Minister sending out wrong signal over HS2
LISTENING to the right people isn’t normally difficult, but deciding who those right people are in the first place can be.
The celebrated naturalist Chris Packham is an excellent example of someone who knows his stuff. A solid communicator, the author of a dozen books and hundreds of papers on his subjects. He knows what he’s talking about and it is always worthwhile paying attention to wisdom. Unless that is, one has particular reason not to, and the vested interest creeps in.
Mr Packham knows about the environmental and economic consequences of that most perverted and superfluous of all instigations, HS2. Getting 100,000 petition signatures in less than five days without even breaking sweat means that the HS2 issue should now be revisited in Parliament. In truth, if he had needed a few million signatures, he would have received them, such is the concern over this horribly destructive project.
The expected and provoked response came from Transport
Minister Andrew Stephenson.
Unfortunately for him and others who have nailed their pants to the HS2 mast, he effortlessly let the HS2 cat out of its grubby bag this week by saying: “We can’t scrap HS2 because it would have a devastating long-term impact on the UK construction sector.”
Those who have followed HS2 have always known that the real reason for it was to keep the orange jackets busy and the construction bigwigs wealthy.
HS2 was never anything to do with those ever-changing mantras about faster journey times, capacity, connectivity or “rebalancing the economy”.
Poor Andrew. He might have been excused this gaffe, had he not gone on to state: “Scrapping HS2 would send a terrible signal to the rest of the world.” Make of that what you will, but it was lost me, I’m afraid.
Perhaps having the surname Stephenson will prevent him getting the rocket over a train, and people will stick with the experts.
David Briggs, by email