Over the last fortnight I have gone down a High Speed 2 research wormhole, sparked by the thought that I hadn’t heard much about what was going on lately with this bloated project. I started to google around and to read the media outside my usual reference points, which led to a fair few discoveries, some good some bad. This is a time of high tension, a time when the white elephant should be retired before it’s too late. With my head full of statistics and controversies, I chatted to friends and families in the park and at barbecues and received a fascinating range of opinions. There are protest camps going on and I visited some of them. There are reports from various groups, for and against, which I have read. I came to realise that Stop HS2is a huge socio-political issue which the mainstream media (and to be fair also the alternative media I tend to read) are simply not covering in all its complexity.
In this article, I’d like to draw attention to a few issues. The judicial review launched by Chris Packham has just failed on appeal and that’s a real shame, but the struggle is far from over. Various court cases are in progress and these people need our support, as well as the camps which are springing up to protect threatened areas of natural beauty. Nobody is against a railway in itself, but the story is far more nuanced than that.
