Margaret Thatcher's former press secretary Sir Bernard Ingham has denounced anti-fracking demonstrators as "blinkered totalitarians".
Sir Bernard said: "It seems they want us all to live in their yurts, teepees and wigwams in a sort of glorious save-the-planet pre-industrial squalor, regardless of our manifest objections.
“If that is not totalitarianism, I don’t know what is.”
Sir Bernard, writing in the Yorkshire Post, said: “The problem with anti-fracking fanatics is that like other zealots they are blinkered totalitarians,” adding the activists are “guilty of hypocrisy, utter stupidity and exaggeration”.
“Their entire approach to energy is to plump for everything that does not work and exclude anything that does - coal, gas, oil and especially nuclear energy, which emits next to no CO2.
“Worse still, their long campaign has captured our limited politicians.”
He added: “The result is that short of an early shale gas bonanza, we can no longer rely on any government of whatever political complexion to provide secure supplies of energy at affordable cost.”
PA