- One organiser said at least half Balcombe protesters are on benefits
- Philip Lardo, 52, a druid, also has council house in Brighton
- Police complain site is becoming a 'free festival' after anarchists from Spain, France, Holland and Poland, among others, joined the party
- Cost of policing operation already £2.3million - likely to end up at £3.7million
- Majority of local residents oppose fracking, but a growing number are tiring of the chaos
PUBLISHED: 01:47, 24 August 2013 | UPDATED: 01:48, 24 August 2013
Support: Philip Lardo, pictured in full druid dress, is protesting at the Cuadrilla site in Balcombe but normally lives in a council house in Brighton
Each morning, 52-year-old Philip Lardo wakes up, lights a camp fire, parks his backside in a deckchair, and rolls a cigarette.
For most of the past three weeks, he’s been living in a tent by the B2036 in Sussex, where he’s spent days relaxing in the sun, or visiting the local shop to stock up on tobacco, snack food and drinking water.
At meal times, Lardo adjourns to a marquee a few hundred yards away to queue up for the home-cooked food that is served free of charge to residents of the leafy site where his tent is pitched.
‘For lunch today, we had Tuscan bean stew,’ he tells me. ‘They served it with bread and rice. It was pretty tasty, if you like that kind of thing.’
In the evenings, he likes to sit around the fire listening to bongo drums and guitar music, or — if he’s feeling energetic — wander to the local pub, the Half Moon.
It sounds, on the face of it, like an idyllic way to spend August. And, as he relaxes in the sunshine, Lardo looks every inch the happy camper. But he isn’t on what you might call a traditional summer holiday; quite the reverse, in fact.
For, as the crowds of uniformed police officers circling warily in the distance suggest, we are at what is currently the country’s most high-profile political demonstration. Lardo is one of the several hundred protesters who have taken up residence on grass verges near the pretty commuter village of Balcombe.
They are lobbying against an operation by the energy company Cuadrilla, which has started exploratory drilling several thousand feet beneath the rolling countryside of rural Sussex.
Environmentalists fear the Balcombe site could in future be used for fracking, a controversial extraction technique in which pressurised liquid is pumped deep underground to release oil and gas trapped within shale rock.
They have therefore pledged to remain at the scene until the drilling is stopped.
The demo began quietly last month, when a few dozen concerned locals began picketing the site. They were soon joined by Lardo and other activists from across the country, including designer Dame Vivienne Westwood, and perennial activist and ex-rock wife Bianca Jagger.
The group scored a major victory last Friday when drilling was suspended altogether, on the advice of police, after several hundred new protesters arrived for a pre-planned five-day rally.
The suspension was lifted a few days later. But not before the authorities had been accused of surrendering to ‘mob rule’.
On Monday, on a day of so-called ‘direct action’, more than 30 people were arrested for blocking access to the Cuadrilla site, including the Green Party MP Caroline Lucas, whose plight helped place the demo on the front pages.
Noisy: Demonstrators making their voice heard at the drilling site on Monday
Since then, police helicopters have buzzed almost constantly in the skies above Balcombe, where more than 400 officers from across the country have been deployed.
Yesterday, Sussex Police said the operation had already cost £2.3 million, and is likely to eventually set the taxpayer back some £3.7 million.
The lanes around the usually picturesque village are now filled with riot vans, and coverage of events has helped spark a national debate about the pros and cons of fracking.
Yet at the centre of this expensive circus lie some pressing, unanswered questions. Who exactly are these well-organised eco-warriors? Where did they really come from? Just who is bankrolling their long-running protest? And have the once supportive villagers of Balcombe started to tire of the noisy activists in their midst?
Lardo makes for an instructive case study. While organisers of the Balcombe protest do much to play up its local roots, he, like most of the colourful demonstrators, has no connection to the village. Instead, Lardo has a council house in Brighton. But for most of the year, this publicly-funded property lies empty, since he chooses to live in the woods of Sussex — as a druid.
Gathering pace: The protest began quietly last month with a few concerned locals but has now become the country's most high-profile political demonstration
The job doesn’t always see him wearing traditional druid’s robes but it does allow him to spend weeks on end at ‘direct action’ protests.
With this in mind, Lardo spent the early months of 2013 on the outskirts of Hove, attempting to prevent the construction of a new bypass. When that protest petered out, he moved to Balcombe.
‘As druids, we revere nature and we revere the Earth,’ he says. ‘It’s where we live. Nature is our birthright. That’s why we try to save it.’ Lardo is, of course, entitled to spend his time as he wishes. But like many of fellow protesters, his activist lifestyle turns out to be entirely funded by the taxpayer.
‘Druids aren’t paid, so I am officially unemployed,’ he says, when I ask about his finances. ‘I happen to sign on. I get roughly £80 a week for that. Then, because I’ve got osteoporosis in my knees, hip and toes, I also get disability of around £100 a month.’
Controversial: The protesters are objecting to the process of fracking - a technique which involves pumping liquid deep underground to release oil and gas
The money is deposited in Lardo’s bank account each week, as he sits in his deckchair. And among residents of the Balcombe protest site, precious few appear to be gainfully employed.
Also camping nearby, for example, is full-time protester Natalie Hynde, the 30-year-old daughter of Pretenders singer Chrissie and The Kinks frontman Ray Davies. She and her unemployed boyfriend Simon ‘Sitting Bull’ Medhurst, a 55-year-old veteran eco-warrior, were arrested on Monday for ‘supergluing’ themselves to the site’s entrance gates.
Rodney Jago, a retiree and resident of Balcombe, says that’s typical of his village’s new residents.
‘One of the organisers told me that at least 50 per cent are on benefits,’ Jago says. ‘He was quite shameless about it; didn’t think it was at all embarrassing. It’s like a free holiday for these people. They wave a placard from time to time, but basically all they do is sit in a deckchair, getting free food, while their kids run wild.’
This week anarchists from Spain, France, Holland and Poland, among others, joined the party. Their presence led police to complain that the village has turned into a ‘free festival’ for professional agitators.
One new arrival, from Malaga, said: ‘I was in London and going back to Europe when I heard about this. I’ve only recently learnt about fracking, but thought this would be fun.’
A group of French squatters, who had been living in a derelict house in Islington, North London, meanwhile said they had now moved to Balcombe because ‘the weather is really good and everyone is friendly’.
So how many of the people at the demo really care about fracking?
It’s hard to tell. But many of those involved in Reclaim the Power, a mysterious organisation whose supporters turned up in vast numbers this week, appear to have little connection with the issue.
In its literature, Reclaim the Power says it’s a coalition of ‘member groups’ that include UK Uncut — lobbyists against David Cameron’s spending cuts — Occupy London, who were behind last year’s anti-capitalist protests at St Paul’s Cathedral, and the Greater London Pensioners Association. Other members include a pro-Labour group called Disabled People Against Cuts, along with officials from the powerful trade unions Unite and the far-Left RMT, which supposedly represents transport workers.
Profile: The arrest of Green Party MP Caroline Lucas at the protest brought it to the front pages
Quite why such outfits should take a strong position (or indeed any position) on fracking, and want to be pulling strings in Balcombe, remains unclear.
Some observers wonder if they are merely ‘piggybacking’ the issue for political reasons. The Tory MP Jacob Rees-Mogg has decried demonstrators as a ‘rent-a-mob’, saying that ‘buses of hooligans’ had come to the village to party and cause trouble.
The most curious organisation behind the protest is surely Fuel Poverty Action, listed in the protest camp’s handbook (yes, it has its own handbook), as one of its major organisers. This group supposedly exists to campaign against high energy prices. But in the U.S., a fracking boom has helped reduce domestic gas prices by about a quarter.
So why does Fuel Poverty Action see fit to lobby against the introduction of the technology in the UK? A Reclaim the Power spokesman will say only that it sees fracking as ‘part of the way that the big six energy companies are exploiting the vulnerable in society’.
From a distance, the camp resembled a poor man’s Glastonbury, with hundreds of tents pitched around a selection of stages and marquees. Up close, the smell of BO mingled with an occasional whiff of marijuana. Residents seemed friendly, though their ranks included at least two undercover reporters.
Placards could be seen supporting gay rights, opposing the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, advertising a pro-migrant demonstration in Calais, and calling for an end to animal testing.
Shameless: When anarchists from elsewhere in Europe began to turn up, police complained the protest was becoming a 'free festival' for professional agitators
During the afternoon, I spotted three representatives of the local Labour party, wearing red rosettes and campaigning on site on behalf of Alan Rew, a county council election candidate.
Their presence was surely the height of hypocrisy: Labour is cautiously in favour of the technology.
The identity of the key people at the camp remains somewhat obscure. Reclaim the Power calls itself a ‘horizontal’ protest organisation, meaning it has no official leader.
Its finances are also opaque. Some chemical toilets used by protesters have been funded by Greenpeace. Free vegan meals are being provided by a non-profit organisation called ‘Veggies’. Campers seemed unsure who was funding their smart marquee tents and printed literature.
The group was originally formed by 21 environmental activists who were arrested and prosecuted after occupying West Burton coal-fired power station, in Nottinghamshire, last year.
Several are Oxbridge educated, and hail from highly privileged backgrounds. One, Danielle Paffard, studied at Wadham College, Oxford, while her father, Roger, used to be chief executive of High Street chocolatier Thorntons and stationery giant Staples.
Another is Ewa Jasiewicz, 35, a veteran far-Left activist who is best known for campaigning against the Iraq war and being a leader of the Free Gaza Movement, which in 2011 attempted to send a flotilla of ships laden with provisions to the Gaza Strip. She certainly knows how to organise a protest.
Expensive: Sussex Police said the cost of policing the protest is already £2.3million and is likely to increase
The Balcombe site boasts a media centre, a legal advice tent (the sign outside reads ‘have fun and keep us busy!’) and three restaurant tents serving vegan cuisine. Yet for all the creature comforts, it was actually staged illegally: Jasiewicz and her cronies set up their marquees, without permission, on the field of Richard Ponsford, a local farmer.
‘We didn’t have permission to move there, but we now have a constructive relationship with the farmer,’ a spokesman told me.
Strangely, when I spoke to Mr Ponsford, whose family have been tenants at the farm for 60 years, he saw things differently. ‘It’s a pain,’ he said. ‘We’re just hoping they go away without causing too much damage and leaving a mess.’
Mr Ponsford first learned that his field was being invaded when a neighbour told him several cars and vans were setting up camp there. After a three-hour stand-off, police advised him it was safer to back down and let them have the field.
Earlier this week, police arrested a demonstrator at a different site north of the main camp for allegedly threatening a landowner who asked him to cease trespassing. Little wonder, perhaps, that many residents of Balcombe are starting to grow weary of the invasion of their rural idyll.
Not wanted: Residents in Balcombe have begun to complain at the actions of the protesters with several urging them to leave
Though polls show that a firm majority — perhaps understandably — are opposed to fracking on their doorstep, growing numbers also appear to be tiring of the chaos. Last week, Alison Stevenson, chairman of the parish council, published an open letter saying that it ‘strongly opposes any actions which may be taken which involve civil trespass and/or illegal acts’.
Anti-fracking posters now compete with a smattering of signs saying: ‘Balcombe is 80 per cent opposed to fracking and 100 per cent opposed to illegal actions.’
One resident, drinking at the Half Moon pub, told me: ‘People are very reluctant to criticise the protesters, or speak publicly in support of fracking, because they feel intimidated.’
Peter Cockburn, a 67-year-old retiree who supports the potential arrival of fracking to Balcombe because, among other things, ‘it might bring jobs to the village’, meanwhile compared the protest site to a third world slum. ‘There are bodies lying everywhere, all this smoke going up — and heaven knows what’s in that — and it looks like some sort of Malaysian kampong [shanty town],’ he said.
The former botanist devoted several years of his career to campaigning to save the rainforest in Borneo. ‘I did plenty to save the planet, thank you, and unlike this lot, I didn’t achieve it by sitting on my arse on a grass verge smoking pot.’
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