Category Archives: Crazy anti Hs2 campaigner of the week

Crazy anti Hs2 campaigner of the week. No 24.

11 Monday Nov 2019

Posted by in Crazy anti Hs2 campaigner of the week, General election 2019, Hs2, Politics

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With the general election campaigning in full swing it’s been fun resurrecting this feature as we could all do with a laugh at something, and the tiny anti HS2 campaign is certainly providing a chuckle or two thanks to their bizarre insistence that (God knows how) they’re actually some sort of electoral force to be reckoned with! It’s completely bonkers of course. Their influence is so small they couldn’t even get 25,000 signatures on their recent Stophs2 petition. Still, here’s the latest in laughable delusion, this time it’s from another old favourite, Stephen Leary, who lives in NW Leicestershire constituency. You can find him on Twitter as @MeashamHS2Actio

Leary gave up his one-man campaign against HS2 last December but he’s recently returned to continue his programme of self-promotion. He no longer claims he’s going to set up a new StopH2 ‘action’ group, but he does still advertise the non-existent website of the defunct local group (MAPA) which is was a minor member of before it went to the wall.

Here’s one of today’s Tweets, which is a hilarious miscalculation and misunderstanding of party political support!

Green party candidates in Eddisbury and Congleton, eh? Leaving aside the fact the Greens aren’t predicted to win a single extra seat in the general election and are bobbing around at 5% in the polls, we’re expected to believe that the few Shire Tory Brexit supporters who oppose HS2 are going to vote Green to stop HS2? Especially when the incumbent Tory, Antoinette Sandbach, has had the Tory whip removed over Brexit and has gone off to join the Lib-Dems? I mean, seriously? Has it even occurred to Leary that they just might have other considerations on their minds when it come to placing their X’s on the ballot paper? Obviously not, but then that’s typical of these people as their knowledge of politics never normally gets beyond Parish Council level.

To illustrate just how ridiculous and out of touch these claims are, here’s the 2017 election result for Eddisbury. That’s not a hill for the Greens to claim, that’s bleedin’ Everest!

Meanwhile, what of Congleton? This is a real true-blue Constituency which is held by Fiona Bruce with a majority of 12,619. Here’s the 2017 result.

Why Leary’s even bothered with this one’s a mystery as it’s not on the route of HS2! Just 62 people living there signed the last stophs2 petition, that’s 0.065%! The Greens vote dropped last time too, leaving them last on the board.

You have to laugh! Electoral maths clearly isn’t Leary’s forte. Nor has it occurred to him that even if by some miracle, people were persuaded to change their vote because of HS2 and help unseat the incumbent MP, it wouldn’t make a blind bit of difference to anything because HS2 has cross party support from Tory, Labour and Lib-Dems (plus the SNP in Scotland) so it doesn’t make any difference if the seat swaps between any of the major parties – which is the most likely outcome.

To add to the general merriment, Nigel Farage has announced that his Brexit party won’t be standing in any Tory held seats, so that’s really going to rain on the HS2 anti’s parade as there’s no-one else left who opposes HS2 to vote for other than the Greens, who are dead set against Brexit. I’m sure we can expect more laughable nonsense like this from the few remaining HS2 antis over the next few weeks, but there’s no doubt that HS2 won’t be an election issue – despite their desperate and fantastical claims – just like every other election since 2010.

2023 update.

Psephology was no more Leary’s strongpoint than it was that of any of the other Nimbys who’ve opposed HS2 over the years. None of the constituencies Leary mentioned changed political colour in the 2019 election, never mind actually went green! The greens hung on to their sole MP but have never got anywhere near close to gaining another parliamentary seat. They remain the only national (ish) political party opposed to HS2, an act of hypocrisy that’s caused a schism within the English and Welsh party and set them apart from their Scottish counterparts who’re more fact and science based – so support building HS2.

As for Leary, like most anti HS2’er on Twitter, he had little more than his 15 mins of ‘fame’ (if you can call being laughed at fame) before disappearing in 2020.

Many of us are looking forward to the next general election in 2024. I’ll make a prediction for that one. Whichever party wins it will continue to build HS2…

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Crazy anti Hs2 campaigner of the week. No 23.

04 Monday Nov 2019

Posted by in Brexit, Crazy anti Hs2 campaigner of the week, Hs2, Politics

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I didn’t expect to be bringing this back twice in a week, but then we’re in general election mode which has thrown up all sorts of nonsense, not least from the anti HS2 camp who’re really making me laugh!

The latest exponent of this craziness is one Peter Deeley, an ardent Brexiter (funny how so often being pro Brexit and anti Hs2 goes together, Ed). Deeley is a former Parish Councillor in Boddington which is in the Daventry constituency. You can find him on Twitter as @PDeeley. He’s always been one of those who’re opposed to HS2 who never lets fact get in the way of fiction, especially when it come to claiming how many people actually oppose HS2! If you believed his rambling tweets, the whole country’s united in opposition to HS2! Here’s one of the latest examples, as Deeley tries (and fails) to get people to retweet him.

This was yesterday. Since then, Deeley’s been on a continuous and tedious loop with the same basic tweet and getting nowhere fast as no-one’s interested. But how can this be? Deeley claims there’s “hundreds of thousands” of potential Tory voters willing to switch allegiance because of HS2!

Really? Where?

Well, not in his own constituency for a start! Here’s how many in Daventry signed the last StopHs2 petition which finished last week.

Just 100 signatures, or 0.101% of the 99,130 constituents in Daventry. So where are these ‘hundreds of thousands’ then? They exist only in Deeley’s fevered imagination! That ridiculous petition only got 24,079 signatures, nowhere near ‘hundreds of thousands’. Nor have their been any sign of all these people in a single election since 2010. This is the stupidity of these people, it’s pure bluster and it’s so easy to disprove you have to wonder what the hell’s the point? Who do they think they’re fooling other than themselves?

Of course, there’s the usual hypocrisy at large here. Whilst claiming he’d vote Tory if Johnson releases the Oakervee report, Deeley’s not clever enough not to have let the cat out of the bag in his own Twitter feed. His intention’s always been to support the Brexit party, no matter what.

There’s a double irony here. The MP for Daventry is one Chris Heaton-Harris, a Brexit zealot and member of the European Research Group and former group Chair! But then when have these Brexiters ever made sense?

Talking of Farage and the Brexit party, it’s a great shame the man has declared that he’s not going to stand in any constituency in this election as we’ll be deprived of the pleasure of seeing him beaten for the eighth time. Of course, the Brexit party are only Farage’s latest vehicle for his ego, and it’s certainly the strangest. It’s very much his party as it has no national executive or structure, everything is in his control, right down to him charging folk £100 a head for the chance to get on the list of candidates. To say the whole process is bent and the antithesis of democracy is an understatement, but then it’s typical that the people who bang on about the EU being ‘undemocratic’ are the biggest hypocrites.

These are the people that fantasists like Deeley are in bed with. Is it any wonder no-one takes these StopHs2 keyboard warriors seriously anymore?

2023 update.

Deeley’s one of the handful of people who’re still banging on about HS2 on Twitter. Having learned nothing in all these years he still likes to pretend there’s millions of Nimbys out there so outraged about HS2 they’ll overturn the political applecart if they’re not listened to. Poor Deeley! Every election result at both national and local levels has exposed his bluster for what it is. The forthcoming local elections will do exactly the same as all the others. The few people ‘actively’ (and I count ranting on social media here) opposing HS2 were never a political force even at their height. Now that HS2’s being built past where Deeley lives they’re even less so.

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Crazy anti Hs2 campaigner of the week. No 22

31 Thursday Oct 2019

Posted by in Anti Hs2 mob, Crazy anti Hs2 campaigner of the week, Hs2, Penny Gaines, Railways

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Yes, it’s back – after a gap of nearly 18 months! To be honest, there’s been no point in doing one of these for two reasons. One is that there’s so few of these people left nowadays the field is pretty thin and two – the ones left are all pretty much crazy. If you don’t believe me, go and have a look at the comments from people posting on the StopHs2 Facebook page!

But I couldn’t resist resurrecting it after seeing this classic tweet from StopHs2 ‘Chair’ Penny Gaines which went out earlier today. It’s an absolute pearler! The levels of egotism and perspective failure are weapons-grade. Let’s take a look…

“I told them my vote will depend on whether they oppose Hs2” tweets Gaines. Well, I’m sure the canvasser who knocked on her door must be absolutely sick to death of hearing that said to them. Wait, where does Gaines live? That absolute hotbed of anti HS2 activity, otherwise known as err, Bournemouth…

Yes, Bournemouth. Now I don’t know which of the two constituencies she lives in (East or West) but I’m willing to bet that HS2 isn’t exactly high up on their list of concerns. Brexit? Absolutely. The NHS? Almost certainly – but not HS2!

So, how many people in the two constituencies signed that last daft and doomed StopHs2 petition? Here’s the results.

Wow! All of 31 eh? I’m sure that’ll really make Tobias Ellwood MP change his mind on HS2. Oh, wait, he’s a strong supporter of the project as he’s written here as recently as August 2019! Meanwhile, in Bournemouth West…

Oh dear, just 17 signatures, all of 0.016%. I’m sure that’s giving sitting MP Conor Burns and his canvassers sleepless nights! He’s been absent for the past couple of votes on HS2, but then he’s now a Government Minister, so the idea that he’ll vote against party policy is moonshine. It’s also worth mentioning he’s got a healthy majority!

This rubbish from Gaines does show one thing – why no-one takes what’s left of the anti HS2 grassroots campaign seriously anymore. They really are so divorced from reality it’s actually funny! Now we’re in the run-up to an election, expect to hear more nonsense like this as the few remaining antis bluster and try to puff out their chests and flex non-existent political muscle.

I’ve no doubt the election is going to be a fascinating night as I don’t think we’ve had one with these levels of political uncertainty for a very long time, but there’s one thing that isn’t going to be a factor in any of this and that’s HS2. Not in the Chilterns, and certainly not in Bournemouth!

2023 update.

The 2019 general election was another debacle for those opposed to HS2. Not only did they have zero impact, the election brought returned to power a Government (and PM) that continued its support for HS2, so much so that the project was given ‘notice to proceed’ in 2020 when construction started. Now in April 2023 40% of the civils works on phase 1 is complete whilst ‘stophs2’ collapsed in the same year NTP was given.

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Crazy anti Hs2 campaigner of the week. No 21

19 Monday Mar 2018

Posted by in Crazy anti Hs2 campaigner of the week, Hs2, YorkshireStopHs2

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It’s a long time since I’ve done one of these, but I thought the award was merited this week due to complete spin and utter disregard for the facts by one Johnathan Pile, from Crofton* in Yorkshire, who is the Chairman of the grandly titled ‘Yorkshire Against Hs2’ (of course, Yorkshire’s nothing of the sort. Ed).

Pile has tweeted this load of fact free nonsense this morning.

yorks 1

yorks hs2

Let’s unpick this, shall we? Besmirching Virgin Trains East Coast’s reputation to claim they’ve cancelled trains due to the snow may sound clever, but Pile’s story fell apart by his own evidence. VTEC’s 12.55 from Wakefield KIRKGATE to London Kings Cross? I don’t think so…

VTEC run from Wakefield Westgate, not Kirkgate and the cancelled train is run by Grand Central. It was cancelled yesterday, but due to a technical issue with the trains traction equipment, not snow – as Grand Central tweeted – and as is clearly shown on the information screen at Wakefield Kirkgate! 

GC

Grand Central arranged for their tickets to be accepted on an East Midlands Trains service from Leeds. This ran and arrived in London St Pancras, just across the road from Kings Cross (on time) at 18.26 several hours after the GC service which was scheduled to arrive at 15.07. Of course, there were other alternatives. The next Grand Central service did run. It left Kirkgate at 16.02 and arrived in Kings Cross at 18.32 (18 mins late).

If Pile hadn’t already got a Grand Central specific ticket there was a VTEC service (the company he claimed was cancelling trains ‘cos of snow). leaving nearby Westgate at 13.18, giving him plenty of time to get a taxi across Wakefield to catch it. Here’s a copy of how VTEC’s services ran that day. None of the Kings Cross services were cancelled due to snow – or anything else – and timekeeping was pretty good.

wakey

So, why did Pile have to drive? he didn’t, the 12.55 was the only London train cancelled, all others ran. It was a Sunday and his meeting (by his own admission) appears to have been today, so he had plenty of time to get to London. Of course, that wouldn’t have made a tenuous ‘let’s try and bash Hs2’ story!

How long would it have taken him to drive yesterday anyway? Google maps calculates a journey made today would take between 3hr 43m – 4hr 6m to drive from Kirkgate to Kings Cross. As there was a lot of snow on the ground yesterday I’d suggest it would’ve taken longer and also been a pretty daft thing to do bearing in mind the weather conditions which were (allegedly) causing trains to be cancelled.

But that’s Hs2 antis all over – a cavalier attitude to facts and the truth. It seems that according to people like Pile, facts are what you make up. Is it any wonder their campaign’s fallen apart?

*Crofton is in the West Yorkshire constituency of Hemsworth. Despite Pile’s grand claims the anti Hs2 campaign isn’t exactly setting the constituency alight. I’ve had a look at the number of folk who’ve signed the latest Stop Hs2 Parliamentary petition. Here’s the result (updated today).

Hemsworth

Just 0.34% eh? Yorkshire ‘against’ Hs2? Even bleedin’ Hemsworth isn’t!

Of course, Pile has form for making grand claims and writing cheques he can’t cash. A year ago he was threatening that he’d start a Judicial Review against Hs2 (link). It was nothing more than bluster. His group never even started to raise the money to pay for one.

2023 Update. 

Both Pile and and the laughably titled ‘Yorkshire against HS2’ have disappeared. With the Eastern leg of HS2 having been mothballed but the line of route safeguarded their continued fragile existence was tipped over the edge. Will they return when the next Labour government resurrect the line to Leeds? Possibly, but they’ll have no more success than last time as they struggled to deal with the real world from the start.  

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Crazy anti Hs2 campaigner of the week: No 19.

19 Wednesday Oct 2016

Posted by in Crazy anti Hs2 campaigner of the week, Hs2, StopHs2

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I haven’t highlighted any individual campaigners for some months now as the whole StopHs2 campaign’s crazy nowadays but I couldn’t resist this outstanding example. So, step forward Nicholas Ward – who’s standing as a Stophs2 candidate in tomorrow’s Witney by-election!

Witney is an ultra-safe Tory seat that was the constituency of David Cameron, the former Prime Minster, who held it with a majority of 25,155. Ward, who lives in Greatworth near Banbury has decided that this is the ideal place for him to persuade voters that Hs2 is such a major issue (even though it’ll go nowhere near the place) they’ll reject their Tory tendencies to elect him as their MP instead. There’s a grand total of 14 candidates standing in Witney which means Ward has to fight for votes against parties with far more credibility, like The Monster Raving Loony party, or bus pass Elvis!

Ward’s website claims that “there is little to be gained from voting for one of the main parties in this by-election” as if Brexit and the economy are somehow a side-show in Witney compared to Hs2. He goes on to claim that he’s “always worked on the basis that, no matter how difficult the odds, one had to go on trying to achieve one’s objective for as long as there was any chance of success. This attitude has motivated his decision to stand in the Witney by-election.”
How Ward expects to be able to do anything about Hs2 (even if by some incredible miracle he was elected) is a mystery as the project has solid cross-party support and the Hs2 bill sailed through Parliament with a massive 411 majority. Like many other Hs2 antis Ward doesn’t understand that the general public don’t share his obsession with the project. It’s an attitude that’s bedevilled the anti hs2 campaign from the beginning, leading to them making serious tactical errors by assuming ordinary voters will ‘rally round’ – as Ward is doing. It’s a tactic that’s backfired time and time again as all it’s done is expose how little support they really have. Ward is doomed to repeat this failure when the by-election result is declared on Thursday night/Friday morning. If this isn’t crazy, then…

POST-RESULT UPDATE.

Mr Ward managed to get all of 92 votes. This beat his previous total of 63 votes from when he stood in Westminster North at the General election. It equates to 0.2% of all votes cast in Witney.

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Crazy anti Hs2 campaigner of the week No 18..

04 Monday Jan 2016

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The first award of 2016 goes to one Nicholas J Batty for this (just posted) supremely idiotic tweet where he forgot to check the calender before typing;

BattyBS

What happens when you click on the petition link?You get a petition that closed on the 7th August 2014 after gathering 124 signatures!

The appropriately named Mr Batty appears to be a classic Walter Mitty personality as anyone browsing his details will find. He has a long history of preposterous personal claims. The anti Hs2 campaign does seem to attract an awful lot of people like him.  Still, a man who can claim the anti Hs2 campaign is both “relentless” and “expanding” whilst posting rubbish like this obviously lives in a special place the rest of us don’t.

Meanwhile, the active anti Hs2 flood petition has just passed the 1700 mark in 7 days. Anyone proficient in either maths or the way these polls work will know that means it doesn’t have a snowballs chance in hell of hitting the 100,000 in 6 months that it needs.

2023 update.

The petition died a death after 6 months having collected a paltry 8,116 signatures. Funnily enough, the overwhelming majority came from constituencies along the HS2 route with no history of flooding – what a co-incidence!

It took several more years before HS2 antis finally twigged that all these petitions did was expose their Nimbyism due to the fact the maps displayed with the petitions showed where the majority of people signing them lived – this neatly displaying the routes of HS2! They were always fun to number-crunch as the other drawback for antis was they also exposed how few of them there were. When their ‘strongholds’ couldn’t get more than 2% of constituents to sign you knew their claims of ‘overwhelming support’ where pure bluster.

The last petition they tried was in 2021. Started by celebrity conservationist (but clueless environmentalist) Chris Packham is got 155,000 signatures. Still a piss-poor amount but enough to take it over the 100,000 needed for a debate. That was when the fun started!

HS2 antis were cock-a-hoop. Now there’s be a vote in Parliament that would stop HS2! It was complete bollocks of course. I’d been pointing out the small print in these petitions for years but either they’d never read it or had deliberately ignored it. Here’s a classic example from Sebastian Sandys, the man who called himself their ‘Parliamentary liaison team’. Someone who should surely have known how these things worked, no? No – as I exposed in this blog.

When the petition was debated in a committee room (not in Parliament) by the handful of MPs who bothered to turn up and there was no vote at the end the penny finally dropped with some of the antis. It was a complete waste of time. I doubt we’ll see them trying futile stunts like this again. Their petitions are history, as is the ‘batty bricklayer’ who’s disappeared completely…

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Crazy anti Hs2 campaigner of the week No 17.

24 Thursday Dec 2015

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

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Jacques Cousteau would be proud of this weeks anti Hs2 mob winner. Like him, they’re not afraid to plumb new depths. This week the award goes to one John Mitchell of Culcheth who hides behind the wonderfully ironic Twitter name of “John Sensible”, for it is he who has come up with the ludicrous claim that it’s “unchristian” to want to build Hs2 – and I kid you not. Here’s some of his ludicrous tweets on the matter;

Sensible christian 2

sensible christian

Such distasteful claims only go to show how desperate & divorced from reality the anti hs2 mob are as it becomes clear their campaign’s failed. But it also shows many of them have become indivisible from UKIP – who jumped on the anti Hs2 bandwagon after the 2010 election in the hope there’d be votes in it. Anti Hs2 campaigners have never been afraid to use homophobia, racism, threats or intimidation. Now they show they’re not afraid to play the religious card either.

Here’s another of today’s examples, from UKIP fan Trevor Forrester which also manages to combine religion and racism.

Forrester

The sooner their whole distasteful campaign is put out of its misery the better. The good news is that – at the rate decent folks are turning their backs on it – that won’t be long…

2023 Update.

Moaning about Cameron was an abject failure, as was targetting the next FOUR Tory PMs (May, Johnson, Truss and Sunak) – or the leaders of HM Opposition for that matter. As for UKIP, they never got anywhere as a party. Forrester is still as bigoted as ever,  and still posts the same xenophobic rubbish rehashed but he’s turned his attention to the new bigots in town, the Reform Party although he rarely tweets about HS2 now. His Twitter bio is a full-house in right-wing BS Bingo. 

The ‘human oxymoron’ Jon Sensible is one of the few who still thinks him posting nonsense on Twitter will somehow stop HS2, which just goes to prove that some people never learn…

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Crazy anti Hs2 campaigner of the week. No 16

01 Tuesday Dec 2015

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

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Although the week has only just begun I think it’s going to be hard to beat this lunacy from the Twitter account of the Mid Cheshire anti Hs2 group.

Admittedly, they have a lot of form for spouting complete nonsense. After all, it was one of their members who claimed that the anti Hs2 campaign was bigger than the 1990s poll tax demonstrations (stop sniggering at the back!). I doubted they’d be able to top that but I have to say the anti Hs2 mob always seem to be able to exceed my expectations. Take a look at this..

Mid ches

So, there you have it. Don’t build the rail capacity we need to get modal shift from road/air to rail to tackle climate change, don’t build a catalyst for massive regeneration in our major cities. Don’t create tens of thousands of jobs that will up-skill the workforce (who will then pay tax back to the government) – simply bung every ‘poor’ person in the UK £20,000 of taxpayers money, gratis – job done.

Quite what they’d been ingesting or smoking when they came up with this stunning idea is open to conjecture.

For some reason only a couple of other antis latched on to the idea, presumably because anyone with half a brain stopped and thought – “what the actual f***!”

With this level of intellect, grasp of economics and understanding of politics powering the anti Hs2 campaign, what could possibly go wrong?

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Crazy (& obnoxious) anti hs2 campaigner of the week No15

14 Saturday Nov 2015

Posted by in Anti Hs2 mob, Crazy anti Hs2 campaigner of the week, Paris terror attack, Peter Jones

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As the anti Hs2 campaign continues to implode and gets more desperate by the week it’s become harder to single out a single campaigner for the weekly award. Nowadays, crazy sums up their whole campaign.

That changed today when Peter Jones, the obnoxious and libelous Camden campaigner came out with something so utterly crass and blinkered that it takes your breath away.

Like many people, I’ve spent the past 12 hours watching with horror as the tragic events unfolded in Paris. This morning it became clear just how awful the scale of the terrorist attack had been. Along with people worldwide I was moved to show solidarity with Paris and the people caught up by displaying a symbol drawn up by a young man who then shared it on social media. That symbol has since gone viral. You can read about it here – although I’m sure many of you will have already seen it.

Enter Peter Jones, who posted this on Twitter this morning (hence my reply);

dd fuckwit

Since then this has been retweeted by several other anti Hs2 campaigners. As their campaign’s collapsed cheap insults have become Jones’ and the anti hs2 mobs stock in trade. Typically, each time you think they couldn’t sink any lower they manage to dig another basement level. One can only hope that their increasingly extreme and unpleasant campaign isn’t digging basement levels but its own grave…

UPDATE:

To cement his title to the crown, Jones has added ambulance-chasing to his list of odious accomplishments. To compound French woes there has been a rail accident today. A high-speed test train has derailed on a yet to be opened TGV line, killing five of the technicians aboard. Jones triumphantly & sickly uses this incident in a crude attempt to scaremonger & smear high speed rail in general & Hs2 in particular, then pretends a 2014 incident in which a TER service hit a TGV was a second accident today!

TGV 1

TGV2

Note there’s not a single drop of sympathy anywhere for the dead and injured, or their families, just triumphalism. Jones and his fellow travellers in the anti Hs2 campaign are beneath contempt.

16 November UPDATE

Here’s proof (where any more needed) from this evening that Jones is a brass-necked hypocrite of the first water who has the cheek to accuse me of exploiting tragedy!

DD hypocrisy

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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.

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

Thank you!