It’s a long time since I’ve highlighted one of these but I couldn’t resist this one!

Step forward Stephen Leary, a member of MAPA (Measham, Appleby, Packington, Austrey  HS2 Action) in Leicestershire. This group seems to represent about 1% of the local population. I’m being generous here as that’s roughly how many turned up to their inaugural meeting. Leary is the self-appointed keeper of their Twitter feed, and he’s hilarious! Check out @MeashamHS2Actio to see. The group claim that their aim is to “To make a coordinated response across the villages to HS2 issues affecting our communities” and to “To collect information and research the case against the HS2 Measham Re-Route”. But Leary spends most of his time retweeting any old rubbish that opposes the whole concept of Hs2 – 95% of which has absolutely nothing to do with or relevance to Measham and communities or the phase of Hs2 they’re part of (2b). Leary also seems rather obsessed with the number of views his nonsense gets, hence tweets like this.

Quite what Crewe, which is on a completely different leg of Hs2 to Measham has to do with “our communities” is a mystery – as is how advertising that the number of folk engaging with your tweets is tiny will persuade anyone to take you seriously! Still, I’m sure the people who follow him (hardly any of whom live in the Measham area) will be inundating the Phase 2 Hybrid Committee with petitions to get the Leicestershire route of Hs2 changed. Or perhaps not. Here’s some of his 70 followers…

 

I’m sure they’ve both been terribly busy drafting responses to the consultation- as were all the Chiltern Nimbys who follow him…

I can’t help laughing at a campaign this inept. They’re spending all their time re-running the same tactics that failed to stop Hs2 phase 1 – as if it’s suddenly going to work second time around. The way they’ve woefully misunderstood how social media works is rather amusing too. A few folk shouting at each other on Twitter was never going to change anything. Leary has added his own unique contribution by not understanding how hashtags work, which means his  multiple tweets are reminiscent of the comedian Norman Collier. His routine was based around someone talking into an intermittent microphone!

MAPA may well have a short life. The consultation that closed on March 9th will soon reveal whether local residents back or oppose the route change. If the result is that more people support the change than oppose it, then MAPA is irrelevant.

2023 update. 

Like most Nimbys Leary eventually disappeared without trace. Having got bored with being laughed at and with his one man band local ‘group’ never having got off the ground Leary wandered off to find another windmill to tilt at. MAPA went the way of all local groups opposed to HS2 and sank without trace shortly after being formed. It now exists in old Council minutes and newspaper clippings but nowhere else…

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