Welcome to 1984

Ok, if you had to choose between, let’s say, Egypt or the United Kingdom, and predict which country you think is more likely to detain someone for nine hours without cause, I’m willing to bet that most of you would say Egypt. The UK after all doesn’t do stuff like that.

However, it turns out, of course, that we apparently do.

Now I can understand why our government – and the American government come to that – would not want some of the information leaked by Edward Snowden to come to light. It is, after all, information regarding the activities of two of the world’s biggest security services, and there is bound to be stuff in there that is better off not being printed, not to prevent embarrassment, but for reasons of national security.

But the point remains that if the Government is keen to prevent information being published, for whatever reason, there are legal avenues which it can pursue. The government can issue the newspapers with a little thing called a DA-Notice which means that a newspaper cannot legally print the information that is covered by the notice. It’s like an injunction, only with the Official Secrets Act behind it. What they can’t do is send a senior civil servant down to a newspaper to strong arm them. And they most certainly cannot drag someone out of the line at Heathrow and detain them under some obscure section of the Terrorism Act.

David Miranda had done nothing wrong, nor was he a suspected terrorist – though apparently under Schedule 7 of the Terrorism Act that doesn’t matter. What he is, is the partner of Glenn Greenwald, a journalist working on the Snowden story, and what he was doing was carrying information that Greenwald needed for his work on that story. Again, if the Government was worried about what that information contained there were perfectly legal ways for them to get hold of it. Detaining Mr Miranda was unnecessary and comes across as a blatant attempt to scare people into not reporting on the Snowden material.

It’s not just the Government’s decision to go all Orwellian on the Fourth Estate that has me angry though, though that does terrify me. It’s the hypocrisy of it that really gets to me. On the one hand, you have a news report about the Government ordering the detention of a journalist for no reason other than that they can, and on the other, you have them condemning Egypt and Syria for their acts of oppression. You can’t have it both ways.

If this country is really committed to standing up for those who cannot help themselves and to  being a bastion of free speech, free ideas and free thought, then we have to act like it. Sometimes that means letting people do stuff that we don’t like or that we don’t necessarily want them to do. But if the Government is going to use strong arm tactics to get its way, then it needs to keep its nose out of international affairs. After all, nobody has any reason to listen to a hypocrite

 

Frack Off Indeed

It’s understandable why the people of Balcombe are unhappy. Not to mention the people of the “desolate” North West and North East. I don’t think I would want a fracking operation on my doorstep either.

Now please don’t misunderstand me. I am as much in favour of using sustainable energy sources as the next twenty one year old, not least because, very soon, we are going to be faced with a situation where a group of miners are going to emerge from the coal face, shake their heads grimly and report that there ain’t no more down there. As a world and a civilisation we desperately need to move away from fossil fuels.

And on many levels I can understand the appeal of fracking. There are enough untapped pockets of natural gas to last us for a decade or more, it creates jobs – very important right now – and it isn’t too complicated. Essentially, you insert water and extract gas. The pluses are there for all to see.

But unfortunately so are the minuses. Fracking involves shooting a mixture of pressurised water and sand down a well shaft at very high speeds and essentially “fracturing” the rock underneath (hence fracking’s full name of “hydraulic fracturing”) thus releasing the gas. Unfortunately, doing this comes with all sorts of side effects that no community would want to deal with. For one thing, natural gas isn’t the only thing released during the fracking process and the various harmful chemicals that are also released tend to find their way into the local water table. There are also concerns about the side effects of the chemicals used during fracking process itself, including such things as benzene, uranium and hydrochloric acid. All this before we get into what repeated fracking does to the geological stability of the local area.

I am all in favour of the government looking into alternative energy resources, but at the moment it seems as if they are looking for the quick solution, the quick fix. That’s not what the energy crisis needs. We don’t need to put something in place that will fix problems now only to create bigger ones in future. We still have time to invest in ways that we know work, such as wind power, and work out all the kinks involved with them. After all, for all its flaws, at least a wind turbine doesn’t dump radium into the local drinking water.

As I have said, on the surface fracking seems like the perfect solution. But once you dig a bit deeper you discover that this is just another example of the Coalition looking for the easiest and flashiest solution so that they can claim they have done something without actually having to put in any of the hard work involved in coming up with a properly thought out answer to the problems we are facing.

The government needs to listen to the people of Balcombe and look at the data again. If after that, fracking is still the best solution, then they can go right ahead and start, with my blessing. But until then, can they please just frack right off.