If Jacob Rees-Mogg really believes that the only people who don’t like fracking are “the socialists and Caroline Lucas”, he’s clearly not been paying attention (Rees-Mogg tells Tories he’d welcome fracking in his back garden, 3 October)
This may come as no surprise since, until recently, his most memorable position on the green benches at Westminster has been horizontal. But if he couldn’t see the large numbers of his own party’s backbench MPs queueing up to voice their outrage at his proposal to restart fracking when he made his announcement a few weeks ago then he should certainly have been able to hear them.
The Conservative Environment Network is already plotting to force another Truss U-turn. The Tory MP Brendan Clarke-Smith recently said on Question Time that he didn’t want drilling in his constituency. Local communities from Lancashire to Sussex have been challenging fracking for a decade. Every single poll shows that the public are strongly opposed. And even if we frack in the UK, energy bills won’t come down, since the gas will get sold on international markets, and global emissions will still increase, as exporter countries like Qatar and Norway won’t reduce their own gas extraction by an equivalent amount – so that puts the planet firmly against it too.
Sadly, fracking isn’t the only issue where this government is so dangerously out of step with public opinion – from threatening to scrap the environmental land management scheme and tearing up more than 570 environmental protections in the “Brexit freedoms bill”, to lifting the cap on bankers’ bonuses. It’s time for this government to stop arrogantly lying down on the job and sit up and start listening instead.
Caroline Lucas MP
Green, Brighton Pavilion
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