Can a leopard change its spots?
One of Backing Fracking’s most vocal supporters is Lorraine Allanson who runs a bed and breakfast and holiday cottage complex near Pickering. She also runs a pro-fracking Facebook group and website under the name FORGE on which she bans anyone who expresses any opinion contrary to her own.
On her website Ms Allanson is scathing about those who
“promote the view that tourism in Ryedale will be ruined when we at FORGE know that that decades of gas extraction in the area has had no adverse consequences for tourism whatsover (sic). The ignorance and lack of knowledge of critics who are opposed to fracking knows no bounds and yet some people still believe them.”
How funny then to read Ms Allanson’s reaction back in 2010 to Moorland Energy’s plans to build a gas processing facility on a proposed farmland site (2.2 hectares) to the east of Thornton Dale and south-east of Wilton just 2.5 miles from her own tourism business.
Lorraine Allanson, who runs a bed and breakfast and holiday cottage complex near Pickering, said: “This seems to have come out the blue and we don’t want it to impact on what is an absolutely stunning area.”
She added: “This is also in the Vale of Pickering and full of tourists, which is the biggest industry. There all sorts of issues including safety.”
In another article she is quoted as saying
“So many businesses rely on the beauty of the area and if this gasworks is going to be a blot on the landscape we need to know where it will be.”
Funnily enough, one Neil Milbanke, who is one of Lorraine’s ardent supporters on the FORGE facebook page was so anti gas development 6 years ago that he set up a protest group. His recent Damascene conversion to supporting shale gas is rather amazing isn’t it?
Of course, it’s a woman’s prerogative to change her mind as Shania Twain reminded us recently, but honestly Lorraine,”that don’t impress me much”
It is also odd that somebody who is so dismissive of what she calls protestors should also have a bit of history in opposing development herself – I wonder what a B&B owner’s reasons for objecting to a development of 46 Holiday lodges and an education/conference centre in Whitby – 20 miles from her own business might be?
Funny old world in the Backing Fracking camp isn’t it?
POST SCRIPT – It seems I got it ALL wrong 🙂
Here is Lorraine’s response
Sorry Lorraine – I didn’t say you joined a campaign group or wrote letters of objection about the Moorland application did I? Where did you get that from? I just quoted what you told the papers and they printed. I don’t need to clutch at any straws to show the bizarre difference between what you said then and what you do now.
The fact that you objected to the Whitby application as part of a group makes not a blind bit of difference.
The lady doth protest too much methinks!
I would have put this response on your FORGERY page but you won’t let me post on there 🙂
POST POST SCRIPT
And now Ken Wilkinson has ridden in to defend this damsel in distress:
Clockwork Ken (named thus by his paragliding club as he is apparently so easy to wind up) really doesn’t like me because I give him a hard time on the many newspaper columns that he infects with his generalisations about how safe fracking is because it’s run by “experts”. He really, really hates it when I ask him to try to back his statements up and he can’t 🙂
What is particularly hilarious about his comment is that Kenny didn’t bat an eyelid when his pals Backing Fracking launched ad hom attacks at me as recently as 13th February (in fact he joined in!) and to Barbara Richardson on 1st February. Again he joined in the thread without whining once about “unacceptable” ad hominem attacks that “even the gutter press would see as unacceptable” LOL. Funnily enough he really doesn’t seem to be able to ignore me ins spite of his protestations. 🙂
In fact Backing Fracking are so obsessed with me that in spite of the fact that I haven’t posted on their petulant Facebook Page since Christmas they have launched at least 7 ad hominem attacks on me and several more against others. It’s quite shillarious 🙂
