Author Archives: Paul Bigland

The anti Hs2 mob plumb a new moral low to exploit steelworkers

19 Monday Oct 2015

Posted by in Anti Hs2 mob, Hs2, Hs2aa, Rail Investment, UK steel industry

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I thought the anti Hs2 campaign couldn’t find any more of the barrel-bottom to scrape but their cynical attempts to exploit the steelworkers has proved me wrong.

One might have thought a campaign to stop the biggest civil engineering and railway construction project in the UK and possibly Europe would have the integrity, morality and PR nous to steer clear from trying to link stopping Hs2 with saving UK steelworkers jobs – but this is the anti Hs2 mob we’re talking about. Morality & integrity went out of the window years ago…

First out of the traps was the main Chiltern Nimby group, Hs2aa with a tweet of such breathtaking stupidity it spawned this blog.

Obviously, they’re so ‘concerned’ about the UK steel industry they didn’t even realise Redcar isn’t the country’s last steelworks.

We’ve had a number of people jump on the bandwagon since then. Here’s a sample of some of their tweets.

DR Kate

bullivant

DD steel

So, what do a Bucks Doctor, A Devon Reiki Master and a Camden ‘activist’ have in common? Well, you can bet your bottom dollar it’s not the welfare & jobs of UK steelworkers. If they really were so bothered about steelworkers they’d be campaigning FOR Hs2 to be built and for the steel to do it to be produced in the UK – but hell will freeze over before they do that.

Their level of intellectual & moral bankruptcy says an awful lot about the anti Hs2 campaign – as does their efforts to defend their cynical exploitation of others misfortunes for personal or political reasons.

The sooner their increasingly unpleasant campaign is put out of its misery, the better.

More doom & gloom for the anti Hs2 mob…

17 Saturday Oct 2015

Posted by in Anti Hs2 mob, Hs2, Hs2aa

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Now the party conference season is over I thought it would be a good time to take a look at the anti Hs2 campaign to see if they’ve made any headway after touting themselves around the various conference venues. StopHs2 made some daft claims about how ‘busy’ their stalls got which was contradicted by people tweeting pictures like this.

stophs2 stand

So, let’s see if any of their claims are backed up by any statistics. Of course, the answer is – no. Their social media campaign’s still a disaster. Take a look.

stop hs2 scores 17 oct 15We now have eight months worth of figures to analyse which show that – not only is their campaign failing to reach people, in some cases it’s still going backwards. The usual caveat applies – not all followers are supporters, many are there just to keep an eye on them. Here’s a breakdown that shows how many more people each of them have reached in 8 months.

scores 2There’s a wonderful irony in the fact that the most successful, Deanne Dukhan has pretty much abandoned tweeting about Hs2 & moved on to other things. This isn’t much of a surprise. Deanne was Campaign Director of the woefully inept AGAHST (Action Groups Against HS2) which ceased to exist. You can find their abandoned website here. I’m still keeping her in to provide a useful contrast.

To say these numbers are woeful is an understatement. Look at Stophs2. After eight months they’ve only reached another 337 people on Twitter and 281 on Facebook. The numbers show there’s been absolutely no improvement after the party conferences – which have proved to be a waste of both their time & dwindling resources.

The Facebook stats are of particular interest as it’s Facebook that has by far the biggest audience with 30.3 million users in the UK compared to Twitters 13.8 million.

Away from social media the news is even worse. Bucks County Council leader Martin Tett has effectively admitted the 51M campaign is dead and buried. With the earlier demise of AGAHST this leaves just StopHs2 and Hs2aa and neither of them are getting anywhere. One can only speculate how long their campaign can survive like this.

Martin Tett finally buries 51M & their Hs2 ‘alternative’.

14 Wednesday Oct 2015

Posted by in 51M, Anti Hs2 mob, Martin Tett

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The past couple of days has seen Bucks Country Council leader Martin Tett giving evidence to the Hs2 Hybrid Bill Committee. What the evidence has shown is that he’s finally killed off the unsuccessful & financially wasteful 51M consortia of Councils and their equally unsuccessful ‘alternative’ to Hs2. To be honest, it was a mercy killing. 51M have effectively been on life support ever since the Hs2 Hybrid Bill passed second reading with a stonking 411 majority. Here’s their Facebook page which hasn’t been updated since June 2011. Tett and Bucks CC were the power behind the 51M throne & their major funder. How much this has cost local taxpayers was documented in a great bit of investigative journalism by Jon Harvey, a Labour Councillor in Bucks.

What’s also gone unnoticed by those opposing Hs2 is that Tett has inadvertently strengthened the case for building Hs2 with his evidence on building new homes in the area surrounding Milton Keynes and Bletchley.

You can read a newspaper summary of his evidence in the Bucks Herald

The article says that 31,000 new homes are planned to be built in Bucks and “these include building an extension to Milton Keynes and Bletchley, creating a new settlement of 4,000 homes – or both”.

This means that many of the people would benefit from the capacity Hs2 releases on the West Coast Main Line (WCML). Network Rail have previously pointed out how Milton Keynes is an important beneficiary.

Of course other stations on the WCML in Bucks also benefit from the capacity released by Hs2. You can find more details in this Network Rail document.

This is yet another big setback for the anti Hs2 campaign as it’s clear concerted opposition to Hs2 from Councils has collapsed. Even Tett is (late in the day) trying to make the most of things. This is leaving the anti Hs2 campaign increasingly isolated & irrelevant. Of the four groups leading the campaign against Hs2 (51M, AGAHST, Stophs2 & Hs2aa) only two are left. How long before the next one folds?

The Bow Groups ‘fresh thinking’ is anything but.

12 Monday Oct 2015

Posted by in Anti Hs2 mob, Hs2, Hs2 Bow Group, Railways, Transport

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The Conservative Bow group are currently touting a ‘new’ report which claims we shouldn’t be building Hs2 but reopening old lines instead. The problem is, this report is neither new (it came out in August) or the ‘fresh thinking’ the group use as their slogan.

The report seems to have only one function which is to say “anything but Hs2”. The reports main premise is that whilst the railways clearly need new capacity, this can be provided by reopening old railway lines. How? They never say. Instead, they quote a few examples of lines that have reopened (the Borders railway being one) or lines that they suggest could (BML2). What they fail to deal with is what happens to trains from these lines when they rejoin existing routes. For example. New platforms had to be provided at Edinburgh Waverley to allow the Borders railway to use the station. Edinburgh had old platforms to allow this to happen. Most stations don’t. So, what do you do then? The Bow group have no idea.

The report also ignores the recent fall in performance & punctuality that has been linked to an increasingly crowded network. Put simply, the railways are that busy with extra trains there’s little room for the timetable to recover during times of disruption. The Bow groups ‘solution’ would be to make this worse.

Here’s the group talking about the capacity question.

bow group

How, exactly, can this be achieved “through the use of existing lines”? The Bow group don’t even attempt to justify this claim. There’s no explanation at all on how this can (supposedly) be done which makes this report worse than useless. It’s all very well making such assertions but when you can’t even justify them – what’s the point? The obvious question – how would running more trains in/out of our existing termini relieve congestion – is completely ignored. You might as well claim Heathrow doesn’t need a 3rd runway because planes can take new and different routes to get there! The best the group can do is say “the logistics of merging the flow of trains from a re-opened line into existing timetables is a large job in itself.”

So what’s their answer to this revelation? They don’t have one. That’s hardly surprising when you look at the references for this report. The group haven’t talked to anyone who understands how the railways work. Instead, they quote from the likes of the IEA and articles in the Daily Mail rather than Network Rail, timetable planners or signal engineers.

Clearly, the only point to this report is to try & cast doubt on Hs2, not to seriously address the issues of capacity & congestion on the UK’s railways. If this muddy mélange of sources and assertions without answers is “fresh thinking” then we really are in trouble.

The anti Hs2 mob parade their bigotry

11 Sunday Oct 2015

Posted by in Anti Hs2 mob, Bigotry, Hs2, Islamophobia, UKIP

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There’s always been a deeply unpleasant side to the anti Hs2 campaign. It’s not just their willingness to lie and deceive, it’s the darker side. This manifests itself in their xenophobic & racist tendencies and willingness to use threats & intimidation. A good example of their bigotry has surfaced on the Facebook page of ‘Yorkshire doesn’t buy Hs2’

hs2

This unpleasant little group group appears to be run by UKIP supporters. Of course UKIP have been heavily involved with the StopHs2 campaign as (cynically) they saw it as a way of snatching votes. UKIP dropped its 2010 manifesto pledge to build three high-speed rail lines as they’d been conned by the anti Hs2 campaign into believing there was mass opposition to Hs2 & so lots of votes to harvest by opposing Hs2. Of course, the reality was very different & UKIP failed to gain a single seat in any area that Hs2 will pass through. Despite the general election humiliation, it’s clear UKIP & the StopHs2 campaign are still working together through groups like this. Not that it’s doing them much good, this Yorkshire group only has around 250 followers. Truth be told, there’s bugger all opposition to Hs2 in Yorkshire. There’s only a couple of anti ‘action’ groups in the county, neither of which are very active.

Rather typically, when I drew attention to this bigoted nonsense there was a deafening silence from anti Hs2 campaigners. Not a single one condemned it. Instead, one of the usual suspects (fond of resorting to bigotry himself) tried to accuse me of faking it, which is rather stupid when the post is still displayed on this groups Facebook page for all to see!

DD bigotry

I’ll leave you to draw your own conclusions about what this says about the anti Hs2 campaign, its members and their tactics…

Normal service will be resumed as soon as possible…

08 Thursday Oct 2015

Posted by in Work

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My apologies for the lack of blogs recently. This has been due to a couple of factors. One was my hectic schedule at the excellent ACoRP awards last week & the volume of pictures it generated. The other was far less enjoyable: My laptop gave up the ghost.

I’d been meaning to upgrade it for some time but never had the downtime where I could do it. Sadly, a software update caused major problems that it didn’t recover from. The bugger is – this happened just before a data backup…

The poorly machine was on a service contract so it’s being looked after & refurbished by PCWorld. This left me with Plan B – an older Sony Vaio which has kept me going (ish) for the past week. Then, yesterday – this arrived.

20151007_091049

I have to say I’m rather impressed with the Dell XPS13 – although it’s been a slog to upload all the software & get it photography ready & able to take on the road. This has left me little time for blogging as I’ve also got a business to keep running. After all, something had to take a back seat…

Now I’m almost there – so expect blogs to start appearing again.

Torquay here we come!

30 Wednesday Sep 2015

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I’m up at this ungodly hour as I’m heading down to Torquay for the ACoRP community rail awards which are being held in the resort tomorrow.

Right now Dawn, Hazel & I are heading across the damp and foggy Pennines to Manchester on the first leg of the trip. This time of morning it’s actually possible to get a seat on a Trans-Pennine train from Huddersfield, which is a rare luxury nowadays. For the next leg of the trip we’ll be in the hands of Cross-country. This time of day they run a train from Manchester direct to Torquay which will become our mobile office for the next few hours.

Tonight we’ve got a networking event to look forward which has been organised by GWR, so expect one or two pictures of the evening to appear later…

Tomorrow’s ACoRP awards will showcase some of the fantastic work community rail volunteers, organisations & TOCs are doing around the country. I’ll post links to the winners on Friday.

Crazy anti Hs2 campaigner of the week: No 14

29 Tuesday Sep 2015

Posted by in Anti Hs2 mob, Crazy anti Hs2 campaigner of the week, Hs2aa

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Despite the fact it’s only Tuesday there seems little chance anyone will come out with anything as supremely idiotic as the Hs2 Action Alliance have managed to do with this tweet!

Hs2aa hypocrisy

Devoid of all fact & knowledge of the steel industry, it’s a superb example of the intellectual bankruptcy of the anti Hs2 campaign.

The Thai owned Redcar plant is our last steelworks? That will come as a shock to Indian owned Tata Steel and their workers who are busy making steel at Scunthorpe in North Lincolnshire and Port Talbot in South Wales. Not to mention their plants in Tostre, Llanwern, Shotton, Rotherham, Stocksbridge, Motherwell and Teeside…

Then again, what do a few privileged Chiltern Nimbys (because that’s who Hs2aa are) know about the steel industry? Or anywhere outside their own little bubble in Bucks for that matter.

DG210173.Stressing rail. Watford Junction. 6.4.15crop

Apparently, according to what everyone believes these brand new steel rails being installed at Watford Junction were NOT made by TATA steel at Scunthorpe in Lincolnshire (where all UK steel rails are made) because according the HS2AA the plant doesn’t exist!

Roping in Redcar to their campaign to Stophs2 is breathtakingly hypocritical of them as one of the reasons the plant is being mothballed is a lack of orders for the steel it produces. A situation that could be vastly improved when the construction of Hs2 begins as the project will be using enormous quantities of steel products. If you really want to help UK steel producers, the last thing you want to do is cancel the largest construction project in the UK & Europe.

Their other claim that “Osborne offers £11bn to China” is equally idiotic & dishonest. China hasn’t been offered anything more than the opportunity to bid for Hs2 contracts – just like everyone else. There’s no guarantees the Chinese will even bid – never mind win. There’s also the inconvenient fact EU rules forbid what Hs2aa claim . But hey, why let the facts get in the way of a bit of good old fashioned scaremongering eh?

What this rubbish shows is how desperate anti Hs2 campaigners have become. All pretense of reasoned argument has been dropped in a last ditch attempt to lash out at a project they know they can’t stop. Still, they will provide one useful lesson for future campaigners. Don’t run a media campaign that’s based on bullshit.

2023 Update.

Hardly unexpected, but it wasn’t the British steel industry that collapsed it was Chiltern Nimby group HS2aa! This was one of their last tweets as the group gave up completely in June 2016. Meanwhile, UK steel plants and factories around the country have been kept busy providing materials used in the construction of HS2 which began in earnest in 2020.

As for the Chinese building HS2, that was bullshit too. The Chinese have no involvement in any HS2 construction contracts. They are one of several bidders for a (£300m) contract for the overhead wire installation on HS2 phase 1 but that contract has yet to be awarded.

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Faking support was never going to Stop Hs2…

27 Sunday Sep 2015

Posted by in Anti Hs2 mob, Peter Jones

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One of the lessons the anti Hs2 campaign is learning the hard way is that faking your levels of support won’t help you, but it will come back to bite you on the arse. Hs2 antis have lied to themselves (and the public) for years by fiddling clickbait newspaper polls to pretend there’s greater opposition to Hs2 than there is. Another favourite method is to pack your Twitter account with fake followers – either by buying followers or following dubious accounts.

Here’s a great example. The pious & libelous Peter Jones of the Pan Camden Alliance loves to lecture me about pictures of “the laydees” as he calls them because I made a fool of their campaign by taking this shot of an off-message anti Hs2 protester outside Parliament.

V sign

Of course, what Jones neglects to mention is some of the unsavoury & even downright pornographic accounts he has in his Twitter followers list! For example…

DD followers

Then there’s…

dd followers 2

Obviously, both these young ‘laydees’ are deeply concerned about Hs2 and are hanging on Jones’s every word. After all, why else would they follow him? Here’s some more of his followers.

DD followrs 3

Supposedly, opposition to Hs2 is so international even Brazilians want to stop it! You can find more of Jones’s imaginary friends and opposers of Hs2 by perusing his Twitter account.

If anyone could be bothered to analyse all of Jones’s followers I’d bet they’ll find there’s only a small percentage who could have any real influence on the Hs2 debate which is why he’s wasting his (& everyone else’s) time. It’s the same with most antis accounts. They’re very incestuous. They all follow each other in order to boost their follower count. Talking about preaching to the converted…

Of course this laughable hypocrisy and ridiculous attempt to pretend the anti Hs2 campaign’s bigger then it is has backfired on them. It’s allowed them to fool themselves into thinking they’re actually doing something meaningful when, in reality, all they’re doing is wasting their time ranting into space – or at each other. The lesson they’re teaching is too late to save their campaign, but it can serve as a valuable lesson to other campaigns in the future. Cheats never prosper.

Where’s the anti Hs2 mobs media bounce?

26 Saturday Sep 2015

Posted by in Anti Hs2 mob, Hs2

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Hs2 has had a huge amount of media coverage in the past couple of days thanks to George Osborne’s trip to China and him firing the starting pistol on the bidding process for nearly £12bn’s worth of contracts.

Needless to say, anti Hs2 campaigners have had the chance to put their (skewed) side of the story too, especially on the BBC, which gives pressure groups undue prominence for the sake of ‘balance’ without ever explaining just what a minority view they are.

In light of all this publicity I thought is would be interesting to see if the anti Hs2 campaign had been revitalised on social media. The answer (surprise surprise) is – No.

Here’s a look at the ‘scores on the doors’ before the announcement with those for today. The first set is Twitter followers, the second Facebook followers

scores

Need I say more?

That said, when you look at the StopHs2 Facebook page you can see why people steer clear. David Icke would feel very at home here…