LET’S HAVE A PEOPLE’S VOTE ON WHETHER TO DITCH THE HS2 TURKEY
OUR headlines make grim and ever grimmer reading. A knife-crime pandemic that is out of control. Millions spent on tribunal after tribunal to decide whether this or that convicted foreign thug may be slung out. Pages of the sullen animal faces of monsters who groomed, drugged and gang-raped children and girls for their pleasure.
We read of hard drugs now no longer in city-centre slums, but reaching out to every village and rural hamlet. Our police fill out forms or divert trained detectives to examine the hideous crime of wolf-whistling. Our armed forces are 30,000 men and women below what we were told were the minimal safe levels, and the frigates of our under-strength navy rock at anchor for lack of matelots to crew them.
This is not a Conservative-versus-Labour issue. There are millions of lifelong Labourvoting men and women who would, if asked, give the same answer as the retired colonel walking his bull terrier. They all watch a constipated once-Conservative Government sitting in office staring helplessly at a score of things the people would like to see tackled and wailing that they have no resources (meaning money), despite sky-high taxes.
We had a referendum on the EU. How about another one? Which would you prefer? That we get stuck into everything listed above or continue to plough eighty billion pounds into a railway line from London to Manchester to parallel the one we already have?
I mean, of course, HS2. It is a project so expensive that not only is it likely to escalate to a hundred billion; not only is it likely to be superseded by improved technology before any train rolls on it; but it will never be used by more than a fraction of one per cent of our population.
Even today it looks as it if will cost out at £250million per mile.
There are 10 major reforms and improvements that we need urgently and our Government just sits and stares at them while pumping our taxes into this turkey because no one has the courage to put a bullet in it.