Anti-fracking defendants found not guilty as movement grows

10th Jan 2014 via Cor­po­rate Watch Eleven anti-frack­ing cam­paign­ers have been found not guilty after a three day tri­al at Brighton Mag­is­trate’s Court.

The defen­dants had been arrest­ed on the 2nd day of the protests against Cuadrilla’s explorato­ry drilling Bal­combe last sum­mer while sit­ting on or around a log which had been dragged out­side the gates to the Cuadrilla site.

The pro­test­ers were approached by what one defen­dant described as “bat­tal­ions” of police and arrest­ed en masse. The arrests were vio­lent, with police using pres­sure point tech­niques as they dragged peo­ple away. One man, who was drink­ing a cup of tea at the time the police approached was arrest­ed for assault for spilling tea on a police offi­cer dur­ing his arrest.

The arrests were part of a con­cert­ed police strat­e­gy to stamp out resis­tance to frack­ing in Bal­combe before it had begun in earnest. Those arrest­ed were giv­en strin­gent bail con­di­tions not to go back to the area close to Cuadrilla’s oper­a­tions. How­ev­er, police bul­ly­ing tac­tics were not suc­cess­ful, despite over 120 arrests dur­ing the 2 months that the Bal­combe Com­mu­ni­ty Pro­tec­tion Camp was in place. The resis­tance, which includ­ed reg­u­lar block­ades and direct action, sig­nif­i­cant­ly delayed Cuadr­l­la’s work. The com­pa­ny’s plan­ning per­mis­sion expired in Sep­tem­ber 2013 and they left the site on Sep­tem­ber 28th hav­ing dug their well but with­out begin­ning test­ing. It is esti­mat­ed that the polic­ing costs amount­ed to £3.7 mil­lion dur­ing the course of the protests.

The Tri­al

The cam­paign­ers were ini­tial­ly arrest­ed under the pro­vi­sions of arti­cle 241 of the arcane Trade Union and Labour Rela­tions Act, a law brought in by John Major’s Con­ser­v­a­tive gov­ern­ment to pre­vent trade union­ists pick­et­ing in sol­i­dar­i­ty with oth­er work­ers or, as the judge put it (with a straight face) “to pro­tect peo­ple’s right to work”. One defen­dant said dur­ing his evi­dence, “I think they were just scrap­ing the bar­rel and could­n’t find a real rea­son to arrest us and had dug up this obscure sec­ondary pick­et­ing law”. The charges were lat­er amend­ed to obstruct­ing the high­way.

Sev­er­al defen­dants said they were shocked at the police tac­tics. One woman described a car­ni­val atmos­phere at the gates of Cuadrilla with chil­dren play­ing ten­nis and hop­scotch in the road before “mil­i­tarised” police wad­ed in to break up the protest and arrest­ed her in front of her daugh­ter.

One demon­stra­tor, who had dragged the log into the road, said he had done so to make the point to Cuadrilla that “we need to have a con­ver­sa­tion about what you’re try­ing to enforce on a com­mu­ni­ty who don’t want this sort of busi­ness going on in their back yard”.

The judge ruled that he could not be sure that the defen­dants had intend­ed to obstruct the high­way and that the fact that the road was closed while it was being resur­faced went in their favour. The court had heard that the police had not giv­en suf­fi­cient warn­ing before mak­ing arrests.

At least anoth­er 19 defen­dants are await­ing tri­al after being arrest­ed dur­ing the Bal­combe protests.

The strug­gle con­tin­ues

Char­lotte Wil­son, a spokesper­son from the Frack Off cam­paign said, on hear­ing the ver­dict: “The frack­ing block­ades at Bal­combe and now Bar­ton Moss near Man­ches­ter, are tes­ta­ment to the lev­el of anger and fear sur­round­ing these devel­op­ments. There are now 70 or more groups resist­ing frack­ing devel­op­ments nation­wide. The indus­try is los­ing. Each new well is met with months of protests and mil­lions in polici­ing costs. The scale of the gov­ern­m­ren­t’s sell-off means that rough­ly 60% of the UK is now avail­able to frack­ing com­pa­nies, huge num­bers of peo­ple are threat­ened and as a result com­mu­ni­ties from all cor­ners of the coun­try are get­ting organ­ised.”

IGas Ener­gy, who describe them­selves as a “lead­ing British oil and gas explor­er and devel­op­er”, are cur­rent­ly try­ing to set up a well to begin explorato­ry drilling in Bar­ton Moss, near Man­ches­ter, in the face of con­cert­ed resis­tance and direct action from anoth­er camp which has been set up for around 45 days. Infor­ma­tion about the cam­paign can be found at the North­ern Gas Gala web­site at  http://northerngasgala.org.uk/.

For more infor­ma­tion about anti-frack­ing move­ments in the UK see www.frack-off.org.