Joe Boyd - Fracking law for sale

The Green Wash authors continue to take a look at the blog of long-time anti-fracking campaigner Joe Boyd.

Part 4a - The Injunction Enforcers, a paradigm begins to emerge.

Joe Boyd, centre, took on the British Government and the wealthiest man in the UK and won!

The "secret state", which has no accountability to Members of Parliament, is regarded as a vital weapon by the Establishment in its underground activities against all those who pose a threat to capitalism." In defence of private property the state will deploy bodies of men to protect the ruling class's power and privileges. Those who are fighting to protect the environment or who are campaigning for change will be subjected, not only to surveillance, but to "all the dirty tricks the ruling class can muster to maintain their power and privileges".

The Special Demonstration Squad (SDS), 1968-2008, was a top-secret unit within Special Branch, its unofficial motto, "By Any Means Necessary", is a constant reminder that there are no depths to which the police will not sink in order to defend the corporations.

However, with the use of advancing technology for surveillance and "paid informants widespread in operations" do the police still go undercover?

In August 2018 Rob Evans, who broke the Mark Kennedy story, stated: "I would be surprised if they weren’t still doing infiltrations, how that operates we don’t know". Adding "what this means in practical terms is that now they can’t operate as they used to, and so the police will of course react and will find new ways of working.”

State surveillance and infiltration of protests is predominately used, not to gather evidence to bring cases to court, but to undermine and crush campaigns. Surveillance and 'counter-subversion' involves the careful profiling of activists to find out who the key players are, identify their weaknesses and "breaking points" and how they might be 'bought off' or "burnt out". It identifies relationships and networks within, and between, individuals and groups and then sets about agitating those relationships by creating, fermenting and then deepening mistrust and animosity. Counter-subversion is also about making it difficult for new people to become involved and much more difficult for those already participating in the campaign to remain. It exploits "informational and organisational bottlenecks" to demoralise whilst at the same time reinforcing hierarchical social relations.

Short-term destructive relationships, not necessarily intimate, are used as an ingrained and calculated method to gain acceptance within groups, create disharmony and make groups less effective.

There should be no doubt in anyone's mind that by 2010 the UK government, enthusiastically convinced that hydraulic fracturing was the way forward, thought they had fluid, multi-faceted plans ready to try and thwart any credible opposition to their ambitions.

In 2009 in a Guardian article, "High court injunction - the weapon of choice to slap down protests", Paul Lewis and Rob Evans wrote "Law designed to protect women from stalkers is increasingly being used by companies to keep demonstrators quiet".

In his eulogy to Timothy Lawson-Cruttenden Richard D North noted the lawyer had helped formulate, and was an authority on, the Harassment Act, 1997. Although the Act had made it simpler for women to get protection from stalkers the ramifications for campaign and protest groups was hard hitting and far reaching. In less than three months of the Act passing into law Cruttenden was using it to obtain injunctions against animal rights activists. As time went on the injunctions became more and more "draconian" with, especially latterly, courts refusing to grant them. Cruttenden passed away in April 2019; whilst swimming off the coast of Gibraltar he suffered hypothermia.

In early 2012 activists occupied a disused farm building on an EDF Energy owned 400-acre site earmarked for two new mega-reactors at the Somerset Hinkley Point nuclear power station. A mass protest had also been called by anti-nuclear groups with additional camps to be set up in an attempt to prevent construction work starting.

Protesters squat disused farm buildings on EDF Energy's Hinkley Point

EDF Energy, in an endeavour to end the protests and obtain a blanket ban on demonstrations occurring on their land, applied to the court, not only to evict the individual protesters occupying the farm land, but also to secure an injunction against four anti-nuclear campaign groups, Stop New Nuclear, Stop Hinkley, South West Against Nuclear and Stop Nuclear Power Network UK. The camp eviction and land parcel injunction were submitted to the court as one case.

On 27 February 2012 Mr Justice Floyd at the High Court ruled against the defendants squatting on the land, granting a possession order to EDF, however, he rejected the injunction application on the grounds it was ‘inappropriate’.

In October of the same year sixteen members of the group No Dash for Gas, a group formed out of members of Climate Camp, "scaled two eighty metre high chimneys at the EDF owned West Burton gas-fired power station".

In what appears to be a very well planned and executed action the protesters entered into the power station at night through a 'hole in the fence'. Using a night vision camera, and filming as they walked, the group managed to avoid security guards, scale the chimneys and then spend most of the rest of the night hauling up enough supplies to last a week. Equipment lifted up to the top of the flues, according to at least one source, included solar panels, platforms and a portaloo. Zip wires were used to enable the activists to move from one chimney to the other.

No Dash For Gas protester at EDF's West Burton power station

EDF were forced to close part of the power station for eight days at a cost to the company of over £5m.

As a result of the action twenty-one activists were arrested with all pleading guilty to the charge of aggravated trespass at Mansfield magistrates court on 20 February 2013.

In an attempt to recoup part of their losses EDF Energy began proceedings to bring a law suit for damages and costs against the protesters amounting to £238,000 per person. However, amidst a blaze of negative publicity for the company, and following an offer from the group to EDF's solicitors to "settle the case", the civil action was dropped and a "fair and reasonable solution" was accepted by both parties. The mutual agreement, "to drop the claim on the proviso that the members of No Dash For Gas accepted a permanent injunction" preventing the twenty-one named activists from entering any site operated by EDF, was immediately implemented.

The less-severe criminal charges of aggravated trespass, combined with the EDF move to file a civil claim, it has been alleged, was a deliberate ploy by the police who had, by this time, learned that juries tended to be more lenient towards activists than magistrates. The same police force that arrested the activists also helped serve the legal papers, although there is no obligation as part of their duties to undertake to do this.

Information obtained through a Freedom of Information request also revealed discussions took place between the police, government employees and EDF on the bail conditions, reporting to the police station daily, imposed on the activists prior to any arrests taking place. All bail conditions were removed when the law suit was dropped and the injunction mutually agreed.

Following sentencing on 06 June 2013, which Peace News described as "surprisingly lenient", sixteen of the activists were given 150 hours of community services and five were given conditional discharges. Costs of £85 were imposed on the defendants with an additional £60.00 victim surcharge. The judge, in his summing up statement, described the activists as "industrious and committed individuals who work and volunteer in your communities".

On 17 October 2013 six out of the twenty-one activists had their sentences quashed on appeal at Nottingham Crown Court, despite having pleaded guilty in the magistrates court, reducing the number of those with conditional discharges to eleven. David Shakespeare, Lawrence Carter, Hannah Davey, Aneaka Kellay, Ewa Jasiewicz and Alistair Cannell had all previously been sentenced to 150 hours of community service.

In response to the actions of No Dash for Gas EDF formed a "Stakeholder Advisory Panel". The findings of the panel, published in August 2013, noted "...the Secretary of State has powers to ‘designate’, in the interests of national security, certain sites. Ultimately, it is possible that EDF Energy sites, which are of strategic national security importance, could be designated as protected so that all areas within the designation would give rise to strict liability trespass offences."

The National Risk Assessment (NRA) is a five year Government plan, reviewed annually, assessing potential threats, malicious or hazardous, the United Kingdom could face. In 2013 the Government published its summary, taken directly from the findings of the NRA, the "2012 Sector Resilience Plans" (SRPs). The document included a summary for the energy sector, "upstream oil and gas, downstream oil and gas and electricity", with an assessment of major risks to the energy sector that included "storms and gales, flooding, accidents and loss of key staff".

Originally Sector Resilience Plans focused on resilience to flooding, however, in 2015 the scope was extended to include all perceived hazards and security threats relevant to each sector and renamed Sector Security and Resilience Plans (SSRPs). Energy is one of the thirteen areas included in the list of the Critical National Infrastructure Sector, with the 2017 published document reinforcing the government's and industries stance, "disruption to National Infrastructure can also be caused by public disorder".

The Centre for the Protection of National Infrastructure (CPNI), formed on 01 February 2007, from a merger between the National Infrastructure Security Co-ordination Centre and the National Security Advice Centre (part of MI5), and is the government body providing protective security advice to businesses and organisations classed as being part of the national infrastructure. Accountable to the Director General of the Security Service, MI5, the CPNI operates under the Security Service Act 1989. Their integrated advice aims to "reduce the vulnerability of the national infrastructure" to terrorism and other threats by combining information and personnel.

Crucially, as part of MI5, the CPNI is exempt from the Freedom of Information Act 2000.

The Command document 9161, National Security Strategy and Strategic Defence and Security Review 2015, A Secure and Prosperous United Kingdom, foreword by David Cameron, provides an insight into how perceived threats to infrastructure will be countered; by this time environmental activism had been classed as domestic extremism.

Section 1.4 states:

"In particular, over the next five years our priorities will be to:

• Tackle terrorism head-on at home and abroad in a tough and comprehensive way, counter extremism and challenge the poisonous ideologies that feed it."

Section 3.40 states:

"Our investments in nuclear, shale, renewable and other innovative technologies will increasingly generate new sources of energy for the UK."

Section 4.5 states:

"We will tackle all threats to the UK, our people and our interests. The UK will remain resilient to, and a hostile environment for, those who intend us harm, whether they are statebased or non-state actors such as terrorists and criminals, and we will coordinate all levers of national power so that the sum of our efforts is greater than the constituent parts."

Section 4.87 states:

"We will continue to implement the statutory duty which we introduced in the Counter-Terrorism and Security Act in 2015, which means that all local authorities, schools, colleges, universities, NHS and Foundation Trusts, police, probation services and prisons have a specific legal responsibility to prevent radicalisation. We will also expand our work to National Security Strategy and Strategic Defence and Security Review to intervene with people who are at risk of radicalisation and to stop them before they begin to engage in any terrorist-related activity."

Section 4, sub-sections 4.141 and 4.412 further highlights the importance Cameron and his government placed on inward investments and the need to protect these investments.

"...We will tackle energy security challenges robustly. We have balanced the need for a competitive energy market with government action to ensure a diverse supply of energy for consumers. As part of this we are modernising the UK’s energy infrastructure, including by attracting inward investors, with appropriate assessment of any national security risks, and mitigation."

"...We will promote investment in renewable, shale and other innovative technologies to increase domestic production, reflecting devolved arrangements where relevant, and support UK energy companies to win business overseas..."

Cuadrilla's Grange Hill site, Singleton.

With tight margins and stiff competition in order for oil and gas exploration and extraction to be economically viable it must be completed speedily and unopposed. A company must complete all the necessary regulations from scratch for each well site with companies and investors benefiting from subsidies and exemptions.

In the embryonic stages of exploratory drilling for Shale gas in England the government and industry had received virtually no opposition to their fracking ambitions. Residents living in close proximity to proposed well sites, deliberately left in the dark by local and national government, had absolutely no concept of the plethora of damage and destruction the industry would wreak on their daily lives, homes and the environment, with the burden of the onus of proof falling to them. The predominately working class communities of Lancashire were, in the main, oblivious to what was happening in their backyard hidden away on rural farmland. However, as awareness of the industry slowly began to grow, campaign and opposition groups started to spring up around the country. Knowledge of Petroleum Exploration and Development Licences, planning applications, government regulatory agencies, breaches to permits and Freedom of Information Requests began to be shared and, with this increased awareness, came an ever more vocal and increasingly mobilised and creative resistance.

In 2011 a series of events occurred that laid the foundations for what Joe identifies as the "Frack Free Lancashire hierarchical structure". These events were to became highly significant in the ongoing campaign against Cuadrilla's Preston New Road hydraulic fracturing site.   

Part 4b - The Injunction Enforcers, Camp Frack, Occupy and Blackpool Tower!