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Author Archives: Penny Gaines

The Independent View: What’s wrong with HS2?

By Penny Gaines | Fri 1st November 2013 - 4:14 pm

High speed 2 easily cleared its first parliamentary hurdle yesterday, with just 34 MPs voting against the High Speed Rail (Preparation) Bill – 350 voted in favour. Here Penny Gaines argues the case against HS2 is still strong.

High Speed 2 will cost £50bn, including the trains. But it is an environmentally damaging vanity project, with a constantly shifting rationale for building it.

The current argument is that speed is irrelevant for the case for HS2, but that our existing railways are nearly full and the only option is to build a new high speed railway. This argument does not stand up to scrutiny.

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Posted in Op-eds and The Independent View | Tagged high speed 2 | 46 Comments

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Recent Comments

Peter Wrigley
I think Kira Collins is wrong. When Jo Grimond was leader he wrote an article in the Observer (I think it was in the very first edition of their weekend Magazi...
Mick Taylor
It is NOT a review of policy. It's a review of strategy, under section 5.1 of the constitution. We have enough policy to fill the British Library. The problems ...
expats
@ Tom Walker, “Economic decline, Conservative austerity and misguided government policy have all been blamed for worsening inequality in the UK”.... Our ...
Matt (Bristol)
I think your left/centre-left 'anti-system' bloc still breaks down into activists who are 'recognise the spirit of the system, just want it to work better and b...
Matt (Bristol)
I mean ... 'radical' is an attractive to many people across the centre-left of politics, but your 'radical' is my 'unprove / unwise leap in the dark' and many m...