I’ve long said that the UK’s ‘green’ movement is hypocritical and unfit for purpose. Their years-old stance of opposing us building HS2, the new spine of the British railway network is the classic example of this. The Green Party of England and Wales (The Scots are separate, and sensible) have a mad policy where they support building a new North-South high-speed line ‘in principal’ but vehemently oppose it in practice. So much so that their energies go into trying to stop a railway whilst giving road construction a free pass.
Yesterday, their outgoing MP for Brighton, Caroline Lucas tweeted this load of tosh whilst linking to a Guardian article on the trial and conviction of Gail Bradbrook, one of the co-founders of ‘Extinction Rebellion’.
Where to start? Was Bradbrook convicted of protesting? No. She was convicted of criminal damage, for smashing a plate glass window in protest against the building of HS2! Yep, protesting against building a new railway! Not a road, not a motorway – a railway! Criminal damage is NOT covered by article 11 of the ECHR law. It is NOT a ‘peaceful protest’ – it’s criminal damage. That some ‘greens’ simply can’t get their heads around that because of their exceptionalism is just another reason I have little time for them.
I won’t go into the rubbish Lucas has claimed about HS2 ‘destroying’ nature. Regular readers will have seen me cover that canard at length in previous blogs. I tweeted this is response to Lucas.
“Without Hs2 we won’t have the rail capacity we need to get modal shift from road/air to rail to cut #co2 emissions to tackle GLOBAL #ClimateChange. Stopping HS2 isn’t ‘green’ it’s the opposite. You’re literally doing the fossil fuel lobby’s job for it”.
This rattled Bradbrook’s cage, as she responded with two tweets, both of which sent my irony meter off the scale! The first quotes the Times newspaper and its recent attempts to fly air-cover for Sunak and the Tories by rehashing old claims of corruption with HS2 Ltd as a way of diverting attention from the mess they’ve got themselves into by cancelling parts of HS2. Never forget, who had oversight and control of HS2 Ltd? The Government. But, a founder of XR? Using a Murdoch-owned newspaper as ‘evidence’? Bless! However, it was this tweet that was the most interesting.
This is a link to an anonymous document with no provenance and no names on it to say who compiled it. Called ‘supporting facts and figures’ it’s essentially a cut and paste job a list of cobbled together reasons and ‘evidence’ of why ‘greens’ should oppose HS2. It’s a litany of lies, discredited claims and things that never, ever happened, including the classic that “HS2 is the largest deforestation exercise in the UK in over 100 years, not since WWI has the UK cut down so many trees”. I skewered that one here back in 2019!
But the real doozies are these. Amongst the list of cut and paste incoherency and contradictions the list uses ‘evidence’ and quotes from both the Institute for Economic Affairs and Policy Exchange, two of the most opaque right-wing ‘think tanks’ in the UK.
Both have been linked to being funded by oil companies. The ironies here are weapons grade! In 2018 a Greenpeace investigation linked the IEA to British Petroleum (BP)! In 2022 it was revealed that Policy Exchange is partially funded by ExxonMobil! Next is where we hit ‘through the looking glass’ territory. The Open Democracy investigation revealed that the new controversial anti-protest law may have originated in a briefing from Policy Exchange! Bradbrook is espousing the views of the very people who may have helped the Government impose the law she’s spent so much of her time protesting against and claims to be a victim of!
That a co-founder of Extinction Rebellion is circulating this travesty of the truth and actively promoting the views of climate-change denying, fossil-fuel funded ‘think tanks’ is beyond belief. Or is it? I’ve long harbored suspicions that XR is a front for attempts to discredit and sideline the green movement by showing them up as a bunch of fools who do more harm than good. Lets face it, many of their actions have had real greens holding their head in their hands. Gluing yourselves to green electric public transport to disrupt the lives of ordinary people is a bizarre way to get people ‘on side’. Many of their actions seem to be intent on alienating ordinary people and provide the right-wing media with a massive stick to beat the environmental lobby with. Is this by accident, or design? The fact the likes of Braybrook are peddling fossil fuel lobbyists anti rail propaganda looks less like stunning ignorance of who these lobbyists are and more like a deliberate attempt to further their agendas.
Bradbrook claims to be a ‘trained scientist’. But if this is the quality of her research…
Still, I’m sure Bradbrook spends even more of her time campaigning and Tweeting about the 1000s of miles of new roads the Tories are planning to build, doesn’t she? Oh, wait. @CanburyLiberal did a search on Twitter and found this. Nada, zilch, zip, SFA…
I’ve a small favour to ask…
If you enjoy reading this or any of the other blogs I’ve written, please click on an advert or two. You don’t have to buy anything you don’t want to of course – although if you did find something that tickled your fancy that would be fab! – but the revenue from them helps me to cover some of the cost of maintaining this site (which isn’t cheap and comes out of my own pocket). Remember, 99% of the pictures used in my blogs can be purchased as prints from my other website – https://paulbigland.zenfolio.com/
Or – you can now buy me a coffee! https://ko-fi.com/paulbigland68312
Paul Bigland 
Interesting post. As an aside, I remember reading something you wrote a fair while ago about why it was supposedly impossible to upgrade/re-instate the old Grand Central Line like the East/West, Oxford to Cambridge line has been done as opposed to building HS2. I can’t find it, could you please direct me.
Hi James. You can find that blog here. https://paulbigland.blog/2019/08/03/rebuild-the-great-central-instead-of-building-hs2-heres-why-its-utter-nonsense/
Thank you
James. It is not impossible to reinstate the old Great Central Line (not Grand Central), but it would never have been a workable alternative to HS2 and no less costly. As you can’t even get the name right it’s all too clear that you know very little about the line and the route it followed or its current different states. Marylebone to Aylesbury is a very busy commuter route with no spare capacity, the route turns north east at Rugby and goes nowhere near Birmingham, in both Leicester and Nottingham the original route is heavily developed, the latter actually part of the tram network (part of which was in the laughable Network North document which the Government clearly didn’t know had already been built), much of the remainder of the old route is now basically a linear wood after 50 plus years so far more trees lost than HS2 by some margin and so the list of issues goes on. The current East West Rail route from Bicester to Calvert was an operational railway until a few years ago, the section on to Bletchley was mothballed 20 odd years ago but was still extant so whilst overgrown was nothing like the old Great Central. The section to Bedford is still an operational railway. From Bedford to Cambridge is planned as a new route and thus it is attracting the same sort of wailing nimby’s as HS2. So the Great Central is a fantasy project as an alternative to HS2 and East West Rail is not a good comparison.
Phil, thank you for correcting (somewhat rudely, but anyway) my naming of the railway. It was shut before I was born! I was asking the original question as I was curious. I am no expert on the rail network old and new that is true, however I do know a little bit about the old Grand Central and HS2 as both went/will go through my farm. I have read both Paul’s and your’s explanations and what you both write makes sense up to a point. All I would say is that most people that post on here are very pro-HS2 which is fine, I know what I think – I hate it and read what others say as I’m interested to get the counter argument. HS2 is not going to do what you, Paul and all the other pro-HS2 people wanted it to do as it’s been cut off at the knees, if a different way had been found at the outset which would have worked and been cheap enough to actually do then something useful might have got built. If you all say it won’t have worked then fine but HS2 now won’t work either so the railway system is surely no better off?
And yet HS2 even with just the 140 miles of Phase 1 does work, solving big issues on the WCML south and on the Birmingham loop, so more than worth having in its own right. HS2 trains will still head north from Handsacre using the existing network, HS2 is not isolated. The irony of the recent government decision is whilst it delays the inevitable north of Handsacre it actually makes the inevitable even more inevitable down the road. As to “rudely”, I don’t think so in my case, but you might want to read back some of your previous comments that seem to be just trying to bait Paul.
If it does what you say that’s great, there’s some good to come from it all, as I say I know very little about the rail network. Fair point about baiting Paul! He’s good at dishing it out, he’s got to expect a bit back occasionally….
James. Problem is almost all Anti’s very quickly showcase a lack of knowledge regarding the rail network, yet they continue to push mythology that has been shown to be mythology. But then most Anti’s are simply nimby’s who wouldn’t be the slightest interested if the project was being built elsewhere. Paul is certainly direct, but I’ve never seen him baiting anyone he simply puts facts on the table.