FRACKING – harvesting oil and gas by using water jets to break rocks deep underground – could be coming to Swindon.

In fact, it could be coming to just about everywhere now that fracking companies are set to be allowed more freedom to apply for licences.

There’s no space here to go into the arguments for and against the technique, but I’d like to make a request: if anybody in authority here is to have a say in the granting of licences, can we please, please ensure they know what they’re talking about?

I suggest making public servants and elected officials alike take a course in fracking science and only allowing the ones who pass an exam to have a role in the decision-making process. Such a strategy might have saved us some problems with one or two other technological projects in the past.

If we don’t take this precaution, I have a feeling we can guess how things might pan out...

Spring 2016: A press conference is called to announce the formation of Swindon Frack-U-Like, a new financial partnership between the public and private sectors. Its aim is to drill beneath Swindon and get fracking as soon as possible. It will involve a fracking technique so state-of-the-art that other towns will scramble to embrace it, and Swindon will end up with so much extra cash that we’ll have a concert hall, a monorail, the latest tablet computer for every schoolchild, a free kitten for anybody who wants one and quite possibly a spaceport atop the new multi-storey car park.

Autumn 2016: Fracking begins. There’s another triumphant press conference, with various local dignitaries and members of the Swindon Frack-U-Like team posing by a drilling rig and some giant high-pressure squirty things.

Spring 2017: Six months into the fracking process there’s no trace of any oil or gas, even though Swindon Frack-U-Like has been drilling away nineteen to the dozen at all hours of the day and night, and according to the schedule we should have been awash with cash already. Swindon Frack-U-Like blames teething troubles associated with new technology and promises results soon.

Summer 2017: There are strange and ominous rumblings from far beneath the ground. A few households across the borough report that their taps have begun to spew a muddy, sulphurous ooze instead of water. An elderly woman in Gorse Hill says that one morning her floor vibrated so alarmingly that her tea mug fell off the table and her otherwise talkative budgie was rendered silent. Swindon Frack-U-Like insists these are coincidental isolated incidents to do with global warming or freak storms. Or something.

Autumn 2017: More and more rumblings are heard from beneath the ground, getting louder by the day. The sulphurous ooze has begun to emerge from drains, from wells, from plugholes and from the gaps between paving stones. A toxic, corrosive miasma hovers and birds fall dead from the skies. Residents become so alarmed that they begin to protest en masse to Swindon Frack-U-Like officals and the council. They are in turn accused by Swindon Frack-U-Like officials and certain councillors of wanting the project to fail. Swindon Frack-U-Like releases a statement saying: “The problems are nothing to do with us. Furthermore, we know everything about fracking and you know nothing, so shut up.”

Spring 2018: A bottomless pit half a mile wide opens in the middle of Swindon. Satan and his demonic host emerge to begin enacting that which was predicted in the Revelation of St John the Divine. Swindon Frack-U-Like announces that fracking is no longer economically viable and that the problems were all the fault of the protesters.

Spring 2019: The report into the Swindon Frack-U-Like disaster is published. It concludes that blaming anybody involved in the affair would be “counter-productive” and “a witch hunt” – and that the best course of action would be to draw a line under it all and move on.

 

  • SWINDON Council is to launch a town-wide consultation into the library service. 

Apparently there was a good response to an earlier consultation but it was mainly aimed at library users – the vast majority of whom wanted to keep libraries open. 

The new consultation, we’ve learned, is to include non-users of the service. A councillor backing the project explained that users would support the libraries but budget pressures meant every view should be taken into account. 

Well, that sounds perfectly logical, I’m sure you’ll agree: asking people who don’t give a damn about libraries whether libraries are worth keeping. 

In fact, let’s extend the principle. Let’s get in touch with the countless people who haven’t thought any candidate worth a vote in any election for the last 20 years or more. 

Let’s ask them whether our elected representatives are worth keeping or should be replaced by some other people. 

Or would that be too narrow a survey? Maybe we should give them more of a choice. How about: “Should our elected representatives be replaced by some other people or by a collection of gonks from the prize shelf of a fairground’s ‘hook the duck’ stall?”

 

  • YOU’LL have noted that the perverted GP who used to work in Royal Wootton Bassett has had its sentence cut. 

The thing – I won’t repeat its name here as names aren’t for the worthless – used a wristwatch camera to film female patients during attacks. It could have been jailed for life if we lived in a country whose lawmakers didn’t regard crime victims – and female crime victims especially – with utter contempt. Instead it got 12 years, later cut to 10 by the Court of Appeal. 

Still, we should perhaps be grateful that it was ever jailed at all. 
Men who’ve walked free from local courts in the past year or so include one who broke his girlfriend’s foot, another who disobeyed a restraining order and smashed his former partner in the face, and a third who punched a complete stranger so hard that she had to have dental surgery. 

In that instance the magistrate not only freed the thug but wished him all the best in a future military deployment. 

Remember that American maniac last year who kept women imprisoned in his house and topped himself after being jailed forever? Do you get the feeling he’d have got away with about eight years in this country? 

Or that if he’d committed his crimes in this neck of the woods it would have been more like community service and his victims being ordered to pay a decade’s worth of back rent?