THE Tory Party is in an energy crisis.
In 1993 in the person of Michael Heseltine it completely shut down the mining industry putting 100,000 miners out of work, just to get rid of the National Union of Mineworkers, that fought it in a year-long strike to stop all pit closures.
Now it is paying the price for this act of colossal vandalism.
North Sea oil is now very much in decline, and running out.
The super-green windfarms are unable to deliver the power that is required, while nuclear power is too expensive and as the Fukushima catastrophe proved, is far too dangerous for humankind to handle.
That disaster was enough to convince Germany to abandon its entire nuclear power programme.
Even France is seeking, with over 40 nuclear power stations, to cut back on nuclear power, as its existing power stations age and become dangerous and accident-prone.
The answer of the Tories and their coalition to this power crisis of their own making, is not to return to coal and develop a clean coal nationalised mining industry, it is to seek to bribe councils to adopt a system that involves triggering underground explosions, even earthquakes, and fouls the water supply for all time.
Judging the whole world by themselves, the Tory leadership figures that council leaders up and down the country will place the people of their areas into potential danger if councils are allowed to keep all of the tax revenues that the big power companies will pay over for the right to exploit fracking sites.
Prime Minister Cameron has said that English local authorities will receive all the business rates collected from shale gas schemes – rather than the usual 50%.
No wonder Greenpeace has accused the Tory cabal of trying to ‘bribe councils’. Cameron is in fact acting for the French company, Total, which plans to invest about £30m to help drill two wells in Lincolnshire. It is the first major energy company to invest in fracking in the UK.
The British Geological Survey estimates there may be 1,300 trillion cubic feet of shale gas present in the north of England. Faced with such riches the dangers that fracking will cause earth tremors and quakes, water contamination and environmental damage, count for nothing with the coalition.
Those that have allowed the mass building of homes on flood planes while at the same time cutting back on vital environmental measures to combat the dangers of flooding, are about to plunge the Tory shires into new disasters.
There is not the slightest doubt that there will be a massive uprising of rural and urban populations who will not put up with the new danger that is to be placed in their midst.
Already the Barton Moss fracking facility in Greater Manchester is under siege from large numbers of people, many of them local residents.
They are determined not to allow ‘hydraulic fracturing’, which involves drilling deep underground and releasing a high-pressure mix of water, sand and chemicals to crack and smash rocks and release the gas that is stored inside.
Meanwhile, Whitehall officials are seeking to convince residents not to object to the danger being imposed in their midst. They think that the local councils keeping up to £1.7m extra a year from each fracking site will do the trick.
Energy Minister Michael Fallon has confirmed that the government expects ‘20 to 40 wells to be drilled in exploration over the next couple of years and I think it’s very important that local communities see some of the benefit.’
Earth tremors or quakes, water contamination to the point where water can be set alight as it comes out of the tap, must be accepted so that the energy companies can make their super profits.
Obviously Cameron, Fallon and Co will not be moving into the affected areas to share in the experience.
Cameron’s position is: ‘We’re going all-out for shale’.
The position of the working class and the middle class must be to get rid of this power companies’ government with a general strike and to bring in a workers government that will reopen a nationalised mining industry to take advantage of the huge coalfields that the UK’s surface land rests on.
