It’s always heartening when you come across a story of a trade union leader who is not promoting middle class Leftist narratives and instead keeping at least one eye on improving the lot of their union’s members. It’s even more heartening when it’s a union that I used to be a member of and which I joined because the main union in my workplace was dominated by Trots. It’s good to see this union going against the grain and putting their members and the broader working class before dogma.

Gary Smith the General Secretary of the GMB union has come out and said that fracking in the UK is a better option than importing fracked gas from the USA in tankers. Mr Smith is correct. There is less expenditure and less fuel wasted by getting natural gas from under our own feet than getting it from the land underneath someone else’s feet at least three thousand miles away. We do, as Mr Smith said, have to ‘face reality’ and acknowledge that we cannot ignore the source of energy that fracked gas provides. This reality should also be faced by those who are wedded to the man made climate change narrative. This is because importing gas generates far more CO2 by being transported than would be the case if the gas were extracted in the UK and either used in the UK or sold via pipelines to our European neighbours. The other reality is that we need gas for domestic heating, industry and to fuel power stations in order to provide baseload electricity generation.

Also as Mr Smith points out, fracking of gas generates real world material jobs not just knowledge economy jobs but proper jobs with an end product. As Mr Smith said the main beneficiaries of things like wind power generation are the wealthy landowners on which these windmills stand and the lawyers who manage the planning and administration of them.

Mr Smith laid into the middle class left and their obsessions with renewables and said:

We should not get caught up in a bourgeois environmental debate driven by the bourgeois environmental lobby …The debate on the left needs to seriously talk about climate change, but it needs to be focused on jobs. And the renewables industry, and many of those who espouse it in politics, have no interest in jobs for working class communities. And we should stop pretending that we’re in an alliance with them. The big winners from renewables have been the wealthy and big corporate interests. Invariably the only jobs that are created when wind farms get put up, particularly onshore wind, have been jobs in public relations and jobs for lawyers.

Well said Mr Smith. This approach that he’s made is a common sense one. He’s also pointed out that the only real winners from following a policy of eco-communism are those with incomes and assets many times greater than those possessed by the ordinary working man or woman. Let’s hope we have more union leaders speaking up like this and less union leaders being lead up the dead end and anti-working class path of eco-communism.