Drill down and it’s obvious: the fracking debate was lost long ago

Five years ago this week, George Osborne as chancellor announced a scheme to place tax revenues from shale gas fracking in Lancashire and Cheshire into a ‘sovereign wealth fund for the north of England’. Soon after that, a leaked memo revealed him urging fellow ministers to intervene with planning authorities to fast-track fracking proposals and in particular to help Cuadrilla, the company whose drilling near Blackpool caused a seismic tremor in August big enough to give the current government reason to impose a moratorium on fracking ‘until and unless’ it’s judged completely safe.

Jeremy Corbyn probably isn’t wrong when he calls this ban ‘an electoral stunt’. But it comes as no surprise to anyone who has observed the absence of coherent energy policy in Downing Street since Osborne last cracked the whip. The truth is that the fracking debate was lost long ago, not because science proved the technique toxic but because objectors maintained their fervour and renewables raised their claims to viability while ministers ducked. Industrial earthshaking beneath rural English homes was never remotely comparable, in political terms, to the wilderness fracking that has transformed America’s energy economy.

The ban is ‘temporary’, but I bet it turns out to be permanent. If so, many of us who have tired of the underlying arguments will breathe a sigh of relief. But the other truth is that the UK will continue for many years to depend on insecure supplies of imported gas, plus fluctuating windpower, while we live in hope that the Hinkley Point nuclear project doesn’t stall; that non–fracking onshore gas finds such as Rathlin Energy’s in East Yorkshire can still be exploited while we wait for other renewables to scale up; and that our lights never go out.