1
BACK TO THE POOR LAWS
We have been moving back to the world of the 19th century, when the Poor Laws ruled and those deprived, hungry and unable to pay rent, were herded into workhouses. Even then, there were not as many sleepers on the streets as now, when record numbers are reported. Families all over the country are relying on food banks, run by volunteers giving out groceries collected from churches and other charity dispensers. Low wages do not provide families with enough to live on. The unemployed are vilified for not searching hard enough for a job. In addition, if they have a spare second bedroom in social housing, they have to pay extra for it even if it is being used for grandchildren or a partner with a disability.
Writing about the present situation, Jeremy Seabrook, author of a history of poverty in Britain, says the present government "looks deep into a punitive past for inspiration" in its plans to appoint new overseers of the poor into the hands of private providers.
The workhouses of the 19th century became a public scandal, opened up by campaigners like Joshua Hobson, who built his own printing press for his pamphlets describing the conditions he had found in the local workhouses in Huddersfield. In 1833, At the age of 23, he was sent to Wakefield prison for publishing an "unstamped newspaper" and in 1835 and 1836, jailed again. It seemed that enthusiasm for imprisonment was at the same level as today, when our prison population has been the highest in Europe.
Prison did not stop Hobson, originally a joiner from a local family in the Fixby district of Huddersfield. H went on writing and speaking about the workhouses and the poor, opposed the Poor Law acts and joined the Chartist movement, publishing radical material in the West Riding and nationally In his "Book of Murder" attacking the Malthusian doctrine of dealing with over-population, he writes: "The framers of the New Poor Law........appear to act, either upon the principle that the poor have no hearts, or upon a determination to break them. Let them be wary: patience generally yields sooner than the heart." The condition of the country's poor - diseased and short of food - he said was solely owing to human rapacity and human ignorance, to the want of wise and just laws for protecting the labouring poor "from the rapacity of the capitalists, who not only underpay the labouring poor, but divert their labour to useless or improper purposes, and of laws for enforcing the proper employment of a just reward for labour."
This could be a message for today. As Jeremy Seabrook writes: "The fate of the most vulnerable people - in children's homes, prisons, care homes, rehabilitation centres, adult care homes and probation services - is increasingly in the hands of private providers, just as they were when known as orphans, felons, the lame and the halt, and the aged." Those who suffer, he writes, will be people whose lives have already been blighted and many of whom were born to an inheritance not of 'hard-working strivers, but of despair.'
Be careful if demonstrating against all this. Now, as in Hobson's day, there might be arrest and imprisonment. With the mass surveillance of society which has been revealed, protesters will be marked down before they even start.
ends
Thursday, 28 November 2013
Tuesday, 29 October 2013
workers of the world - who are they?
London is awash with young graduates seeking jobs in bars, restaurants and fashion shops. PhD's can be cleaners, and you can find a young woman with a first-class degree in history of art pulling your pint. Many are also unpaid interns when they are not busy with the jobs that pay them.
How did this happen? Remember Tony Blair's continual emphasis on the importance of young people getting a University degree, of increasing the numbers of those going to University - and he certainly made the figures climb high - and the desirable future for all, seemingly, to join one of the professions?
But I cannot remember, in all the days of the New Labour government - and, yes, their title was Labour, their ancestry the working class of the Industrial Revolution - any praise for or singling out, of the people actually doing the work needed to keep the country going. We need a doctor when we are ill. We need a lawyer if we run into legal trouble, or to help us with our will.
The workers we need every day of our lives. They are there collecting the rubbish, mending the roads, driving the trains and buses, putting up the buildings, harvesting the land, cleaning the windows and streets, doing the electrical repairs..........the list of those we miss if they do not appear could go on. And if includes the bar and restaurant and shop servers with University degree but not with the skills of the others.
The lost of the major industries from the UK, the factories, steelworks, mines and clothing factories - took away much of the prestige in which the workers were held. The miners were once a major political force, and the trades unions, founded against so much opposition, could effect changes in government policy by the strength of the views of their membership.
New Labour were desperate to get the country out of the clutches of Thatcherism and they did it by making the traditional party "middle class". Now it was respectable to vote for it, you did not have to be a worker.
Never have the phrases "middle class" and "working class" been used so intensively to mark the difference in any section of the population, though "hardworking families" has become a popular alternative of praise. But it is always made clear that the section of society it is best to belong to is middle class. Most now either claim or aspire to belong to it. Why is this? I used to know people who never wanted to be termed "middle class" on the grounds that it was dull and undistinguished, and would say they were either working class or upper class. The in-betweens were considered boring.
The workers used to have a long and proud tradition. I can go as far back as to remember this, the feeling of assurance that came from them as they thronged the buses on the way to work, the sense of pride they had, one that I shared as soon as I brought home my first pay packet and felt myself at last one of them (as well as giving half of it to my mother for my keep. She didn't need it, but it was all part of the Yorkshire tradition).
So, please could we have a word for the workers now? Education has always been important to them - the technical colleges, the workers' educational association, the night schools - not just to improve their pay and position but education for its own sake - that was how it was regarded as important then, and the Open University has carried on that tradition, though degrees everywhere are being seen more for their value as aiming towards jobs. Classics and history have had to take a back seat.
One leading political columnist wrote recently about his climbing upwards from ancestors who included a cobbler and others engaged in skilled manual jobs. He said all this had brought him to his present life, happier in his work and standard of living. But, we have to ask, who was the most useful to society - him, or the skilled workers in his past?
And maybe those first-class degree bartenders should have shoved themselves into the world of work they really wanted to do, like so many successful people before them - Richard Branson being a good example. The education would still have been there for them when they wanted it.
ends
How did this happen? Remember Tony Blair's continual emphasis on the importance of young people getting a University degree, of increasing the numbers of those going to University - and he certainly made the figures climb high - and the desirable future for all, seemingly, to join one of the professions?
But I cannot remember, in all the days of the New Labour government - and, yes, their title was Labour, their ancestry the working class of the Industrial Revolution - any praise for or singling out, of the people actually doing the work needed to keep the country going. We need a doctor when we are ill. We need a lawyer if we run into legal trouble, or to help us with our will.
The workers we need every day of our lives. They are there collecting the rubbish, mending the roads, driving the trains and buses, putting up the buildings, harvesting the land, cleaning the windows and streets, doing the electrical repairs..........the list of those we miss if they do not appear could go on. And if includes the bar and restaurant and shop servers with University degree but not with the skills of the others.
The lost of the major industries from the UK, the factories, steelworks, mines and clothing factories - took away much of the prestige in which the workers were held. The miners were once a major political force, and the trades unions, founded against so much opposition, could effect changes in government policy by the strength of the views of their membership.
New Labour were desperate to get the country out of the clutches of Thatcherism and they did it by making the traditional party "middle class". Now it was respectable to vote for it, you did not have to be a worker.
Never have the phrases "middle class" and "working class" been used so intensively to mark the difference in any section of the population, though "hardworking families" has become a popular alternative of praise. But it is always made clear that the section of society it is best to belong to is middle class. Most now either claim or aspire to belong to it. Why is this? I used to know people who never wanted to be termed "middle class" on the grounds that it was dull and undistinguished, and would say they were either working class or upper class. The in-betweens were considered boring.
The workers used to have a long and proud tradition. I can go as far back as to remember this, the feeling of assurance that came from them as they thronged the buses on the way to work, the sense of pride they had, one that I shared as soon as I brought home my first pay packet and felt myself at last one of them (as well as giving half of it to my mother for my keep. She didn't need it, but it was all part of the Yorkshire tradition).
So, please could we have a word for the workers now? Education has always been important to them - the technical colleges, the workers' educational association, the night schools - not just to improve their pay and position but education for its own sake - that was how it was regarded as important then, and the Open University has carried on that tradition, though degrees everywhere are being seen more for their value as aiming towards jobs. Classics and history have had to take a back seat.
One leading political columnist wrote recently about his climbing upwards from ancestors who included a cobbler and others engaged in skilled manual jobs. He said all this had brought him to his present life, happier in his work and standard of living. But, we have to ask, who was the most useful to society - him, or the skilled workers in his past?
And maybe those first-class degree bartenders should have shoved themselves into the world of work they really wanted to do, like so many successful people before them - Richard Branson being a good example. The education would still have been there for them when they wanted it.
ends
Wednesday, 13 February 2013
factory farming
The British are " animal lovers." The organisations for rescuing dogs, cat, horses, and donkeys are swamped with almost more money than they can handle. The international rescue organisations have a ready response to their appeals for dogs killed in the Phillipines, for African animals maltreated for a profit.
Yet they do not care about cows, hens, sheep, ducks, pigs, continuing to eat them though they know they have been kept in what have been called concentration camp conditions and killed barbarically? To this must now be added the sufferings of horses, transported hundreds of miles by rail and sea to be slaughtered for cheap food. According to the British government's shadow environment secretary, Mary Creagh, up to 70,000 horses are unaccounted for in Northern Ireland. According to Viva, the animal welfare organisation, horses are taken to Ireland, where export rules are said to be easier, sold for £10 each and then resold for meat to dealers for £500 and sent overseas in long, hard sea and train journeys. And an estimated 65,000 horses are transported back and forth across Europe, many from Romania.
The final agonies of the horses, intelligent, sensitive animals whose lives are closely linked to humans, are at last being recognised. "The fact that animals belong to other species ought not to disqualify them from our compassion.....raising them for our food we cause animals more pain than we gain by eating them.....Unlike scientific knowledge, which is cumulative, moral knowledge can be lost just as easily as it is gained. Historical progress means a reduction in suffering and increase in happiness for sentient beings everywhere. ...abolishing slavery, giving women the vote and legalising gay marriage fall into this category," wrote Amol Rajan in the Evening Standard in one of the most intelligent columns on this subject.
It took a long time for Britain to persuade the rest of the European Union that farm animals were sentient beings, not machines, and worthy of being treated as such. Pigs are intelligent and sociable, and like ducks and hens caring and responsible parents - in fact more responsible than many humans. We can all see the sheep caring for their young, while there are still some left out free on the fields before being exported live in appalling conditions. People will encourage their children to coo over lamb and calves. No one will tell them what the future holds for them, apart from the few farms where the welfare of the animal is still put first - cows left to graze, pigs kept outdoors, able to feed and mother their young, hens able to roam freely, ducks able to be in their natural habitat on water.
The RSPCA insists that it makes its views on factory farming clear, and has set down guidelines for the proper treatment of farm animals. But they are not obviously effective. In fact, only Government legislation could work to ensure better conditions for farm animals and so far there is no sign of this appearing. When New Labour first came in, they had an excellent manifesto for animal welfare - but they worked only on a ban on foxhunting. (At least foxes escaped being factory farmed.) At one time live exports were banned, but started again by the Conservatives way back in the 'seventies, and are still going on.
Imports of food from countries like the United States with even worse farm animal conditions would still go on even if legislation stopped cruel practices here. In his landmark book "Eating Animals", Jonathan Safran, exposing the tortures and horrors of factory farming in the United States made the point that the same things went on in the UK. There were some important differences, but "A British reader who cares about the issues raised in this book should not find any peace in being British. Approximately 800m chickens, turkeys and pigs are factory farmed in the UK every year - more than 10 animals for every human." And this did not include cows and fish.
Organisations like Viva and Compassion in World Farming have been fighting for many years to achieve change, and have had some success, particularly in the on-the-spot research by brave members which have produced painful scenes of the processes of factory farming.
Chickens can think and feel, they enjoy dust bathing, nest building and roosting, look after their young, form friendships and pecking orders - when they can. Pictures taken by Viva show chickens locked up, often up to 40,000 of thems in foul-smelling, windowless sheds with no room even to turn around or sit. The space they have is roughly an A4 sheet of paper. This is the only life they will have. Then they will appear in chicken sticks, chicken dinners, cat food
and endless chicken menus in the supermarkets. Over 850m are killed every year,hanging down from lines on the factory floor.
The latest horror are the new plans in several areas for huge cow prisons, known as "zero-grazing farms." Already planning for one in Lincolnshire includes 16 sheds housing 500 cattle each, with 8000 cows working all day and all night, being milked three times a day and meant to produce 250,000 litres daily. With no access to grass, the cattle will be forced to feed through metal bars, kept standing in metal stalls, their calves taken from them after just a few days, and with the prospect of endless calving so they will produce more milk, still with no chance to care for the calves. Still want to drink cheap milk?
Or to eat duck? Viva has filmed major duck producers and claims duck sales have dropped by 2m since the media coverage of their investigations. Certainly an impact on takeup of chicken is at last to be spotted in some supermarkets as chickens stay on the shelves, though most cookery writers still take chicken as one of the main ingredients for their recipes without any mention of whether these were free-range chickens or had gone through the hell of the factory sheds. One or two celebrity chefs have certainly taken up the case for going back to natural farming, and have had some success, but in the cheap takeaways, burger bars and most supermarkets, the message is largely ignored.
Every year in the UK, Viva reported that most of the 19 million ducklings raised for meat each year spent their short lives imprisoned in "a filthy windowless shed with up to 10,000 others." They have to fight for every drop of water." They had filthy, matted feathers and caked eyes. Yet people ordering duck in a restaurant probably thought this a compassionate choice, picturing the duck bobbing along on a lake, living happily until it was killed for human food.
Yet the saddest pictures of all for many have been of the imprisoned mother pigs, with no straw, standing on slatted bars, unable to reach their babies These are intelligent and aware creatures with individual personalities, condemned to a life of uncomfortable imprisonment. Young pigs are bundled together by their thousands in large sheds.
Earlier this year, Viva investigators randomly visited three pig farms in the north-east. At one, worn-out sows were housed on bare concrete, the word "cull" crudely sprayed on their backs. They found dead and rotting pigs and decaying piglets uncollected outside units, sows with open sores imprisoned in metal farrowing crates, pigs in concrete pens with no bedding or environmental enrichment, even though this is now illegal. On one of the farms they found tiny piglets, huddled together, covered in flies, without their mother. One was so badly crippled that he dragged himself across the floor by his front legs. Two of the farms were signed up to the Farm Assured scheme, supposedly a guarantee of better welfare. The footage was passed on to the Government department, yet two of the farms were still given a clean bill of health.
How much longer are we going to let these concentration camps and the cruelties of thousands of miles of transporting animals go on? How will future generations view our indifference and greed? And we don't even need to eat meat, or to drink milk.
Yet they do not care about cows, hens, sheep, ducks, pigs, continuing to eat them though they know they have been kept in what have been called concentration camp conditions and killed barbarically? To this must now be added the sufferings of horses, transported hundreds of miles by rail and sea to be slaughtered for cheap food. According to the British government's shadow environment secretary, Mary Creagh, up to 70,000 horses are unaccounted for in Northern Ireland. According to Viva, the animal welfare organisation, horses are taken to Ireland, where export rules are said to be easier, sold for £10 each and then resold for meat to dealers for £500 and sent overseas in long, hard sea and train journeys. And an estimated 65,000 horses are transported back and forth across Europe, many from Romania.
The final agonies of the horses, intelligent, sensitive animals whose lives are closely linked to humans, are at last being recognised. "The fact that animals belong to other species ought not to disqualify them from our compassion.....raising them for our food we cause animals more pain than we gain by eating them.....Unlike scientific knowledge, which is cumulative, moral knowledge can be lost just as easily as it is gained. Historical progress means a reduction in suffering and increase in happiness for sentient beings everywhere. ...abolishing slavery, giving women the vote and legalising gay marriage fall into this category," wrote Amol Rajan in the Evening Standard in one of the most intelligent columns on this subject.
It took a long time for Britain to persuade the rest of the European Union that farm animals were sentient beings, not machines, and worthy of being treated as such. Pigs are intelligent and sociable, and like ducks and hens caring and responsible parents - in fact more responsible than many humans. We can all see the sheep caring for their young, while there are still some left out free on the fields before being exported live in appalling conditions. People will encourage their children to coo over lamb and calves. No one will tell them what the future holds for them, apart from the few farms where the welfare of the animal is still put first - cows left to graze, pigs kept outdoors, able to feed and mother their young, hens able to roam freely, ducks able to be in their natural habitat on water.
The RSPCA insists that it makes its views on factory farming clear, and has set down guidelines for the proper treatment of farm animals. But they are not obviously effective. In fact, only Government legislation could work to ensure better conditions for farm animals and so far there is no sign of this appearing. When New Labour first came in, they had an excellent manifesto for animal welfare - but they worked only on a ban on foxhunting. (At least foxes escaped being factory farmed.) At one time live exports were banned, but started again by the Conservatives way back in the 'seventies, and are still going on.
Imports of food from countries like the United States with even worse farm animal conditions would still go on even if legislation stopped cruel practices here. In his landmark book "Eating Animals", Jonathan Safran, exposing the tortures and horrors of factory farming in the United States made the point that the same things went on in the UK. There were some important differences, but "A British reader who cares about the issues raised in this book should not find any peace in being British. Approximately 800m chickens, turkeys and pigs are factory farmed in the UK every year - more than 10 animals for every human." And this did not include cows and fish.
Organisations like Viva and Compassion in World Farming have been fighting for many years to achieve change, and have had some success, particularly in the on-the-spot research by brave members which have produced painful scenes of the processes of factory farming.
Chickens can think and feel, they enjoy dust bathing, nest building and roosting, look after their young, form friendships and pecking orders - when they can. Pictures taken by Viva show chickens locked up, often up to 40,000 of thems in foul-smelling, windowless sheds with no room even to turn around or sit. The space they have is roughly an A4 sheet of paper. This is the only life they will have. Then they will appear in chicken sticks, chicken dinners, cat food
and endless chicken menus in the supermarkets. Over 850m are killed every year,hanging down from lines on the factory floor.
The latest horror are the new plans in several areas for huge cow prisons, known as "zero-grazing farms." Already planning for one in Lincolnshire includes 16 sheds housing 500 cattle each, with 8000 cows working all day and all night, being milked three times a day and meant to produce 250,000 litres daily. With no access to grass, the cattle will be forced to feed through metal bars, kept standing in metal stalls, their calves taken from them after just a few days, and with the prospect of endless calving so they will produce more milk, still with no chance to care for the calves. Still want to drink cheap milk?
Or to eat duck? Viva has filmed major duck producers and claims duck sales have dropped by 2m since the media coverage of their investigations. Certainly an impact on takeup of chicken is at last to be spotted in some supermarkets as chickens stay on the shelves, though most cookery writers still take chicken as one of the main ingredients for their recipes without any mention of whether these were free-range chickens or had gone through the hell of the factory sheds. One or two celebrity chefs have certainly taken up the case for going back to natural farming, and have had some success, but in the cheap takeaways, burger bars and most supermarkets, the message is largely ignored.
Every year in the UK, Viva reported that most of the 19 million ducklings raised for meat each year spent their short lives imprisoned in "a filthy windowless shed with up to 10,000 others." They have to fight for every drop of water." They had filthy, matted feathers and caked eyes. Yet people ordering duck in a restaurant probably thought this a compassionate choice, picturing the duck bobbing along on a lake, living happily until it was killed for human food.
Yet the saddest pictures of all for many have been of the imprisoned mother pigs, with no straw, standing on slatted bars, unable to reach their babies These are intelligent and aware creatures with individual personalities, condemned to a life of uncomfortable imprisonment. Young pigs are bundled together by their thousands in large sheds.
Earlier this year, Viva investigators randomly visited three pig farms in the north-east. At one, worn-out sows were housed on bare concrete, the word "cull" crudely sprayed on their backs. They found dead and rotting pigs and decaying piglets uncollected outside units, sows with open sores imprisoned in metal farrowing crates, pigs in concrete pens with no bedding or environmental enrichment, even though this is now illegal. On one of the farms they found tiny piglets, huddled together, covered in flies, without their mother. One was so badly crippled that he dragged himself across the floor by his front legs. Two of the farms were signed up to the Farm Assured scheme, supposedly a guarantee of better welfare. The footage was passed on to the Government department, yet two of the farms were still given a clean bill of health.
How much longer are we going to let these concentration camps and the cruelties of thousands of miles of transporting animals go on? How will future generations view our indifference and greed? And we don't even need to eat meat, or to drink milk.
Sunday, 27 January 2013
Shale gas - are we ready for it?
shale gas l
The optimists say that the discover of shale oil and gas is the new hope for future energy, garnered from the shores round the UK. The pessimists say the efforts to get it out, known as "fracking" would cause minor earthquakes and poison the local water around. Alex Salmond, head of the Scottish government, is already in trouble with those saying he has endangered his green policies by giving approval to a plan to sell 12bn to 24bn barrels of oil and gas from Scotland for as estimated £1.5tn over the next 40 years.
The US could be totally independent for its energy, now its shale oil and gas discoveries are being developed, freeing it from dependence on imports and hopefully, the international conflicts brought about by the global need for energy. Marlan Downey, formerly President of Pecten (Shell) International, President of ARCO and a consultant with Atlantic Richfield, has been a pioneer in the discover of shale oil and gas in different parts of the world. As a Fellow of the Geological Society of Great Britain, he is regularly consulted on the methods and practicalities of oil and gas development here. He is well aware of the fear growing in Britain at the prospects of the accidents that could be caused while that is going on. But the top academics and engineers in this country, the Royal Academy of Engineering and the Royal Society have given the all clear and said that fracking should be allowed to go ahead, with close monitoring. The government have already gone along with this, though a former energy minister, Charles Hendry, is reported to have warned that shale gas could not bring the same benefits as in the USA, where consents were much easier and prices low. It will be up to the Geological Society to advise on the safety or otherwise of fracking in the areas of development. Marlan Downey, on one of his regular visits to this country, also made this point to me. "The restrictions on Crown land are strict here and investment will be more difficult than in the USA"
But he holds out an alternative, the North Sea oilfields. "Shale oil is there, in great abundance, but it will be expensive to produce, everywhere it is found. The drilling and production costs may be treble the US onshore costs." He raised the possibility of using North Sea oil rigs for the job, delaying their planned abandonment, to cut the high expenditure. "The challenge is difficult, but think of the possible prize - 20 billion barrels recoverable, with huge investment in the UK of around two trillion dollars." He is optimistic and expects to see the first barrel of shale oil coming out of the North Sea within a year, given the right economics in world oil price and contract terms.
But he said that no one had developed oil from offshore - yet. Only four years ago the development of shale inshore had hardly begun, though already it has become a huge resource of the USA and other countries. Obviously, offshore oil would avoid the objections to inshore developments, the fracking and the fear of contaminated water.
He sees little first-hand research in the UK, but thinks the Geological Society, which is now involved in shale oil and gas, has a fine resource of minds to tackle the problems and possibilities.
The North Sea brought unprecedented riches to the UK, which became the envy of Europe. Has its time come again?
ends
The optimists say that the discover of shale oil and gas is the new hope for future energy, garnered from the shores round the UK. The pessimists say the efforts to get it out, known as "fracking" would cause minor earthquakes and poison the local water around. Alex Salmond, head of the Scottish government, is already in trouble with those saying he has endangered his green policies by giving approval to a plan to sell 12bn to 24bn barrels of oil and gas from Scotland for as estimated £1.5tn over the next 40 years.
The US could be totally independent for its energy, now its shale oil and gas discoveries are being developed, freeing it from dependence on imports and hopefully, the international conflicts brought about by the global need for energy. Marlan Downey, formerly President of Pecten (Shell) International, President of ARCO and a consultant with Atlantic Richfield, has been a pioneer in the discover of shale oil and gas in different parts of the world. As a Fellow of the Geological Society of Great Britain, he is regularly consulted on the methods and practicalities of oil and gas development here. He is well aware of the fear growing in Britain at the prospects of the accidents that could be caused while that is going on. But the top academics and engineers in this country, the Royal Academy of Engineering and the Royal Society have given the all clear and said that fracking should be allowed to go ahead, with close monitoring. The government have already gone along with this, though a former energy minister, Charles Hendry, is reported to have warned that shale gas could not bring the same benefits as in the USA, where consents were much easier and prices low. It will be up to the Geological Society to advise on the safety or otherwise of fracking in the areas of development. Marlan Downey, on one of his regular visits to this country, also made this point to me. "The restrictions on Crown land are strict here and investment will be more difficult than in the USA"
But he holds out an alternative, the North Sea oilfields. "Shale oil is there, in great abundance, but it will be expensive to produce, everywhere it is found. The drilling and production costs may be treble the US onshore costs." He raised the possibility of using North Sea oil rigs for the job, delaying their planned abandonment, to cut the high expenditure. "The challenge is difficult, but think of the possible prize - 20 billion barrels recoverable, with huge investment in the UK of around two trillion dollars." He is optimistic and expects to see the first barrel of shale oil coming out of the North Sea within a year, given the right economics in world oil price and contract terms.
But he said that no one had developed oil from offshore - yet. Only four years ago the development of shale inshore had hardly begun, though already it has become a huge resource of the USA and other countries. Obviously, offshore oil would avoid the objections to inshore developments, the fracking and the fear of contaminated water.
He sees little first-hand research in the UK, but thinks the Geological Society, which is now involved in shale oil and gas, has a fine resource of minds to tackle the problems and possibilities.
The North Sea brought unprecedented riches to the UK, which became the envy of Europe. Has its time come again?
ends
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