Tag Archives: StopHs2

Another awful day for the Stop Hs2 ‘campaign’.

16 Tuesday Jul 2019

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

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, , , ,

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 This included disgraced former Labour MP Kelvin Hopkins (who had the whip withdrawn in 2017 after allegations of sexual misconduct and who is still ‘under investigation’) and another of his Brexit supporting ‘chums’, mad Kate Hoey MP, plus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 in Anti Hs2 mob, Hs2, Politics, Railways, StopHs2

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

, , , ,

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 news.

18 Saturday May 2019

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

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

, , ,

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.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Stop Hs2 petitions are like London buses, there’s none for ages, then…

17 Wednesday Apr 2019

Posted by in Hs2, Railways, StopHs2

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

, ,

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;

free vote

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.

keeffe 1

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

keeffe 2

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.

hs2 cost

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…

new hs2 petition

I’ve a favour to ask…

If you enjoy reading this blog, please click on one or two of the adverts. The revenue I receive from this helps me cover the costs of my WordPress site. Many thanks!

 

Oops! Stophs2 did it again…

18 Monday Mar 2019

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

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, , ,

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.

 

Stop Hs2? Some people never learn!

06 Wednesday Mar 2019

Posted by in Hs2, Railways, StopHs2

≈ 5 Comments

Tags

, ,

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.

duggan

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

petition

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.
If you enjoy reading these blogs, please consider clicking on an advert – or two! You don’t have to buy anything, honest! The clicks just help me cover the cost of running this blog. Many thanks, Paul

 

 

Crunching the StopHs2 social media numbers. February 2019

01 Friday Mar 2019

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

≈ 3 Comments

Tags

, ,

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…

I’ve a favour to ask.
If you enjoy reading these blogs, please consider clicking on an advert – or two! You don’t have to buy anything, honest! The clicks just help me cover the cost of running this blog. Many thanks, Paul

Crunching the StopHs2 social media numbers. January 2019

03 Sunday Feb 2019

Posted by in Hs2, Railways, StopHs2

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, ,

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.

stophs2 Facebook

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:

stophs2 FB

fb 2

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.

twitter

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.

duck

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

ukip

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

 

 

 

Crunching the StopHs2 social media stats: December 2018

01 Tuesday Jan 2019

Posted by in Hs2, StopHs2, Uncategorized

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

,

Happy New Year folks!

I’ve had a bit of time on holiday to crunch these numbers, so here’s the final series of the year (predictable as they are). Remember that the final few months of 2018 was meant to see the ‘relaunch’ of the anti Hs2 campaign? It never happened. Not only that, but their last ‘great white hope’ – a BBC Panorama programme that they’d worked themselves up into a frenzy about as it would provide the ‘killer evidence’ that would see Hs2 off once and for all turned out to be a damp squib. Aired on the evening of the 17th of December, it made barely a mention in the wider media – manly because there wasn’t a single new thing in it! You can read about it here.

After that, to quote Marvin the Paranoid android, they ‘went into a bit of decline’. It’s clear that the majority of politicians minds are elsewhere in the run up to 2019. Even Stophs2 gave up posting and tweeting before Xmas as it’s obvious they’re wasting their time.

Anyways, Here’s a look at their social media stats. First up is Facebook.

stophs2 facebook

As you can see the only real improvements are to their headline numbers due to people desperately trying to draw attention to the Panorama programme – although many comments on their Facebook page make it clear people were disappointed with it. They have managed to increase their Facebook followers by nearly 3% but as that’s from such a small starting number (after 10 years) it’s not something to boast about.

Meanwhile, over on Twitter, numbers remain flat.

stophs2 twitter

It’s becoming clear that Twitter’s a complete waste of time for them. The only thing it does is show how few of their followers actually bother with it. Remember that headlines behind these numbers. 6.5 MILLION people live on the route of HS2, so 6363 ‘followers’ (and how many of them are real I wonder?) are a tear in an ocean.

As with previous months a browse of their tweets/posts show that the majority are copies of media articles about HS2. Not a single one of them is news about the StopHS2 ‘campaign’ for the simple reason that – there is no news. They’re not actually doing anything! Sure, the media still trot out Rukin & Gaines for interviews, but they always have. There’s not even any news from (the increasingly scarce) local groups anymore. What both social media accounts show is that StopHs2 has little in the way of heavyweight support – and that’s putting it politely! In fact, both their accounts are refuges for the old ‘green ink’ brigade. who (in an earlier age before social media) would’ve had their ranting, batshit letters spiked by the newspapers they wrote to!

That said, there is one bit of news they’ve ignored reporting completely! Instead, it was slipped out by lawyers. Hs2aa, the ‘real’ brains behind the stophs2 campaign (StopHs2 were always strident, student politics types due to Rukin’s background) folded In 2017, but before they did they mounted a last gasp legal challenge under the Aarhus convention. Last month that was finally rejected, hammering the final nail into HS2aa’s coffin.

2019 is going to be a very bad year for StopH2, if they can be bothered to come back off their rather long Xmas hols…

 

Panorama on Hs2, what a damp squib!

18 Tuesday Dec 2018

Posted by in Hs2, Politics, Railways, StopHs2

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

, , ,

After much hoo-ha from the tiny anti Hs2 campaign who did their best to build up the programme, Panorama aired at 19:30 last night. The 30 minute episode, titled “Hs2; Going off the rails?” was billed by Hs2 antis as a smoking gun that would herald the downfall of the project as it would ‘lift the lid’ on the (supposedly) massive cost overruns and shaky finances.

The reality? It told us nothing new at all. Not a single thing.

The main thrust of the programme was an interview with a former employee of H2 who’s turned “whistleblower” and made all sorts of allegations that Hs2 had grossly underestimated the costs of purchasing land and property needed to build the line. None of these allegations were new, they date back to 2015. In fact, they’d been investigated by the National Audit Office who published their report into the matter back in September (link). The full report is 36 pages long and looks into all aspects of land and property purchase. Here’s the opening.

Part One Introduction to HS2 Ltd’s acquisition of land and property 9

Part Two The cost of land and property 16

Part Three Performance of HS2 Ltd’s land and property function 27

Appendix One Our investigative approach 32

So, what were the NAO’s conclusions and key findings?

Key findings
1 The estimated cost to acquire land and property for Phase One has increased significantly since the start of the programme.

2 The estimate has increased for a range of reasons, such as scope increases and the introduction of additional compensation schemes.

3 HS2 Ltd’s estimate of the cost to acquire land and property has improved, and now provides a reasonable basis for monitoring the cost of the property acquisition programme

4 HS2 Ltd forecasts that costs will remain within available funding, but it is still very early in the property acquisition programme

5 The Department deposited an estimate of the cost to acquire land and property, and a list of the property it expected to acquire, with the hybrid Bill, as required by Parliament

6 The property acquisition programme is currently on track but there is a long way to go and risks remain

7 HS2 Ltd’s land and property team has become better established since 2015

8 Only half of advance payments to claimants have been completed within the required three-month period from HS2 Ltd receiving a claim request

Now, the headline “half” of advance payments needs putting into perspective. Here’s what else the NAO said.

” Under compulsory purchase, HS2 Ltd is required to pay claimants 90% of HS2 Ltd’s valuation of the property within three months of receiving a claim, or the date of possession, whichever is later. The remainder is then paid upon agreement of the final value of the property. Between March 2017 and August 2018 payments have been later than the three months or forecast to be later in 52 out of 108 cases. HS2 Ltd has analysed the causes of delays. It considers that in 35 cases, the main reason is that claimants have not provided the required information in a timely manner. HS2 Ltd considers that the remaining 17 cases have been caused, at least in part, by HS2 Ltd (paragraphs 3.14 to 3.15).

So, just 17 cases of delays (out of 108) due to Hs2 Ltd, in other words 15.74%. Undoubtedly room for improvement, but hardly the scandal some try to pretend.

The NAO then go on to their concluding remarks
9 It is understandable that concerns have been raised with us about HS2 Ltd’s land and property acquisition programme given that it affects so many individuals and businesses. Although HS2 Ltd has made efforts to improve its land and property function since 2015, there is work to be done to support claimants to receive timely compensation where they are due an advance payment.

10 While HS2 Ltd’s estimate of the cost of land and property has increased significantly over time, cost estimates, particularly in this sort of major land acquisition programme, are inherently uncertain and subject to change as more information becomes known about both the design and operation of the railway, and the nature of the land and properties required. HS2 Ltd’s current estimate is within its agreed funding envelope from HM Treasury and provides a reasonable basis from which it can monitor the potential cost to compensate property owners and tenants affected by the construction of the railway. However, it is still very early in the property acquisition programme and too soon to determine with certainty what the final outturn will be.

So, no evidence of corruption, malfeasance or any other shenanigans. The NAO report is measured and balanced. It highlights the difficulties for such a major project as Hs2, pointing out that, “in order to build Phase One of the railway, the government will need to acquire approximately 70 square kilometres (more than 17,000 acres) of land along the route of the railway. HS2 Ltd estimates that it will have to compensate between 6,000 and 10,000 claimants who have land and property interests affected by the route, including property owners, leaseholders and tenants, and issue and process up to 50,000 compulsory purchase notices between 2017 and 2023”

All of this puts Panorama into perspective. As well as the ‘whistleblower’, they had a short interview with Surveyor Michael Byng, who trotted out his (long known about) claim that Hs2 would spend it’s entire budget on building Phase 1. No evidence was offered to support his claim, which wasn’t explored in any detail and it was rebutted by Hs2’s Chief Executive, Mark Thurston, and err – that was it. All a bit of a waste of time really.

The final part of the programme involved interviewing several people who were complaining that Hs2 wasn’t offering them enough money for their homes so was ‘robbing’ them, or that payments were late. None of them were new, in fact most of them had been featured in the media regularly over the past year. Such as this one.

All in all, Panorama was nothing more than a rehash of old stories and allegations – hardly a smoking gun that was going to bring down the project. The NAO had already addressed and dismissed the main complaint, and the fact they could find just 5 from 6,000 to 10,000 claimants who were complaining was never put into perspective.

You could almost sense the disappointment amongst the remaining Hs2 antis. StopHs2 didn’t even get a look-in and the reaction on social media was muted. Hs2 didn’t trend on Twitter and there was no ‘Twitterstorm’ just a few dozen people tweeting their outrage – many of whom were the usual suspects! The Stophs2 Facebook page was equally muted. Here it is this morning. Just 16 comments and 172 shares!

stophs2 FB

The reaction to the programme on social media and elsewhere reflects what I’ve been saying for a very long time. The anti Hs2 campaign’s a busted flush. Its influence is as insignificant as the actual number of people still protesting and programmes like this are no smoking gun. If his is the best they can go, it’s all over bar the moaning. Stop Hs2 is dead. Ironically, Joe Rukin himself gave the game away with this pompous but utterly misguided tweet

rukin. 17 dec

“Thousands” of people on Stophs2’s mailing list? Not tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands, just thousands – despite 6.5 million people living on the route of Hs2?

On another matter, a little bit of other news slipped out unseen yesterday. Remember the High Speed 2 Action Alliance? They used to be the main Stophs2 group until they gave up the ghost way back in 2016 after a long and futile campaign of legal challenges, including Judicial Reviews. Their last action was to allege a failure by the United Kingdom to comply with its obligations under article 7 generally, and article 7 in conjunction with article 6(3) and (4) of the Aarhus Convention by failing to ensure public participation in relation to the decisions issued by the Secretary of State for Transport on 10 January 2012 in the Command Paper “High Speed Rail: Investing in Britain’s Future – Decisions and Next Steps”

Yesterday, their legal people, Landmark Chambers, announced they’d failed as there was no breach, thus driving the last nail in the coffin of Hs2aa!

A Favour…

I use ads to help pay for the cost of this site. If you’d be so kind as to click on one (or several, if you feel that way inclined) I’d be grateful. You don’t have to buy anything if you don’t want to, but every click helps. Thank You!