A little more substance from Jane Hutt this week and continued support from Alun Cairns and some local councillors who have clearly been taking good notes from my speeches at the last two meetings and from this blog.

I left with somewhat mixed feelings today. On a positive note, there is clearly a groundswell that may lead to VoG making a landmark decision to reject the test drilling application. On the downside, I think we could then see a lot NIMBYists melt away from this campaign. We even heard one VoG councillor effectively saying leave the lovely Vale alone and go and mess up the grotty Valleys! And this is exactly what will happen, for sure, if we let them.

And if the test drilling gets approval on Thursday, we then have to monitor its activities, which I suspect will have very modest impacts, and then sit around indefinitely looking out for phase two applications, which will probably avoid Llandow like the plague and pitch up somewhere a bit more discreet. Either way, Thursday will be the end of the beginning of the wider battle we will need to fight.

The next stage is the peaceful, placard waving, slogan chanting fun of site visit protest. Join us at the Llandow site at 2.00pm.

Copy and paste this map url for an accurate location fix of the site

http://maps.google.co.uk/maps?q=51.438634,-3.500508&num=1&sll=51.438922,-3.500433&sspn=0.0043,0.009474&hl=en&ie=UTF8&ll=51.439029,-3.499231&spn=0.016051,0.025749&z=14&source=embed