Two more arrests at fracking protest | Environment | theguardian.com

Police at an anti-fracking protest in Balcombe, West Sussex, pushed back demonstrators on Wednesday afternoon to allow the entry of an articulated lorry carrying pipes. It was the first successful delivery of equipment to the site since the protest began last week.

Earlier in the day two people were arrested over the ongoing protests against plans to drill for oil at a site a few miles outside the village.

The pair - a man and a woman - had glued themselves together at the gates of the site in an attempt to prevent machinery from being brought through the gates. Sussex police said the pair had been arrested under section 241 of the Trade Union Labour Relations Act.

Section 241:

Trade Union and Labour Relations (Consolidation) Act 1992

241 Intimidation or annoyance by violence or otherwise.E+W+S

(1)A person commits an offence who, with a view to compelling another person to abstain from doing or to do any act which that person has a legal right to do or abstain from doing, wrongfully and without legal authority--

(a)uses violence to or intimidates that person or his [F1spouse or civil partner]F1 or children, or injures his property,

(b)persistently follows that person about from place to place,

(c)hides any tools, clothes or other property owned or used by that person, or deprives him of or hinders him in the use thereof,

(d)watches or besets the house or other place where that person resides, works, carries on business or happens to be, or the approach to any such house or place, or

(e)follows that person with two or more other persons in a disorderly manner in or through any street or road.

(2)A person guilty of an offence under this section is liable on summary conviction to imprisonment for a term not exceeding six months or a fine not exceeding level 5 on the standard scale, or both.

As far as I can see, no trade unions are involved, but the "right to work" is being invoked to quash any kind of determined protest or picketing.

I guess when they get tired of losing, they'll dig the 19th century rulebook back out again.

- Jake

Friends come and go. Enemies accumulate.

The Cabinet papers published under the 30-year rule lay bare the scale of Margaret Thatcher's long-held ambitions to crush the power of Britain's trade unions even before she had won her historic 144-seat majority landslide victory.

The Downing Street papers from 1983 show she told Ferdinand Mount, then head of her policy unit, that she agreed that Norman Tebbit's gradualist approach to trade union reform was too timid and that they should "neglect no opportunity to erode trade union membership".