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Category Archives: Anti Hs2 mob

StopHs2 and ‘don’t mention the war’…

20 Saturday Jul 2019

Posted by Paul Bigland in Anti Hs2 mob, Hs2, Politics

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Anti Hs2 mob, Hs2, Politics

You have to laugh! StopHs2, the only ‘group’ left opposing Hs2 have come up with a cunning wheeze to explain the fact that the Hs2 Phase 2a hybrid bill sailed through Parliament with a majority of 246 last week. Their plan? Don’t even mention that it ever took place – just ignore the fact! So, there’s no mention of it on their website, or their Facebook, or in tweets. It’s as if it never happened!

war

You can understand why it’s an embarrassment to them as it underlines their complete irrelevance nowadays and the fact that what little political support they had has collapsed. I blogged about the result here.

How long Stophs2 are going to maintain this pretence is a good question. It’s certainly made a mockery of their claim that they’re ‘the’ place to go to, to learn about Hs2! But it is very funny! I’s yet more signs of the irrelevance of Stophs2 nowadays. Unlike the Phase 1 petitions, they weren’t even involved in the Phase 2a process at any level. No-one invited them along, so they rarely mentioned it. But then they’ve always been a campaign (and I use that term in its loosest sense) that’s been firmly based on Phase 1 of Hs2. Mind you, as their Chair, Penny Gaines actually lives in Bournemouth nowadays (no, really!) they’re even more isolated. Of course, quite what Penny chairs is open to question, as Stophs2 is little more than her and Kenilworth based Joe Rukin!

Meanwhile, some lone soul has decided to arrange another anti Hs2 demonstration in London via Facebook and Twitter! If it ever happens (which is extremely doubtful) It’s meant to take place on the 7th September.

woolf

Unsurprisingly, Hemel Hempstead based Woolf is also a Brexit fanatic. Oh, I wouldn’t bother with his Facebook page either as there’s little of interest, unless you like looking at someone posting lots of ‘selfies’ all about bodybuilding! His attitude to people on Twitter (where he uses the appellation @drophs2) doesn’t exactly inspire much confidence in his rhetorical or intellectual capacities either…

Drop hs2

You have to wonder. There’s 6.5 million people living on the route of Hs2, yet there’s never been a credible anti Hs2 campaign. The best they came up with was the Hs2 Action Alliance – which at least had some educated people involved, even if they were only Chiltern Nimbys! Now it’s reduced to the likes of Rukin and Gaines, a couple of dozen ‘Walter Mitty’ types who still think ranting on Twitter will stop Hs2, few self publicists like young Woolf plus a handful of misguided Greens who can’t see further than the ends of their noses. Hardly what you’d call a ‘winning team’ is it? I popped in to have a look at the progress of StopHs2’s latest petition on the Government website this morning. It’s taken them 10 days to get another hundred signatures!

petition. 20 jul

The petition doesn’t stand a hope in hell as to be on target they should have had 58,000 by now. It now needs over 800 every single day until October! I see no-one in Camden has signed it for almost 6 weeks now, leaving it stuck on a miserable 247.

I suspect StopHs2 are in for even more disappointment when (as is looking increasingly likely) the blond buffoon Boris Johnson becomes Prime Minister. The chances of Johnson cancelling HS2 are minimal (see link). They’ve previously been sold a pup by another Brexiter, Jacob Rees Mogg, who’s another one who says one thing and then does another. Having been quoted saying he’d cancel Hs2 he then goes and votes for it – several times in fact! You can read about that here. Their poster boys do have a habit of letting them down! I await Boris Johnson’s premiership with interest!

 

 

Another awful day for the Stop Hs2 ‘campaign’.

16 Tuesday Jul 2019

Posted by Paul Bigland in Anti Hs2 mob, Hs2, Politics, Railways, StopHs2

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Anti Hs2 mob, Hs2, Politics, Railways, StopHs2

Yesterday, the High Speed Rail (West Midlands – Crewe) Bill had its 3rd reading in Parliament after completing the petitioning process. In a surprise to absolutely no-one except a few die-hard anti Hs2 people, it sailed through with a majority of 263 to 17. The 17 who voted against it were the usual rag-bag of MPs who’ve always opposed Hs2. This included disgraced former Labour MP Kelvin Hopkins (who had the whip withdrawn in 2017 after allegations of sexual misconduct and who is still ‘under investigation’) and another of his Brexit supporting ‘chums’, mad Kate Hoey MP, plus Helen Jones, the MP for Warrington North and the other pro-Brexit Labour dinosaur – Dennis Skinner. Also on the list were two Plaid Cymru MPs and 11 Conservatives.  Yet again the Tory list featured the same old names. Bone, Fabricant, Cash, Gillan, Bridgen and McVey, plus 5 others. Completely outnumbering them were a cross party selection of 210 Tories, 45 Labour, 6 DUP and 2 Liberal Democrats.

To say it was a walkover would be an understatement! You can find the Hansard record of the debate here. Needless to say, the decision was welcomed by a wide range of political, business and transport groups up and down the country. But what of the anti Hs2 camp? Well, it’s a bit like saying “Don’t mention the war”! There’s been a news black-out from StopHS2, which has been hilarious! There’s no mention of the result on their website, Facebook page or Twitter account. Even more amusing, StopHS2 ‘Chair’, Penny Gaines was live tweeting all the way through the debate. In her usual style, Gaines tried to spin and hype anything negative said about Hs2 by the tiny number of detractors, whilst studiously ignoring anything said by its supporters. Producing over 100 Tweets in that time for her tiny band of 798 followers from her home in Bournemouth (yes, Bournemouth!) she kept up a stream of spin right up to the moment the vote was taken, as you can see here;

gaines

Then? Nothing. Absolutely nothing – complete radio silence in fact. She ran away and left people hanging. Well, she would have if there’d been many listening, the maximum she got was 10 retweets! As far as her Twitter thread goes it died just as soon as the result of vote was announced! It’s hilarious! Talk about denial!

So, that’s it folks, the Hs2 Phase 2a bill has passed with a massive majority and now goes on to the Lords, where it’ll also pass with a huge majority as there’s no more opposition to Hs2 there than there is in the Commons! In the meantime, the future of some of the MPs who voted against the bill is ‘interesting’ to say the least! Hoey has announced she’s standing down at the next election – jumping before her solidly Remain constituency deselect her. Hopkins future looks in doubt too. Plus a few of the other Brexit fundamentalists like Gillan & Fabricant could be in for a rough ride if/when Brexit blows up in the faces because of the impossibility of making Unicorns real. The same for Skinner when his constituents wake up to the real damage Brexit will cause. In fact, the correlation between opposition to Hs2 and support for Brexit is unmistakeable, although some prominent Brexiters – including one who previously pulled the wool over Hs2 antis eyes before – Jacob Rees-Mogg, who voted FOR the bill!

It’s only a question of time now before StopHS2 join all the other defunct anti Hs2 groups as historical footnotes – and failures.

 

 

StopHs2, remember them?

14 Sunday Jul 2019

Posted by Paul Bigland in Anti Hs2 mob, Hs2, Politics, Railways, StopHs2

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Anti Hs2 mob, Hs2, Politics, Railways, StopHs2

I’ve not blogged about Hs2 or what passes for a campaign against it for a while now, mainly because there’s nothing going on! Oh, there’s still a tiny bunch of Nimbys (nor more than a couple of dozen regulars) banging on about Hs2 on Twitter, but in the real worlds there’s nothing. In an effort to still appear relevant, StopHs2’s Joe Rukin turned up outside a couple of Tory party leadership hustings but he got nowhere near either of the events in Carlisle of Nottingham. Instead he filmed himself rambling on (as he does) about nothing really relevant to anything. Neither video got more than a 2,000 views, so it was all pretty pointless, as usual. If you like watching paint dry, you can find one of the video’s here.

Meanwhile, Rukin’s latest petition on the Government website has bombed. Each one he starts performs worse than the last one. This one’s struggling to get 19,000 signatures. To be in with a chance it needed to have over 53,500 signatures at this stage of the game. When you look at the constituency results, they’re awful. Camden is supposedly a StopHs2 stronghold as it contains Euston, yet only 247 in Camden have signed, and the last one of those was 5 weeks ago! Truth is, the anti Hs2 campaign in Camden has collapsed as most of those genuinely affected have been bought out by Hs2 or have moved on. It’s the same in many other areas. Let’s take the Chesham and Amersham constituency of arch Hs2 anti Cheryl Gillan MP as an example. This has always been ‘the’ anti Hs2 stronghold, so you’d expect tens of thousands of signatures, wouldn’t you? Here’s the reality, I took this screen-grab a few minutes ago.

petition. 14 jul

A grand total of 1608 signatures, not even 2% of her constituents! Some ‘stronghold’! And this is their best result. Notice also that the only constituencies with anything more than a a handful of signatures are those on the Hs2 route? So much for claims that Hs2 antis aren’t really Nimbys!

Another sign of the collapse of their campaign is the results from the only London constituency that registers, Ruislip, Northwood and Pinner. In the last petition they managed 1555 signatures, or 1.59% of constituents. How many have they got so far this time? Just 389 or 0.399%!

Pinner

Another interesting feature of the latest petition is the way nowhere on the Phase 2b route to Leeds even registers. The Manchester leg doesn’t even register at all. On the Phase 2a route to Crewe the only one that appears is Stone (with just 287 signatures, 0.335%). The petition’s closing date is 29th October. When it finally staggers to a close I’ll crunch the constituency numbers and compare them with the last two petitions just so we can map the decline. To put their numbers in perspective, remember that Hs2 passes through 63 constituencies that (between them) contain a total of 6.53 million people!

All the evidence points to the fact their campaign’s going backwards, not forwards. More and more folk affected by Hs2 have been bought out and no longer care about the campaign to stop Hs2 and that process continues across all phases.

So, where do they go from here? Nowhere. The grassroots Stophs2 campaign’s effectively dead. Their only hope is that the cavalry (in the shape of a new Tory leader) will ride to their rescue. But, as I’ve blogged previously, that isn’t going to happen. It’s all over bar the moaning now as Hs2 ramps up to the major construction phase later this year. No doubt we’ll still see the usual suspects wittering on about Hs2 on social media for a while yet, and there’s no sign of Joe Rukin being employable, so expect a few more pointless videos as he tries to keep himself in the public eye. But as for any effective campaign, the show is well and truly over!

 

HS2 antis get stitched up by Boris Johnson!

17 Monday Jun 2019

Posted by Paul Bigland in Anti Hs2 mob, Boris Johnson MP, Hs2, Politics, Railways

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Boris Johnson, Hs2, Politics, Railways

I can’t help laughing, I really can’t! Those of us who’ve observed the formerly occasional London Mayor Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson for years have known that you can’t trust him as far as you can throw him. HS2 antis however, have always been good at grasping any straw. So much so they could have thatched the dome of the O2 arena with them by now.

Today, the predictable has happened. The Birmingham Mail has carried an exclusive story from the Tory leadership hustings in Birmingham. Written by Johnathan Walker, the piece reports that Mr Johnson said: “I have already asked provisionally Douglas Oakervee, who was the original chair of Crossrail, to have a look at the business case for HS2 and to think about whether and how we proceed.”

Chair of Crossrail eh? Hang on a minute, Oakervee was ALSO HS2 Ltd Chairman between Apr 2012 – Dec 2013! Does anyone honestly think Oakervee, a man who’s been building major civil engineering projects (including railways) around the world for decades, and who’s seen their transformational impacts, is going to say “HS2? Nah, scrap it”.

Furthermore, Johnson is also quoted as saying “I worry about cancelling a big national project of that scale without anything else to replace it.” Now, given Johnson’s penchant for large infrastructure projects that he can put his not inconsiderable ego – sorry – name to, does anyone seriously think he’s going to cancel HS2?

Even some HS2 antis are beginning to realise that they’re on to a loser as Johnson isn’t the only Tory leadership hopeful to row back from opposition to HS2. I predict further wailing and gnashing of teeth from what’s left of the StopHs2 camp as it’s clear the political support of regional leaders like Birmingham’s Mayor Andy Street (a fellow Tory to Johnson) and Labour Mayors in the North is firmly behind HS2. If he manages to become PM, Johnson’s going to need some good news pretty fast – and cancelling HS2 isn’t it. It might satisfy a tiny bunch of Nimbys and the lobbyists of 55 Tufton St, but the political shit-storm it would unleash in the Midlands and the North (not to mention in London) is the last thing Johnson would need.

UPDATE.

My old friend Alan Marshall has been in touch to remind me of something…

“Despite Boris seemingly (or reportedly) being very anti-HS2, in fact when he was Mayor of London he was very much for it . . . so much so that in 2015 he set up the Old Oak and Park Royal Development Corporation to exploit the opportunities arising from the OOC interchange with the new Crossrail station to be built on the GWML. What’s more, he made himself the first chairman of the OOPRDC”.

No HS2 = no OOPRDC = no 24,000 new homes and no 55,000 jobs…

The ‘brains’ behind HSUK are at it again…

18 Saturday May 2019

Posted by Paul Bigland in Anti Hs2 mob, HS North, Hs2, HSUK

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Hs2, HSNorth, HSUK

Remember that madcap scheme that some retired engineers punted as an alternative to Hs2 called HSUK? They claimed it was a fully costed scheme that was cheaper than HS2 but when you looked at it you realised it was just a lot of pretty lines drawn on a blank sheet of paper rather than overlaid on an OS map – because that would expose how bonkers their claims are! I blogged about their daft plans and a curve in Wakefield a while ago.

Unsurprisingly, the madcap scheme died a deserved death. Only it seems now they’ve revived and rebadged it as “High Speed North” to punt it as an ‘alternative’ to Northern Powerhouse Rail. Here’s one of their tweets from earlier today.

HS North tweet. 18.5.19.

No “major expansion outside of existing boundaries” they say? So what the hell’s that new line with a brand new depot big enough to replace Neville Hill then?  And how on earth do you build new Northern platforms at Leeds, then add a flyover (or whatever it is they’re proposing) to connect it to the existing line to Wakefield without causing massive disruption to existing lines? This is nuts!

Yet again, they use a blank canvas so that anyone unfamiliar with the area can’t see what’s really on the ground. So, let’s have a look at a satellite image, shall we? At the top of the picture just above where Pontefract Lane is labelled sits Neville Hill depot. This lot propose building a brand new line from there Southwards that will plough through all the industrial estates on the way, cross the Pontefract Lane dual-carriageway (somehow) plough through another industrial estate, then cross the two branches of the river Aire before ploughing through another industrial estate to join the existing railway just North of the Pontefract Rd! Oh, and their new depot would almost certainly be built on the site of that massive sewage works South of Pontefract Lane. Care to guess how much compensation that little lot would cost? And that’s without the construction costs! leeds.PNG

Why anyone would take these jokers seriously is beyond me. Oh, notice the giveaway on their map? They forgot to delete the reference to HSUK on their explanation of the reinstatement of the Farnley viaduct!

No wonder they don’t like drawing pretty lines on OS maps!

HS2 news.

18 Saturday May 2019

Posted by Paul Bigland in Anti Hs2 mob, Harvil Rd Hs2 protest, Hs2, Politics, Rail Investment, StopHs2

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Hs2, Politics, Rail Investment, StopHs2

I’ve not had time to blog about HS2 or the doomed stop Hs2 campaign recently as I’ve been too busy and the news has been anything but positive for the antis. Yes, they’ve had two high profile events in the past week, but one of them was an excruciating failure and the other (which wasn’t much better) will make no difference at all.

The first ‘big’ event was the Taxpayers Alliance releasing a ‘report’ into what they claimed were viable alternatives to HS2. Who did they get to launch the report? David Davis MP, formerly the Brexit Minister until he resigned – just as he has from so many positions before! Why on earth they though the man who Dominic Cummings, former Campaign Director of Vote Leave famously described as thick as “thick as mince, lazy as a toad and vain as Narcissus” would add credibility is a mystery! At the launch, Davis described the plans as worked out in “exquisite” detail. His problem? Many of them were worked out on the back of a fag packet! As usual, Davis was just making stuff up. Then again, so were the TPA, so maybe that was his attraction?

Not only were some of the schemes mentioned sketchy to say the least, the TPA had lifted many of them without permission, leaving their original proposers spitting blood! It got worse. The High Speed Rail Industry Leaders put out a waspish press release which pointed out that the TPA couldn’t even add up! Here’s what they said. Feel the burn!

HSRIL statement

Things got even worse for the TPA when it became clear Northern leaders were having none of their nonsense either. Here’s what Henri Murison, director of the Northern Powerhouse Partnership, had to say in the Chronicle!

“Northern business and civic leaders all agree we need HS2, Northern Powerhouse Rail and more investment in key road and mass transit schemes for city regions.

Why should hard pressed taxpayers in the North, who pay double the amount of road tax and fuel duty than those living in London, be forced to make a choice between them after decades of underinvestment here?

This half-baked plan is an embarrassment to the Tax Payers Alliance because the sums don’t add up.” He added: “Northerners are not going to stand for cancelling HS2 in order to pay for a list of schemes decided by a bunch of Westminster bubble types trying to impress Tory leadership candidates”.

Another burn delivered!

Of course, it’s no co-incidence that most of the Tory opposition to Hs2 comes from the same Brexity right-wing fringe that David Davis et al inhabit. Much of it is centred on the address of those secretive lobby groups the TPA and IEA: 55 Tufton St.

The next embarrassment came with the release of the House of Lords Economic Committee report into Hs2. It was a wishy-washy, piss-poor bit of work that had clearly decided what it was going to say before they’d even bothered taking evidence. They tried to cast doubts on Hs2, mostly by trotting out the same old stuff the last Lords Committee had (see this earlier blog). Their tactic of trying to play off Northern rail investment against Hs2 is straight out of the IEA/TPA playbook. But that’s hardly surprising as the collusion is obvious, as is the prominence of Brexiters on the Ctte, like Lord Lamont and the Chair of the Committee, Lord Forsyth of Drumlean.

The morning the report was published, Alistair Darling (aka Lord Darling of Roulanish)was trotted out to on the TV to say that more investment is needed in the North – but Hs2 isn’t it. As usual he was given a free ride by the media, none of whom seemed to know his history. I’ll sum it up thus “Man who cancelled major investment in the North calls for major investment in the North”. Hypocritical, no? As Labour Transport Minister and later Chancellor of the Exchequer Darling created the very problem he was complaining about. It was he who pulled money from the Liverpool and Leeds tram schemes at the last moment (Liverpool had even gone out and bought the tramway rails in readiness!). He also stopped the ‘big bang’ expansion of the Manchester tram network. As Transport Minister he oversaw electrification of a piddling 9 miles of UK railway, the section from Crewe to Kidsgrove, and that was it.

The report has not gone down well. The British Chambers of Commerce were less than impressed. Their spokesman said this:

BCC

Worse was to come as others digested the report. Nottingham MP and Chair of the Transport Select Committee spotted a faux-pas straight away, tweeting this;

greenwood

Both Transport for West Midlands (TfWM) and the West Midlands Rail Executive (WMRE) piled in too, issuing this well informed and highly critical statement. The Nottingham Post followed up on Lilian’s point, observing that the Lords hadn’t mentioned Toton once! The absence of mentions of the Midlands is hardly surprising when you think about it. The region gets in the way of the Lords trying to play the Northern narrative. I’ve little doubt that this report will be as unsuccessful at stopping Hs2 as the last one, which it’s destined to sit alongside on the Lords library shelves, gathering dust.

On Thursday afternoon I listened to Labour’s Shadow Transport Minister make his keynote speech at the Railtex trade fair. he made it crystal clear that neither the TPA or Lords had changed the party’s stance on Hs2 and they remained solidly behind the project.

DG323493crop

The week got even worse for stophs2 when the latest YouGov opinion poll came out, as it blew out of the water their oft-repeated claim that the country ‘overwhelmingly’ opposes HS2. They often trot out figures claiming 80-90% of folk don’t want it. Here’s the reality.

YouGov May 2019

Note the figure for London where more folks support than oppose Hs2! This will cause consternation amongst the remaining Camden Nimbys. The reality is that a huge amount of work putting the case for Hs2 is now being made by regional political and business leaders across the country. Add to that the fact the economic impact of 1000s of Hs2 related jobs is being felt and you can start to understand why opinions will shift in favour of Hs2. There’s also a lot more positive publicity around the project and there’s an awful lot more to come. The fact work on the ground has started means that what was seen as a vague concept for so many years is now being seen as something that’s tangible.

There’s two other pieces of bad news for Hs2 antis. The two new petitions they’ve started on the Government website are both bombing. They both close in October but they’ve already run out of steam. The one started by the Bucks Herald has a measly 8521 signatures after a month, whilst the one StopHs2 started has just scraped past the 16,000 mark today. It’s only been going 20 days but its already falling well below the daily average it needs to succeed. It’s doomed.

stophs2 petition

The final piece of bad news for Hs2 antis is that the High Court has extended the scope of the injunction governing the (ineffectual) protests at the Harvil Rd site. This will cramp their style even futher.

 

 

 

 

 

 

A history of stop Hs2 petitions and their failures.

04 Saturday May 2019

Posted by Paul Bigland in Anti Hs2 mob, Hs2, Hs2 petitions, Politics, Railways, StopHs2

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Anti Hs2 mob, Hs2, Hs2 petitions, Politics, Railways

There’s been a real embarrassment of riches recently. We’ve had not one, but three petitions on the Government website about trying to stop Hs2! The first one closed on the 24th April, having received just 16,356 signatures. I’ve not had the time to crunch the numbers on it yet, but the map makes it very obvious where the most signatures came from, and yes – it was from a tiny bunch of Nimbys on the route! It’s easy to trace where phase 1 of HS2 is going on here!

map 1

Just before that petition closed, the Editor of the Bucks Herald started another, which runs until the 17th October (see this blog). After just 16 days it’s already run out of steam and underperforming on its daily target. At the time of writing it’s received just 7,802 signatures. Let’s have a look at what the signature map tells us, shall we?

map 2

My, what a surprise – it’s almost identical to the first! The constituencies Hs2 phase 1 are clearly visible, along with a couple that Phase 2 passes through! So much for the idea those opposed to Hs2 aren’t Nimbys! Now, lets have a look at the very latest petition which was started by Joe Rukin of StopHs2 six days ago. So far it’s not reached ‘peak Nimby’ and it’s been touted by some environmental groups and celebrities like Chris Packham. Now, on that basis you expect it would have far greater coverage, wouldn’t you? Let’s have a look at the map then…

map 3.PNG

Well, well, well, it’s almost identical to the other two! The only major difference is the numbers of constituencies (in grey) where no-one’s signed it! Yet again, the route of Hs2 Phase 1 sticks out like a sore thumb!

Bear in mind that 6.5 million people live in the constituencies that Hs2 passes through. So, if all these people are against the project, why are the numbers of signatures so small? Even the last doomed petition which closed in 2018 didn’t make it to 30,000 signatures (link).

Just for a bit of fun, let’s have a look at the map for the 2018 petition. Can you guess what it’ll look like?

map 6

Well, blow me down with a feather! Spot the route of HS2!

The only question now about the two active petitions is what number they’ll fail at. Rooting through some archives I came across an even earlier petition, started by Rukin back in 2012. That closed on the 4th August after getting a measly 26,262 signatures!

map 5

These petitions do make me laugh, all they ever do is expose the fact the Stop Hs2 ‘campaign’ is (in reality) driven by a tiny bunch of people living close to the route of the line. Despite all their claims about the ‘majority’ of the UK opposing Hs2 they can never get more than a few thousand signatures on a petition, but they never learn…

Oops! Stophs2 did it again…

18 Monday Mar 2019

Posted by Paul Bigland in Anti Hs2 mob, Hs2, Railways, StopHs2

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Anti Hs2 mob, Hs2, Railways, StopHs2

The other week I blogged about the latest doomed attempt to start an anti Hs2 petition on the Government website dedicated to providing them. At the time the petition was being ignored/slipped in under the radar of sole surviving official group, aka Stophs2. It had taken several months to get a measly 1154 signatures, then a couple of regular stophs2 tweeters spotted and pushed it, so finally, on March 14th Stophs2 jumped on the bandwagon and publicised it too.

stophs2 punting petition

Bad move! Now they’ve officially endorsed it I feel I can give it some more attention.

So, how’s it done now if it had reached ten grand on the 14th and it’s now been given the blessing of Stophs2? The answer is – not very well – at all. Here’s today’s ‘scores on the doors’! as at 17:46.

petition. 18.3.19

Wow! Two thousand signatures in 4 days eh? There’s only one slight problem. It needed more than that every single day! Here’s some number crunching. Including today, the petition has 38 days left to run. That means that (from tomorrow) it needs 2,373 every single day to have a hope in hell of hitting the 100,000 target. That’s a figure it’s never, ever hit. If you look through the most popular petitions you see that they get more in a couple of hours than what this needs in a day, which rather exposes the lie that so many people are upset about Hs2!

petitions

It gets worse for Hs2 antis, because these petitions come with a handy little map which shows which constituencies signatures come from. Now, Hs2 antis swear blind that StopHs2 is a truly national campaign and that they’re not ‘really’ Nimbys, oh no! The map blows that claim out of the water. See if you can guess by looking at the concentration of signatures where Hs2 just might run?

nimby map

The biggest number of signatures comes from Buckinghamshire with 1,165. (or 1.15% of all constituents). So, not Nimbys at all!

bucks

Why Hs2 antis still continue with these crazy petitions is a mystery as all they do is cause them harm, but hey ho! Let’s see what the final shambolic total is next month as last time they didn’t even make the 30k mark.

 

StopHs2: Shutting the stable door in Haddenham…

08 Friday Mar 2019

Posted by Paul Bigland in Anti Hs2 mob, Hs2, Politics, The Green Party

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Hs2, Politics, The Green Party

Yesterday there was a local Council election in Haddenham and Stone, a ward on Aylesbury Vale council in Buckinghamshire. The seat had been held by a long-serving Conservative Cllr who had passed away at the age of 82. In yesterday’s election the seat was won by the Green Party’s David Lyons, a well known local Green party member who’d stood before, coming second in 2015. Here’s the result, thanks to the excellent Britain Elects website and Twitter feed

greens

So, with no UKIP or Independent candidates standing and the long-standing Cllr deceased, The Greens won the seat with an impressive 36.5% swing. Picking the bones out of this one would be interesting as it suggests a lot of voters have swapped allegiances for a whole host of reasons. Does anyone seriously believe UKIP voters decided to go Green en-masse?

Here’s a background on the constituency and the players from Britain Elects. It adds some valuable context.

Of course, Hs2 passes through the area and antis are falling over themselves to claim this is a backlash against the project. No doubt some of that is true – especially as preliminary construction work has started. This is no longer a project that was on the drawing-board. Now there’s visible evidence on the ground, which tends to concentrate a few more minds. However, it’s clear that Hs2 isn’t the only issue in the area, as some local Tweeters have pointed out. Housing is also a big issue with 500 new homes due to be built in the area.

halber

As is often the case in Council elections the party that won had put in a lot of effort on the ground and built up a following behind a local man. Add this the demise of a long-standing incumbent and some local issues like Housing and Hs2 and you can see why the Greens have managed to go from 2nd to 1st place. Was Brexit a factor as some people are claiming? Probably, but again, these are local elections which tend to reflect local issues, so you can’t read too much of the national picture into them and get a true image.

So, what does this mean for Hs2? Absolutely nothing.

For a start, these decisions are way above a local Councillors pay grade. Parliament, MPs and the Lords decide on these things, not Councils. This is the political equivalent of a flea trying to bite a rhinoceros. It’s also worth noting that the Council David’s been elected to will be abolished in 2022, so his shelf life isn’t long.

If those opposed to Hs2 had real political muscle they would have shown it long before this. 2010 would have been good, or in any of the local or national elections since. It never happened. Even if Hs2 was the primary consideration (locals suggest it isn’t), this is very much a case of someone shutting the stable door long after the horse has bolted!

Update

I’ve done a bit of digging and found the actual numbers of votes cast, and the results from the May 2015 elections which is the last time the seat came up. You can draw your own conclusions…

haddenham

haddenham 2

Meanwhile, the Independent’s Europe Correspondent, Jon Stone (@joncstone on Twitter) has added this, detailing why some of the Nimbys in the area just might be upset with Hs2!

jon stone

Could we be faced with a delicious irony here? A Green party win because of a few disgruntled golfers? After all, golf courses aren’t exactly on top of the Green Party’s list of favourite things!

I’ve a favour to ask.
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Crunching the StopHs2 social media numbers. February 2019

01 Friday Mar 2019

Posted by Paul Bigland in Anti Hs2 mob, Hs2, Politics, Railways, StopHs2

≈ 3 Comments

Tags

Hs2, Railways, StopHs2

Yep, it’s that time of month again, as February morphs into March I’ve manfully ploughed my way through hours of rubbish to ignore the hyperventilating and crunch the actual numbers. There’s been more mush than usual in February as Hs2 antis were cock a hoop at the fact Hs2 would be featured in Channel 4’s Dispatches. Once again, they hyped it as the ‘smoking gun’ that would finally kill off Hs2! How many times have we heard that now? Allied to Dispatches were efforts by the same small group of right-wing Journo’s associated with the residents of 55 Tufton St to spin as many negative articles as they could in the media. We were (un)reliably informed that Teresa May’s Cabinet couldn’t wait to kill off Hs2 and that it was only a matter of time now. How many times have we heard that one too? Needless to say, February came and went – and so did Liam Halligans lazy and badly researched Dispatches programme (filleted here). Despite all the froth, Hs2’s still here. Informed sources who’ve been talking to members of the Tory party have told me this was always a non-story, that it was posturing by individuals who privately admit there’s no chance of Hs2 being killed off at this late hour. To say that the Cabinet are rather more concerned about an issue beginning with B would be an understatement.

So, what’s all this hoo-ha done for StopHs2 on social media? The answer is – very little. Here’s their Twitter statistics over 2019.

Twitter stats

As you can see, they’ve gained 2.5% more Twitter followers this month. 166 in total. The irony of this is that’s more than the total number of people who’ve retweeted any of their nonsense. The largest amount of retweets they’ve had all month has been 122, which is just 1.8% of all their followers! Not exactly Twitterstorm material, is it? Their average is a paltry 23.1, which is a miserable 0.3%! When you consider 6,6 million people live in the 63 constituencies Hs2 passes through, 6650 followers is pathetic. It’s 0.10%! Whichever way you cut these numbers, they’re tiny – and this is after 9 years!

Wading through StopHs2s twitter timeline one thing becomes obvious. How mind-numbingly banal most of the stuff is. StopHs2 spend most of their time tweeting links to stories in newspapers or from other media outlets. In fact, anything they can find that’s critical of Hs2, or the railways. What they don’t do is Tweet news of their ‘campaign’ because there isn’t any! Rukin wasn’t even interviewed for Dispatches, he spends most of this time throwing around childish insults on Twitter. The only instance of anything resembling a grassroots event happened yesterday when a few hundred people turned up to protest at an Hs2 event in Calvert Green (Bucks) and that’s it. This isn’t the stuff of a campaign going anywhere other then into the history books as a grand failure. A quick look through StopHs2’s followers list soon shows the problem. Many of their followers gave up years ago, like this pair.

dead acc. 2013

dead anti acc. 2017

This problem hasn’t escaped the attention of some of the Right-Wing backers of their campaign as an increasing number of pro Brexit Trolls and bots have been reprogrammed over the past month to include anti Hs2 tweets – as I’ve blogged about here.

Right, now let’s have a look at Facebook.

FB hs2

For some reason Facebook stats on the number of followers isn’t available right now. As you can see, activity’s increased since January thanks to Dispatches, but the numbers (bearing in mind the 6.6m living on the route) are appalling. There’s something else too. Of the 49 posts made by StopHs2 all but the last two were nothing more than links to media articles. There were no notices of forthcoming events from ‘action’ groups like meetings etc. Nothing that would reflect a campaign that’s actually going anywhere. Like Twitter, it’s always the same handful of names posting comments, many of which are either completely bonkers or pure bluster, like these…

fb nutter

eu hs2

I expect stophs2 March social media stats to be on the slide again now all the ‘excitement’ has died down. Both Panorama and Dispatches have flopped and the penny’s going to drop sometime that Hs2 is continuing. In the meantime, their little band gets ever smaller as more people settle, sell up and move away from the route. Meanwhile, work continues along phase 1 in preparation for the notice to proceed with the main civils work and Phase 2a continues its journey through Parliament. No-one’s stopped Hs2…

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