Tag Archives: StopHs2

People care more about Jeremy Clarkeson than they do about opposing Hs2

11 Wednesday Mar 2015

Posted by in Hs2, Railways

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Today’s the 5th anniversary of the launch of Hs2 & also a delicious irony that shows how the only folk who really worry about Hs2 are the people who live on the route.

For years anti Hs2 campaigners have launched petition after petition, trying to drum up opposition to the project & show how many people support them.

They’ve been a disaster. Here’s their best effort;

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-15256229

All they’ve shown is the opposite. Each time they launch a new one, the numbers fall off. Some of the petitions have been given months to run & still got bugger all signatures. Yet anti’s assure us that the ‘majority’ oppose Hs2.

Then, today,the news breaks about Jeremy Clarkson’s ‘fracas’ & suspension by the BBC. Within the space of a few hours, 350,000 sign a petition to have him reinstated.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-31832698

It puts the anti Hs2 mobs claims of mass public support into perspective, doesn’t it?

 

Why the anti Hs2 campaign won’t be celebrating Hs2’s 5th birthday..

11 Wednesday Mar 2015

Posted by in Green Party, Hs2, Michael Dugher MP, Politics, Railways, Transport, UKIP

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Ironically, today the campaign against Hs2 is ‘celebrating’ the 5th anniversary of the announcement of the project.  You would have thought they’d have known better as all they’re doing is drawing attention to their five years of failure in trying to stop it!

With nothing new to say & having no cunning plans now all their previous ones have ended in disappointment & failure StopHs2 are trying to bring back their ‘No votes for you with Hs2’ campaign from the dead.  Bad move. The rotting corpse is too far gone to resuscitate, not least because the anti Hs2 campaign has too few supporters who command too few votes.  I’ve looked at this in two previous blogs;

https://paulbigland.wordpress.com/2015/01/17/the-anti-hs2-campaign-dying-by-degrees-pt1/

&

https://paulbigland.wordpress.com/2015/02/22/the-anti-hs2-campaigns-numbers-dont-add-up-again-social-media-edition/

In the intervening time, things have got worse for their campaign.  The Hs2 Hybrid Bill Committee continue to plough through petitions & remain on course for the Bill to gain Royal Assent by December 2016.

On the political front, all three major parties remain committed to the Hs2 project. The anti Hs2 campaign constantly predicted party political U-turns.  None have ever materialised as no-one is actually frightened by their campaign.  There might be a couple of nervous Tory MPs on the Chilterns Hs2 route but even there the challenge from UKIP seems to be receding after UKIP’s hopeful Chris Adams was exposed in the national media for packing his Twitter feed with fake followers;

https://paulbigland.wordpress.com/2015/02/08/ukip-the-anti-hs2-mob-are-at-it-again/

You can see why UKIP & the anti’s get on, can’t you? Both groups largely rely on imaginary friends!

Meanwhile, Labour’s Shadow Transport Minister gave an interview to February’s ASLEF Journal, where he said: “We are absolutely committed to HS2”

Click to access 1502aslefjournal.pdf

Absolutely no sign of a U-turn there then…

The national opinion polls offer nothing positive either.  The real political race is between parties who all support Hs2, whilst the two that oppose UKIP & The Greens have both had a torrid time.  There’s an almost weekly drip of stories about racism within UKIP (where trying to stop them popping up is like playing a game of ‘whack a mole’) & the Greens have had their Leader, Natalie Bennett, implode in a radio interview that’s gone viral.  The Greens rail policy doesn’t exactly stand up to scrutiny either.  I’ve dissected it here;

https://paulbigland.wordpress.com/2015/03/08/the-greens-rail-policy-is-a-dogmatic-mess/

UK polling reports predict that, between them (at best) the Greens & UKIP will have less than half a dozen MPS. That’s meant to Stophs2?  Oh, please…

Meanwhile, things continue to get worse at home.  At the Hs2 Committee hearing on the 10th March, Denham Against Hs2 Chairman Frank Partridge let the cat out of the bag about the number of Hs2 ‘Action’ groups.  The likes of Hs2aa are still pretending there are over 90.  Frank admitted to the Committee that the real number is ’40 to 50′ – around half the numbers claimed!  More proof (if it were needed) that the campaign’s been exaggerating the size of its activist base.

All this leaves the anti Hs2 campaign with bugger all to celebrate on Hs2’s 5th birthday.  If I was Joe Rukin, I’d be too busy looking through the ‘situations vacant’ columns to be boasting about how a lot of imaginary voters are going to Stop Hs2….

Hs2 Action Alliance & the art of telling porkies

25 Wednesday Feb 2015

Posted by in Hs2, Politics, Railways, Transport

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We’ve seen in the last few weeks how Stop HS2 have resorted to blatant deceit in their desperate attempts to breathe life back into their failing campaign, with a fabrication about major locations such as Runcorn, Preston and Wolverhampton losing all direct services to London. Whilst this fantasy has been well and truly scotched, one striking observation is that those anti-HS2 groups with some pretensions to respectability did not try to pick it up and run with it. Apart from the facts of the matter, as set out in Prof McNaughton’s presentation to the HS2 Hybrid Bill Select Committee, if even HS2 Action Alliance (HS2AA) won’t touch a scare story, we can be pretty certain that “scare story” is a bit of an understatement. And something tells me that this Amersham-based organisation is more than a little wary of the risk of being associated with Joe Rukin’s antics these days.

But even if HS2AA aren’t quite bosom buddies with Stop HS2 any more, that doesn’t mean they shouldn’t be hanging their head in shame, having form on this issue themselves!

Last year, a number of different local newspapers ran stories, identical apart from the name of the location in question, that their main town or city had a better train service in steam days than it would be left with after HS2. These identikit stories came from HS2AA, courtesy of their Director of Local Campaigns Peter Chegwyn. And of course one of these shock horror (insert name of location) stories featured Coventry.

Now, what is instantly clear is that Mr Chegwyn hadn’t done anything so basic as to check out what service Coventry did have in steam days. In 1957/8 (that is, the last year of a full service before the WCML was disrupted by electrification works), Coventry enjoyed a grand total of just eight express trains per day to London, of which even the best needed more than 1½ hours for a journey that now takes a couple of minutes over the hour. Nothing whatsoever, however crudely twisted, supports any suggestion that Coventry would revert to that level of service after implementation of HS2.

That it can only have come from the campaigners’ dirty tricks box is the kindest thing I can find to say. As tactics go, it’s not a bad one of course, as the instinctive response that Coventry would indeed have as good a service as in steam days hardly sounds very good.

But, as we now know, Professor McNaughton’s presentation clearly showed two limited-stop trains per hour to London. That’s as many trains in four hours as HS2AA imply it would have in a day. Clearly, it isn’t the three trains per hour that Coventry, essentially because it is on the way to Birmingham, enjoys today, but the question is what service is appropriate for a city of such a size and distance from London. And two trains per hour is the same as Bristol has now from its city centre station, Temple Meads.

As for speed, no doubt those trains will make one or two extra stops, at worst adding less than 10 minutes to the journey time, so again HS2AA’s comparison with steam fails. The average speed from Coventry to London, even with those extra stops, would be higher than from Bristol Temple Meads today.

But apart from contributing traffic to justify the service level, those extra stops, at major residential and employment centres such as Milton Keynes, are the up side for Coventry. It works in reverse as well. Birmingham should be a very convenient airport for the major business and residential area of Milton Keynes, but only one of the three Virgin Euston – Birmingham trains per hour calls at Milton Keynes. So on the way put you probably have either a lot of wasted time before your flight or a good chance of missing it, whilst on your return you risk waiting 59 minutes for a train home. But even if there might be only two fast trains per hour after HS2, when both stop at Milton Keynes the service effectively doubles, and a half-hourly service makes a pretty fair airport link.

Once the West Coast Main Line has these currently-neglected flows as its prime markets, the service between these major locations improves radically, for the benefit of workers, shoppers and leisure travellers alike. But that doesn’t make for cheap headlines.

The anti Hs2 campaign’s numbers don’t add up, again (social media edition)

22 Sunday Feb 2015

Posted by in Hs2, Railways, Transport

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On their website, the High Speed 2 Action Alliance make the claim that ‘There are over 172,000 households located within 1km of Phase 1 of HS2, and at least the same again for Phase 2 – meaning over half a million people  impacted by these proposals’. Half a million – wow! – that’s a lot of angry people then, surely? They must be queuing up to protest about Hs2. I mean – if we add all those folks supposedly opposed to Hs2 for ideological or financial reasons, that must be over a million, yes?

Not a chance!

The truth is that, for all the various claims made by anti Hs2 supporters, there’s very little real opposition on the ground. I’ve illustrated this before in a previous blog where I looked at the death of their ‘action group’ network. https://paulbigland.wordpress.com/2015/01/17/the-anti-hs2-campaign-dying-by-degrees-pt1/

In this one I’m exploring their daft claims of mass support further.

One would think that with all these stout yeoman folk of England up in arms it would be easy to get huge groups of them together in protest. That’s certainly the impression the anti Hs2 mob try to give, aided & abetted by sections of the media who’re too lazy to fact check or who support them.

But where are these folks in reality? As they can’t be found in mass demonstrations or packed meeting halls up & down the land, perhaps social media will give a clue? Actually, it does, but it’s not a revelation anti Hs2 campaigners will like. Nowadays, social media is one of the easiest ways for those interested in a campaign to engage & show their support so you might be forgiven in thinking that Facebook & Twitter must be teeming with people outraged by Hs2. The problem is, the anti’s numbers don’t stack up here either. Don’t forget that not everyone following an anti group will be supporting their aims. Many folk will be doing it just to see what they’re up to. Their real support will be lower than the numbers I’m quoting (of course, this applies to pro Hs2 groups too).

Let’s start with the Twitter followers of the main anti Hs2 groups:

Hs2 Action Alliance (@hs2aa): 3,199 followers

StopHs2 (@stophs2): 4,112

I’ve also included both of StopHs2’s leaders.

Joe Rukin (@joerukin): 1,857

Penny Gaines (@penny_gaines): 399

51M (@51M_Hs2project): 610

The umbrella group Action Groups Against Hs2 (AGAHST) don’t have a Twitter account but they do have a supposed ‘Campaign Director’, Deanne DuKhan (@DuKhanD) who has a massive following of err, 654….

Still, surely they can do better over on Facebook can’t they? Wrong again. In 2011 it was estimated that over 30 million UK citizens had a Facebook profile, that’s double the number of UK Twitter accounts. And the scores on the anti Hs2 campaign’s doors?…

Hs2aa: 2,168

https://www.facebook.com/HS2AA?fref=ts

StopHs2: 6,415

https://www.facebook.com/STOP.HS2?fref=ts

51M: 393

https://www.facebook.com/pages/51m_HS2project/218611348167462

It’s worth noting that 51M’s FB account hasn’t been updated since the 1st June 2011.

AGAHST haven’t even bothered with Facebook but their derelict website (where they’re still plugging an epetition that closed in August 2012*) can be found here: http://www.betterthanhs2.org/who-we-are/

Now, what was that tosh about a ‘relentless’ & ‘growing’ campaign again? Whichever way you look at it, the one thing you can’t find is any real majority support for a campaign against Hs2 – anywhere – except in the imaginations of the dwindling number still opposing the project.

*Incidentally, that epetition got a grand total of 26,262 signatures.

UPDATE (10th March 2015)

Oh dear! At today’s Hs2 Committee hearing, Denham Against Hs2 Chairman Frank Partridge  let the cat out of the bag about the number of Hs2 ‘Action’ groups. The likes of Hs2aa are still pretending there are over 90. Frank admitted to the Committee that the real number is ’40 to 50′ – around half the numbers claimed! More proof (if it were needed) that the campaign’s been exaggerating the size of its activist base.

 

 

 

 

 

An ode to Joe (Rukin)

16 Monday Feb 2015

Posted by in Hs2, Politics, Transport

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A friend has just sent me this. It’s too good not to share with the world so, enjoy!

Joe Rukin told such Dreadful Lies,
It made one Gasp and Stretch one’s Eyes;
He hasn’t, from his Earliest Youth,
Had the least Regard for Truth,
And in what’s written by Joe Rukin,
Reality don’t get a look-in.
*************************************
Now, for his waffle we must pity,
The HS2 Select Committee.
They once, in fact, last Wednesday,
Knowing he’d have much to say,
On things that views are keenly sought on,
Interviewed Prof A McNaughton,
Who set out with alacrity,
The truth about Capacity.
“We can’t have that” cried Rukin J,
And scrambled into print to say,
From Runcorn, Stockport and Wilmslow,
No more London trains would go,
While Coventry would have none left,
And Wolverhampton be bereft,
(Well, actually he went on Twit-ter,
won’t that won’t fit).
But Joe forgot, the silly Clown,
That long ago had been set down,
The service pattern to be run,
By Trains on HS2 (Phase 1),
And what makes Joe sound rather comic,
Is all in “The Case (Economic)
For HS2”, where plain to see,
Is “Trains per hour for Stockport – 3”
Then “Wilmslow – 1”, and “Runcorn – 2”,
And something similar for Crewe.
***********************************
Well, if that sets Joe’s pants alight,
There’s more – the interesting sight,
Of PFMv4.3,
(Pron. Pee Eff Emm vee 4 point 3),
“Assumptions Report”, which shines a lamp on,
Trains per hour for Wolverhampton,
Now just one to London Town,
But as page 44 sets down,
(And surely this will tickle you),
These will be “cut” from one to TWO!
************************************
Lazy journos wanting free
Copy, have a friend in he,
Who only fools those silly men,
The IEA and Beleben.
But by the sensible and learn-ed,
Rukin and his gang are spurn-ed.

Shimbleshanks, with apologies to Hilaire Belloc

 

Joe Rukin: The anti Hs2 mobs lies get bigger & bolder.

13 Friday Feb 2015

Posted by in Hs2, Politics, Railways

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As the anti Hs2 campaign sees any sign of success slipping further & further away their campaign has become increasingly desperate. This has meant that their lies have got bigger, bolder & more stupid…

On Wednesday, Professor Andrew McNaughton gave evidence to the High Speed Rail Committee on the capacity that would be released on the WCML after Hs2 opens. In a breathtaking example of lying through his teeth, StopHs2 Campaign Manager Joe Rukin has twisted McNaughton’s evidence to allege that “HS2 Ltd admit they will scrap all current long distance trains to Euston”

Here’s the press release Rukin has cobbled together: http://stophs2.org/news/13115-13115

And here’s the evidence that McNaugton gave to the Committee: http://www.parliament.uk/documents/commons-committees/hs2/oral-evidence/110215_Uncorrected_Afternoon.pdf

The relevant pages are 41 to 49.

Rukin asserts that “McNaughton has finally admitted that towns and cities in the Midlands, Scotland, Wales and The North West could lose direct services to London” Really? Where? What McNaughton actually said was this;

“We take off the main line most of the long distance non-stop services, because the purpose of HS2 is to serve cities on the long-distance network”

McNaughton went on to say “The effect for stations on the existing line is that, instead of seeing long -distance trains pass them by, albeit quite regularly, there is the opportunity to introduce new trains that serve those stations”

McNaughton also explained what the Transport Minister wanted “Now, the Secretary of State has set out some principles for how the West Coast Main Line ought to be reused and we worked within those, in doing this illustration They’re things like, broadly, where people have a train service to London, after HS2 comes in, there ought to be broadly a comparable-type service but, balanced against that, the opportunity to improve commuting to the places that most need improved commuting”

So, how can Rukin possibly justify his claim? Clearly, he can’t. It’s an obvious & very stupid lie, especially as McNaughton gave his evidence to a Parliamentary Committee where his words were recorded & transcribed. Rukin’s relying on gullible & lazy journo’s not to check their facts. After all, only the really stupid or geographically challenged will believe Hs2 Ltd will “scrap all current long distance trains to Euston” when, err – Hs2 will run into, oh yes – Euston….

Rukin repeats his lies by quoting himself (in his own press release, how’s that for ego!) “We have always said this means for dozens of towns and cities across England, Scotland and Wales ‘losing the trains you currently have”

So where’s this little revelation confirmed by McNaughton’s presentation? Nowhere. In fact, it’s completely contradicted by these words; “We’ve effectively stripped the long-distance non-stopping services off the West Coast Main Line fast lines and into that now virtually empty railway started to show the types of services that could operate, particularly to pick up the commuter growth areas, which are part of the Government’s central strategy, out at Milton Keynes, Northampton, Rugby and so forth. “

So, McNaughton actually gave evidence that new services & extra trains would run, not less.

There’s also the small matter that Hs2Ltd can’t “scrap all current long distance trains to Euston” as that’s not their decision to make as Rukin well knows. What services run after Hs2 opens will be decided by the Office of Rail Regulation, the Secretary of State for Transport & the Dft in conjunction with stakeholders (something else McNaughton made clear).

Rukin has a long & colourful history of telling porkies but this one could really blow up in his face. He’s lied about the facts presented to a Parliamentary Committee that he’s given evidence to himself. So, what does that say about his integrity, the worth of his words & the weight of his evidence? Somehow, I don’t think the High Speed Rail Committee will be impressed. They’ve shown they don’t tolerate fools gladly.

UPDATE: 14th February.

If Rukin & StopHs2 think this is going to blow over they’re in for a real disappointment. The High Speed Rail Committee have announced they will publish the slides that went with Prof McNaughton’s evidence next week. Rukin penned his lies without seeing them. Once they’re available & I’ve had a chance to look at them, I’ll be blogging again. StopHs2 are in for a very uncomfortable time. As Shakespeare’s saying goes, ‘the truth will out’…