Just as the most recent doomed and daft anti Hs2 Parliamentary petition enters its final week with just 16,000 signatures someone’s gone and started yet another one! This embarrassment of riches won’t stop Hs2 in the slightest of course, but it will give me another 6 months to crunch the numbers and analyse just how weak and how local to the route the remaining opposition to Hs2 is!

The first petition was daft in that it called for Hs2 funding to be diverted to giving everyone free solar panels. This new one’s equally daft and very naive in that it calls for the following;

The idea that the Government will ditch the long-held principle of collective Cabinet responsibility is, frankly, daft. As is the idea that a free vote will result in a majority of MPs suddenly doing a volte-face to vote down building Hs2! Somehow, I can’t see many MPs deciding to deprive their constituents of the economic and transport benefits of Hs2 because of a dwindling bunch of Nimbys in the Chilterns.

The petition has been started by the Editor of the Bucks Herald, one Hayley O’ Keeffe, in what’s little more than a thinly veiled attempt to keep her declining paper relevant, and presumably to try and drum up a few new readers and provide clickbait. Like most local papers the Herald is struggling and its circulation is no longer audited by the Audited Bureau of Circulation, so ABC figures aren’t available. The petition’s not exactly getting off to a stellar start, despite the Herald and others trying to flog it to folk. At the time of writing this it had all of 153 signatures…

Ms O’ Keeffe clearly hasn’t thought this one through, or what these petitions reveal as they’re very much a double-edged sword. Perhaps she should have read my blog on an earlier doomed petition that was stated by StopHs2’s Joe Rukin which you can find here.

I’ll crunch the numbers on the first petition when it finally runs out of rope next Thursday. I’ll carry out a constituency by constituency comparison with the 2018 petition as the decline in numbers should be quite interesting. Then, when Ms O’ Keeffe’s petition  runs out of steam on the 17th October I’ll add that too! Of course, by then construction of Hs2 could already have started and many more people living along the routes will have had their properties purchased – further weakening an already tiny opposition. Watch this space!

UPDATE. 18th April.

My comments about the Bucks Herald’s pointless petition have obviously hit a nerve with the paper’s Editor, although misspelling her name seems to have attracted the greatest ire! I received this tweet this morning.

Here’s some of the correspondence that ensued with a link to Ms O’ Keeffe’s valedictory piece.

Ms O’ Keeffe doubles down on the costs ‘spiralling out of control’ spin, which is troubling as you’d hope that a newspaper Editor could tell the difference between fact and speculation and report accordingly. Apparently not.

The fact is – despite whatever fanciful claims a few minutes on Google might throw up – the budget envelope for HS2 hasn’t changed since 2015! It remains at £55.7bn, as detailed on page 16 in this Hs2 document from July 2017.

Has anything changed since? No, the budget envelope remains exactly the same although some costs within it have changed as the designs are refined and new information (such as ground conditions) comes to light . Clearly, this is not the same as ‘costs spiralling out of control’ but that’s the difference between fact and speculation – which is what any of the other figures for the ‘true’ costs of HS2 you’ll find on the internet are.

The breakdown and allocation of costs within the overall funding envelope will be officially updated later this year. Until they are, any figures bandied around on the internet are pure speculation and/or mischief-making. Again, something you’d expect a responsible journalist to report accurately. As for “dire predictions”, so what? Any fool can bandy around numbers.

And what of Ms O’ Keeffe’s petition? It’s got off to a less than stellar start. Here’s the position at 11:15 on Thursday 18th April…

I’ve a favour to ask…

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In the long list of failure of the anti Hs2 campaign, doomed petitions come close to the top. Time and time again they’ve started ones on the Governments petitions website, only too see it fall far short of the total needed. They’re a complete waste of time anyway as – in the unlikely event they reached the magic 100,001- all they’d do is secure a debate on Hs2 in the House of Commons. Note I said a debate, there’s no vote. Quite what antis hope to achieve is a mystery, but a new one’s been launched. Well, when I say a ‘new’ one, it’s actually been running for several months! To say it’s been under everyone’s radar is an understatement, but all of a sudden a few antis have decided it’s worth pushing via Twitter! Here’s a link to it. Poor John Duggan is one of the people desperately trying to puff it.

“Really rolling”? To date, it has a grand total of 1,604 signatures after 129 days.

Problem is, to be anywhere near in with a chance it needed to average 555 signatures a day! It closes on the 24th April, in 50 days time. Sooo, that’s needing an average of 1968 signatures a day. Far, far more than it’s had in the last 130 days and every day it falls sort of that, the average goes up. You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to see the problem here. I can’t even be bothered to crunch any other numbers on this as it’s so hopeless. I’ll wait until it reaches the end next month.

Why Hs2 antis persist with these polls is a mystery. The only thing I can think of is that some of them have fallen for their own spin and bluster and genuinely believe there’s mass opposition to Hs2. They’ve never twigged that when people answer (often loaded) questions in opinion polls it’s pretty meaningless. It doesn’t mean they’ll actually act on anything, and it certainly won’t mean they’ll change their voting intentions for an issue that never comes anywhere near the rankings of things people consider important in elections.

Still, it keeps them happy, and gives me more ammunition to show what a hopeless campaign the anti Hs2 effort is!

I’ve a favour to ask.
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Slightly later than normal due to having been away for the past month, I’ve finally found time to take a look at the StopHs2 ‘campaign’ (and I use that word very loosely) social media numbers for Twitter and Facebook. Unsurprisingly, they’re as empty as Brexit supporters promises. There’s nothing going on about from the usual moaning and trying to make mountains out of molehills whenever Hs2 appears in the news or before a Parliamentary Committee. StopHs2 are purely reactionary nowadays. If it wasn’t for the odd article in the media they’d have sod all to comment on as they’re doing nothing themselves. The days of them organising events or actually making the news (rather than moaning about it) are long gone.

Here’s their latest Facebook scores. I’ve added November and December’s as a comparison.

As the figures show, it’s all pretty moribund. 9229 followers from a population of 66 million where 6.5 million live in constituencies Hs2 will pass through is tiny – as is the number who actually respond to anything. On average, just 0.73% of their followers shared any of their Facebook posts, that’s appalling. After 10 years of campaigning it’s all a bit of a joke, they’re hardly teeming with activists as the comments show – it’s always the same few names who churn out carbon copy responses like this:

Not exactly a group with gravitas or credibility, are they?

Meanwhile, over on Twitter, the numbers are just as bad. I’ve used the same 3 month comparison here.

Yet again, the numbers are flat, despite a frantic burst of Tweets from Rukin (as StopHs2) on 24th January! He frantically tweeted 24 times when Hs2’s former Chairman was giving evidence in Parliament – for all the good it did. The stats show that fatigue soon set in amongst their supporters, the more he tweeted, the less retweets he got! Even retweeting themselves (as they did on a number of occasions) couldn’t bolster the poor numbers!

Nowadays, Rukin’s ‘style’ has descended into abuse and flat out lies, his Twitter tactics have more in common with the high-vis fascists who insult MPs outside Parliament than anyone respectable and whose opinions would carry weight. In the past month an average of 20.09 of their 6484 followers can be bothered (or still exist) to retweet his rubbish. That’s even worse than Facebook at 0.30%! Does that sound like an active and vibrant campaign to you? The #hs2 hashtag used to be a hive of activity for Hs2 antis with a 100 plus, regularly Tweeting to criticise Hs2. Nowadays that’s shrunk to a few dozen regulars and a noticeable bunch of bots who all tweet from the same script that includes support for Brexit and a penchant for Islamophobia.

To be honest, their Twitter ‘campaign’ is a complete waste of time as it descended into childish name-calling and fantasy years ago. All the remaining Tweeters to is show why no-one takes them seriously anymore, they’re more tinfoil hatters than anything else. Here’s a couple of examples.

Oh, and (apparently) UKIP will cancel Hs2 when they get into Government! *sniggers*

So, as you can see. It’s all over bar the moaning now…