shetland

There’s a dangerous storm brewing in the North Sea. But this is no natural disaster - it’s been whipped up by oil and gas companies lobbying for a major tax cut.

In the Budget, the Chancellor, George Osborne, announced a fuel duty stabiliser. When oil prices were high – over $75 a barrel to be precise – he’d cut taxes on motoring, and tax oil companies instead. When oil prices dropped below $75 a barrel, he’d whack a tax on fuel, but give oil companies a break. 

The oil companies are at it again: they're trying to drill another deep water well off the Shetland Islands. Let's stop them.

After a mammoth 50 hours in the water in front of their drill ship, following 100 hours on Chevron's anchor chain, the oil giant's lawyers have again stopped our protest.

Last night we received news over the ship's radio that Chevron had gained another injunction against us, preventing us from interfering in any way with their operation - otherwise face massive daily fines.

We pulled our last swimmers out of the water yesterday afternoon at about four, all of us exhausted after round-the-clock shifts to block the 228-metre Stena Carron from reaching its drill spot.

Here's the latest video from Esperanza off the west of Shetland, as our swimmers continue their vigil to halt Chevron's giant drill ship, the Stena Carron. This phase of the action is now in its third day. We've been stopping the deepwater oil drillers for a week now.

A few days ago we asked you – our supporters everywhere – to suggest a banner slogan for the pod. We received loads of great entries and in the end went for one we really liked by  Michele Westlake (aka @crazyladywriter) on Twitter. It says: "Don’t SpOIL our planet".

The only problem was, with Chevron’s lawyers forcing our pod down, we had to figure out somewhere else to put it. Well, smack bang in front of the 228-metre Stena Carron seemed like a good idea, so when we jumped in yesterday, we took the banner with us.

Watch this great video of Victor, who along with Anais, was the first to scale Chevron’s Stena Carron anchor chain and start the 100 hour occupation of the ship.