Charles Metcalfe is a Balcombe resident, who lives a few hundred yards from Cuadrilla’s site. He is an established wine writer and more recently a campaigner against fracking

The past year

It’s been a year in which normal life has been disrupted. We felt we had to spend a significant proportion of our time researching, informing ourselves and talking to people who know more about certain specialist subjects than we do. Kathryn [McWhirter] and I should have finished a book last summer and we’ve just had to put it, not even on a back-burner, we’ve had to take it off the stove,

This has been so much higher a priority and I never would have dreamt that my life would have taken this kind of turn.

I’ve met people I wouldn’t have met otherwise and in most cases, I am extremely pleased to have met them.

View of politics

The last year has changed my view of “authority”. It has been a really big shift in the way I think. My respect for people who put themselves forward for election has plummeted because I think that most people who vie for political position – I know there are honourable exceptions to this – do so either because they want the power from an egotistical point of view or because they hope to further their own wealth or whatever.

I would love to see is more independent candidates for political positions.

Maybe we should all be putting ourselves forward to serve in this kind of capacity but it just seems that the parties that are entrenched in power have such hidebound and deeply-rooted positions that it is very difficult to break through.

In a funny kind of way, charities or organisations that collect huge numbers of signatures for petitions and then present these to politicians are more effective than the established structure of politics at the moment.

Policing at Balcombe

It was an interesting parallel with football matches. Football matches are run by football clubs, who employ the police sometimes to come and help them with their security. They pay for it. At Balcombe, this was a private company that was attempting to do something that very few people here wanted to happen. And yet we were the ones, through our taxes, who were paying for the police to be there to assist this company. It seemed a very strange state of affairs.

The violence that was occasionally deployed by the police was really shocking.

So was the realisation, talking to a lawyer at another protest place, that the odds are completely stacked against anyone who wishes to protest peacefully. If you so much as touch a policeman on the shoulder that can be construed as assault and you can be prosecuted. If that policeman wants to push you roughly out of the way he is doing it in the course of his duty and there’s absolutely no comeback whatsoever. That is a ridiculously inequitable position.

Regulation and regulators

The more you discover, the more you realise the huge lie at the base of everything that the government and the regulatory bodies are telling us. They say “Yes, ok, this is a process that has gone very wrong in terms of people’s health, animal health, it has damaged the environment and the water supply in other countries but it could never happen here because we have these wonderful regulations.

The more we have delved into what has actually happened, the more we realise that this is complete tosh.

There may be regulations on paper but no one is regulating.

They are relying on the operators to give them a friendly ring on Friday afternoon to say: “Don’t worry, everything’s ok”. And when things do go wrong and the operators don’t say anything they don’t even seem to get a little rap over the knuckles. There is no gold standard regulation. It is just a complete lie.