A letter a day to number 10. No 1,516
Monday 08 August 2016.
Dear Mrs May,
According to the BBC you want to compensate residents whose communities are affected by fracking with a proportion of the proceeds from shale gas projects.
If the BBC are to be believed, which these days is tricky, you have apparently said that your government wants to help “ordinary families for whom life is harder than many people in politics realise. This announcement is an example of putting those principles into action, It’s about making sure people personally benefit from economic decisions that are taken – not just councils – and putting them back in control over their lives.”
For the purposes of this letter I shall have to assume these are your words and you are right many of our lives are harder than many people in politics realise and one of them is you, because from there on, things start to fall apart.
The idea of private industry compensating communities for the adverse effects upon them is a novel one and I wonder if communities in the once (pre Thatcherite) industrial areas of Britain might retrospectively claim compensation? I may write to the National Union Of Mineworkers (NUM) to get their take on this. The BBC reported in 2012 that the historic damage from mining has left landscapes devastated with estimated repair costs running into hundreds of millions of pounds.
Pre-emptive offers of compensation, or bribes as I prefer to call them, to communities and residents for the disruption, and possible destruction, of their quality of life is an admission, before the fact, that people and communities will be adversely affected making life for ordinary people harder in ways for which bribes can never compensate.
In what way then are you putting people back in control of their lives when you are clearly removing control from their lives by allowing fracking in their communities which they may well be opposed to both in principle and practice? As the good people of Balcombe discovered, where the police, far from protecting the public interest, were deployed as corporate police at a cost of £4 million to protect the interests of Cuadrilla Resources with horrifying brutality and mass arrests of peaceful protesters, the majority of whom were later acquitted, the real concerns of the people are ignored.
To be blunt and as the late great Douglas Adams put it so aptly, you are talking cross-eyed badger spit, just as your predecessor did. Let’s hope that people resist this Judas money because when the lorries start rolling in they’ll live to regret it.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-37000975
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-derbyshire-17315323
Fear and Loathing in Great Britain 
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Precisely what I thought of these payments when I first heard of them. “Bribes”. I am still unaware just how bad the environmental or other impacts on them are (besides climate change; but I seem to gather they are significant enough to worry about- I wonder mostly about the extent to which they can be mitigated), but even trying to subvert the will of those people in an area who don’t want fracking seems like an affront to genuine local democracy. Or even private property rights if they are working underneath people’s homes.
I am writing tomorrow’s letter now with new information that has been sent to me. Part of the fracking process involves explosively fracturing the surrounding rock and they use (add) depleted uranium as part of the mix. It’s beyond insanity.
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