Vote for the ‘Pinocchio Award’ – Your chance to help our high speed rail ‘cousins’ in Europe.

This post is by Madeleine Wahlberg.

Avid readers of this blog will know that HS2 is not the only ridiculous and destructive HSR scheme – there are plenty more in Europe. One of these is the Lyon – Turin scheme through the Alps from France to Italy. Our friends in No TAV (No HSR) have been fighting this scheme for over 23 years and now they invite you to help them by voting in the ‘Pinocchio Award’.

VOTE HERE: http://www.prix-pinocchio.org/en/nomines.php
Click inside the round button next to ‘Lyon-Turin Ferrovairie’ then press ‘VOTE NOW’; then you will be asked to confirm your email address [but you can ignore the other information boxes]. Then press CONFIRM.

The Pinocchio Award is an annual award sponsored by Friends of the Earth in partnership with the CRID (Centre for Research and Information for Development) and Peoples Solidarity-ActionAid in France. I don’t think I need to tell you why it is called the PINOCCHIO award!

There are 3 categories:

• One for all, all for me awarded to the company which has the most aggressive policy in terms of land grabbing, exploitation or destruction of natural resources.
• Greener than green awarded to the company which has led the most abusive and misleading communication campaign with regard to its actual activities.
• Dirty hands, full wallet awarded to the company which has the most opaque policy at the financial level (tax evasion, corruption, etc), in terms of lobbying or in its supply chain.

Now the Lyon-Turin HSR line has been nominated for the third of these. Here is a short ‘supporting statement’ http://www.prix-pinocchio.org/en/nomines.php and in the context of the PINOCCHIO award, it is interesting to note that the original costing for the project was €3billion which, like Pinocchio’s nose, has grown to €30 billion! I also understand that in order to avoid the Italian laws which require certification to ensure that a project is ‘Mafia Free’, the contracts for this project are going to be signed in France. You get the flavour of why this project has been nominated for the Dirty hands, full wallet Pinocchio award.

So when Mr Cameron says ‘we need to catch up with Europe’ on HSR, do you think he could possibly be meaning HS2 should ‘catch up’ and behave just like the financing of Lyon-Turin? Tax evasion, corruption, increasing costs 10 fold, signing supply-chain contracts in faraway places so as to avoid scrutiny etc???

Here are some previous STOP HS2 blogs on Lyon-Turin TAV.

• https://stophs2.org/news/4612-update-no-tav
• https://stophs2.org/news/8138-real-european-lesson-hs-derailment-france-italy
• https://stophs2.org/news/5920-susa-protests-continue

Please vote to support our ‘cousin’ campaign.
http://www.prix-pinocchio.org/en/nomines.php