Frack the Proles

Lord Howell, a former energy adviser who discreetly left the Government three months ago, has recommended confining shale fracking to the desolate areas of the north, rather than to anywhere real people might be trying to keep an honest moat. Howell is the father-in-law of Daveybloke's best chum, the same who recently announced large tax breaks for fracking companies, and he was filmed last year by Greenpeace blathering that Osborne was "putting pressure" on Daveybloke over the "absurd" climate change targets which Britain's Head Boy was apparently not missing farcically enough at the time.

Although Howell's remarks have occasioned a good deal of derision, they fit in perfectly well with the precedent set by Thatcherite governments, viz. all governments over the past thirty years. Much as British administrations of the fifties and sixties undertook a gradual retreat from empire in Asia and Africa, with occasional wog-bombings and concentration camps for appearance's sake, so the administrations from the sainted Thatcher to the present have undertaken a steady retreat from the less important areas of the United Kingdom. The old bag herself more or less formally abandoned Scotland, turning it into a toxic waste dump, nuclear launch bay and experimental laboratory for her own brand of poison gas for the uncivilised, the poll tax. Her chancellor, Geoffrey Howe, recommended "managed decline" for Liverpool and other tribal reservations; and by mid-century, if everything is satisfactorily managed, London will have been socially cleansed to the extent that Fortress Westminster can cower in peace behind its own version of the Righteous State's Fence of Friendship, while the proles and the immigrants fight it out amongst themselves in the wilderness beyond.