Fraking UK Vicars: Now the Church is squirming in Mammon’s mire, that’s the full set

The CofE’s fracking position is another hypocritical disgrace

The Slog: Fogeys like me can remember very clearly in the 1950s who the authority figures were: those who commanded respect, and those whom no good citizen wanted to anger. They were, in no particular order, Dads, policemen, teachers, doctors, lawyers, bank managers, and vicars. Up until yesterday, only the Anglican vicar was left…Catholic priests having disgraced themselves pretty well all the way up to the Vatican. Now the vicar too is a person under suspicion, denounced as yet another money-grubber who may well have lost the plot.
In 1960, when you brought a girlfriend back to her house late after a visit to the pictures, no girl ever said, “Me Mam’ll kill me”. Dad was the fear figure. Then the feminist nutters killed the tough love Dad, and not long afterwards the Australian nationality collector Murdoch started bribing the cops. Greedy and sometimes lazy (as in ill-informed) doctors took the State shilling, lawyers began chasing ambulances and raping kids, and bank managers began overcharging, defrauding, mis-selling and short-changing their customers in the name of efficiency. Now the vicars have seen a chance to make money from fracking.

I wonder if the Anglican Church has media managers, and if so what they’d be called. Spin vergers perhaps, or Devious Dogcollars. Certainly, the fracking fiasco has rammed new nails into the hand of Chrisianity: it has created, if you will, stigmata from stigma. Whichever way you cut it, some young clerical opportunist among the Commissioners persuaded the old guard that there was gas in that there land, so let’s grab it. For the munneeeee.
Responding initially to worshippers’ ethical concerns, the Church insisted that it has “no particular plans to mine under any property” but failed to rule out allowing fracking on its property.The reality behind the bollocks is there for all to see: the CofE has been actively registering its mineral rights to thousands of homes and farms.
By today, the God-happy-clappers were out there ‘explaining’ their actions….while managing only to dig themselves a deeper hole. Not only were the excuses pathetic – “the procedure can potentially be carried out safely through operational best practices” – it has been all over the media (since the news broke that it was obviously engaged in a “land grab”) with ham-fisted attempts to defend fracking without actually supporting it. That, I’m afraid, is a bit of classic Pharisee hair-splitting.
This afternoon, the religious affairs correspondent of the Telegraph reported that the Church saw itself as defending the poor against unreasonable critics of fracking. Ah right, ye venerable personages, so, um, the only reason you wanted to maximise profit from this was so you could give it all to the poor who will always be with us?
Don’t imagine in this case, by the way, that what we’re witnessing here is half-baked MSM invention: far from it. Slogger DW wrote to me earlier today to outline (with plans) “an orchestrated land grab” in one major Eastern England area.
The recent past shows that the Church of England has performed an utterly unprincipled volte-face here: just a few weeks ago, several figures in the Church voiced concern that fracking could risk lasting harm “to God’s glorious creation”. The temporal sphere of the CofE is, however, all too obvious in the shape of the Church Commissioners who manage its huge investments: this is the dark side from which most of the weasel-words emerge:
“There are a number of balancing considerations which need to be taken into account when coming to a view. Fuel poverty is an increasingly urgent issue for many in society – the impact on energy bills is felt most by the least well off. Blanket opposition to further exploration for new sources of fuel fails to take into account those who suffer most when resources are scarce.” Brilliant piece of Christian philosophy that one: ‘the poor might suffer, f**k it, let’s fry Britain’. Dear oh dear, but how muddled our Established Church is these days.

Edited by WD

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