Be wary of MP’s fracking U-turn

IT IS interesting to watch how fast the main parties’ official political line can change and how the politicians can pretend never to have supported anything else.

The particular case here is of Ed Davey, the government’s catastrophic global warming minister, with a side brief of running the energy industry. For three years he and his compatriots have been doing everything possible to strangle the shale gas industry in its crib. Banning it, declaring a moratorium.

But now, with no question that Britain has one of the largest reserves in the world, that the desperate search for scare stories by the Luddites has yielded none and the US economy has come out of 
recession purely because of the falling energy prices the shale revolution produced, he has changed his line, at least for public consumption.

“I like fracking,” claims Ed Davey now.

Does anybody expect that any of these politicians are going to apologise publicly for stifling the industry and thus deliberately keeping us in recession for an extra three years, using scare stories they knew to be false?

Does anybody think they are going to acknowledge that only UKIP initially promoted this policy (and many others needed to end recession)?

Indeed, does anybody really think this apparent conversion means they will now allow the free market in energy to work and fuel poverty to be ended, without dragging their feet every time the public aren’t looking?

Neil Craig, UKIP secretary, Glasgow