The first lock-on protest outside IGas’s Springs Road, Misson site, 22 March 2018. Photo: Julie Field
Five women were arrested in the past week in protests outside the IGas shale gas exploration site at Misson in north Nottinghamshire.
The arrests followed three separate incidents on three consecutive days.
Lorry surfer
The first lorry surfer outside Springs Road, Misson, 21 March 2018. Photo: Julie Field
On Wednesday 21 March, a woman climbed onto a lorry in the first so-called “lorry surfing” protest outside the Misson site.
During the incident, there was an attempt to hand her a copy of the injunction against anti-fracking protests, secured by INEOS, an IGas partner at Misson.
Local people had believed that the INEOS injunction would not apply at Misson. But an IGas spokesperson said:
“The INEOS Supply Chain Injunction protects those contractors working on IGas sites held jointly with INEOS and named on INEOS’ website”.
The spokesperson said an employee of Certas Energy UK Ltd attempted to hand over the injunction order. The company is listed by INEOS as a protected contractor.
The lorry surfer brought to the ground, Springs Road, Misson, 21 March 2018. Photo: Ian R Crane
Lock-on
Early on Thursday 22 March, two women from Derbyshire locked their arms inside a tube outside the gate. The action – the first “lock-on protest” outside the site – prevented vehicles entering or leaving between 6am and noon.
The women said they felt police were restricting where, when and how they could protest against operations at the site. They were charged with unlawfully obstructing the highway.
Sisters arrested
On Friday 23 March, two sisters from East and North Yorkshire were arrested while standing outside the site gates. They were both charged with obstructing the highway and one was also charged with obstructing police. An initial court hearing in their case is due to take place in Mansfield on 27 April.
Other campaigners said police threatened them with arrest for walking on the road outside the site. There is no pavement or footpath on this section of road.
Also on Friday, officers entered the Misson Springs Protection Camp near the site, apparently without a warrant.
Extension to site construction work
IGas is currently working on site construction at the Springs Road and Tinker Lane sites in north Nottinghamshire. The company said in its accounts this week it expected to begin drilling the first well in the middle of this year.
The company told Nottinghamshire County Council this week it wanted to continue site construction work at Springs Road further into the bird breeding season.
A condition of the planning permission prohibited construction work during the bird breeding season, from February-August, unless it could be demonstrated that the noise would not have an adverse impact on breeding birds in the nearby Site of Special Scientific Interest. The condition was designed particularly to protect long-eared owls breeding.
IGas consultants said site construction would not have “an adverse impact” on breeding birds and planners allowed work to continue until 31 March 2018 despite local opposition. The company is now seeking a second extension, this time with no time limit.
The IGas site at Springs Road in red and the Site of Special Scientific Interest in blue. Source: Natural England
Opponents of IGas’s operations have planned a protest outside Nottinghamshire County Council on Wednesday 28 March. The organisers said the county council had “abandoned its responsibilities to the public in favour of helping the fracking gas industry”.
Categories: protest
DRILL OR DROP? 
Good good. Nice to see that injunction doing its job.
This was done in 2007 when shale gas was being talked about in the UK; since then we are still talking about it, and although currently in remission due to the gallant acts of these individuals and the 1000s of others around our country, it is still on the table and needs to be put finally to bed.
Watch this to the end, it has many relevant points still today, and show the tip in scales from the data then and country participation in making a difference, economically and politically.
It’s time for the Cons and their oil backers to stop their lip service to our climate obligations; time for YOU all to write, demo, action, switch or invest in green technologies, change what you do yourself – or in another 10 years, the conversation is over….
Thanks Sherwulfe, at the end of the day only intelligent management of existing and future renewable energy will survive.
All else is just surface noise from vested selfish profiteering exploiters.
There is no energy poverty, only poverty of the willingness to share equally and fairly and freely.
As Douglas Adams said “Don’t Panic!”
That’s right. Applaud the fact that this country is finally admitting it’s a police state run by corporations and money.
[Edited by moderator]
To the women lorry surfer, the two women from Derbyshire who were arrested for locking on and the two sisters arrested for “walking on the road” when there is no footpath on that part of the road, we thank you, you have shown us that totalitarian frackboot tactics are simply not worth the In Junck Shams they are scribbled on in capitals with red crayon.
Well, its Sunday again? And while the UK plunges joyfully into a new cold war and stumbles along on its totalitarian tiptoe into a fascist state, we stand here and wonder where it will all lead?
We had been warned about this before from many quarters, and one of those, was Leonard Cohen, who wrote this song, no doubt having seen what was coming.
Thank you Leonard Cohen for your poetry and your songs, and deepest apologies to Leonard Cohen’s estate for slightly mangling the words, i am sure you will understand why?
This is from:
Leonard Cohen
“The Future”
Which i could rename:
“The Fracture”
Give me back my broken rights
my locked board room, my secret lie
it’s lonely here,
there’s no one left to torture
Give me absolute control
over every living soul
And lie beside me, baby,
that’s an order!
Give me frack and banal specs
Take the only tree that’s left
and stuff it up the hole
in your fracture
Give me back the Berlin wall
give me Stalin and St Paul
I’ve seen the fracture, brother:
it is murder.
Things are going to slide, slide in all directions
Won’t be nothing
Nothing you can measure any more
The blizzard, the blizzard of the world
has crossed the threshold
and it has overturned
the order of the sane
When they said
PREVENT!
PREVENT!
I wonder what they meant
When they said
PREVENT!
PREVENT!
I wonder what they meant
When they said
PREVENT!
PREVENT!
I wonder what they meant
You don’t know me from the wind
you never will, you never did
We’re the little crew
who stopped your libel
We’ve seen the nations rise and fall
We’ve heard their stories, seen them all
But love’s the only engine of survival
Your servant here, he has been told
to say it clear, to say it cold:
It’s over baby, it ain’t going
any further
And now the words of Lennon’s hope
you feel the devil’s riding crop
Get ready for the fracture:
it is murder
Things are going to slide, slide in all directions
Won’t be nothing
Nothing you can measure anymore
The blizzard, the blizzard of the world
has crossed the threshold
and it has overturned
the order of the sane
When they said
PREVENT!
PREVENT!
I wonder what they meant
When they said
PREVENT!
PREVENT!
I wonder what they meant
When they said
PREVENT!
PREVENT!
I wonder what they meant
There’ll be the breaking of the ancient
western code
Your private life will suddenly explode
There’ll be phantoms
There’ll be fires on the road
and the police man dancing
You’ll see rights of man and woman
hanging upside down
their features laughing at the fallen clown
and their lousy “know it all”
drumming sound
tryin’ to sound like President Stalin
With their twilight spin dancin’
Give me back the Berlin wall
Give me Stalin and St Paul
Give me Christ
or give me Hiroshima
Deploy another foetus show
They don’t like children anyhow
We’ve seen the fracture, baby:
it is murder
Things are going to slide, slide in all directions
Won’t be nothing
Nothing you can measure anymore
The blizzard, the blizzard of the world
has crossed the threshold
and it has overturned
the order of the sane
When they said
PREVENT!
PREVENT!
I wonder what they meant
When they said
PREVENT!
PREVENT!
I wonder what they meant
When they said
PREVENT!
PREVENT!
I wonder what they meant
When they said
PREVENT!
PREVENT!
I wonder what they meant
When they said
PREVENT!
PREVENT!
I wonder what they meant
When they said
PREVENT!
PREVENT!
I wonder what they meant
————-
Well, that was uplifting wasn’t it? Never mind, nothing to see here, move along please or we will arrest you.
Have a great Sunday with family and friends and tomorrow we will see…….wont we?
Thanks PhilC;
Just to let you know, there is hope.
An awakening is happening, the beast is stirring, beware the human!
Well well, it seems that entirely valid and relevant historical references are now forbidden too?
This is the redacted world we now live in, well, so be it.
I can understand the reluctance to approve of such evocative historical events and their relevance to today, but it does smack of the Stalinism and McCarthyism paranoia (which are also historical events, are those equally forbidden?) and historical event reframing that emerges from the first cold war agendas and seems to be re-emerging in the 21st century paranoid present?
Never mind I can play that game too and I intend to object to any reference I feel “offended” by in future and in the past, let’s see where that leads shall we?
What a strange censorship world we now live un where truth is only valid if it is approved and sanitised?
The weaknesses of maintaining a healthy civilisation is the inevitable discouraged freedom of critical thought and the redirection into narrow sanctioned corporate divide and conquer imperatives, comforting diversions to occupy attention away from the truth, narrow sanitised and goal oriented job fodder education, enforced and encouraged cognitive complacency and lack of due vigilance to the dangers of allowing self interest and greed to govern our every thought and action.
How are we to learn from our past mistakes if the very mention of them is forbidden due to fear of offending someone with the truth?
Maybe it’s time to stop being offended at anything and everything that threatens to challenge our illusions of our protected status and awaken to realise that it is us who are the prime cut meat on the hoof cash cows and it is we who are paying for the whole shebang to ride rough shod over our assumed illusions of freedom?
Perhaps our assumption that we are at the top of the food chain is relative to who or what we submit our responsibility to? And the realisation that its only a carefully cultivated illusion, and that when that illusion fades and shatters in the light of the fracking debacle amongst other things, we begin to see the mind prison walls and the ever hungry abattoir conveyor belts of relative consumerist reality?
Perhaps it’s time to wake up to exactly what, and who, is being consumed here, and by what and by whom?
Coming up to Easter, there are enough parallels there considering the recent events in France to realise that sacrifice is sometimes the only recourse to sanity and is amply illustrated by the equally brave actions of the seven women at Misson Springs.
PS That is not a critism of Paul or Ruth or Drill Or Drop, you all have to work within your independent fair minded parameters, rather it is a comment on the hypocrisy that loudly and frequently proclaims multiple insulting epithets while simultaneously working to artificially censor and reframe and post delineate alternative views which threaten to challenge the corporate fracking imperatives.
Well that’s given my thesaurus it’s daily workout, time for a cuppa.
Will these arrests be actioned as contempt of court, or will there be initial leniency? Could be interesting.
Contempt of human rights.
I reckon this will be a one off lenient verdict. Further illegal activity will be dealt with a stronger hand otherwise the courts are not fit for purpose.
Personally I’d make them do some hard labour, mind you hard labour for this lot would be getting out of bed before 9am and missing listening to James O’bonkers on LBC at 10!
Gotta be kidding [edited by moderator]
Theses lot and their industrious colleagues nationwide are locked on before you and your lot have even heard the birdsong!
You frackers are due for extinction during 2018!
Gotta be kidding, you simply don’t get it, you and the greedy frackers who care only for money under the guise of “ECONOMIC VALUE” will never silence people who will put the health and welfare of the planet above the money game. It is a community that is growing faster all the time, even injunctions won’t silence the democracy and freedom of speech of the people. It is a fundamental right of passage.
Gold standard regulation protecting owls….thought not. These brave people walking, climbing on a lorry, locking on, protecting owls and our shared environment. Thank you.
Thank you, brave souls for your actions- don’t let the bully boys win.
This is Ian R Cranes video for today remarking upon the events at Misson Springs.
( https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=7brcyqX1zco&feature=em-lbcastemail )
Enjoy! Enjoy!
I suspect you are correct with your first sentence GBK, although a lot will relate to what further arrests have to be made before these five come to court. If they are seen to have started a pattern of behaviour then it will reflect badly.
On whom?