Just before lunchtime today, the Green Party voted at their GPEW Conference to oppose HS2.
This is fantastic news for our campaign and reinforces all the evidence we have previously provided proving:
HS2 is NOT GREEN and has NO ENVIRONMENTAL CASE.
The Green Party have already issued a press release and extract from which appears below:-
“John Whitelegg told us that people need to know what we think about High Speed Rail 2 (HS2). And he thinks that we should be against it: “This is a classic neo-conservative economic growth project” “we cannot lend our weight to HS2″…”What will HS2 do to air travel and car travel” …”17bn, will lead to an 8% move from air to train, and a further 8% shift from car travel from car to train”. “HS2 is very unfair. What stands out is that 30% of users will earn more than 70k a year. It has to be a rich person’s railway because the business case only stacks up if the time saved is ‘very valuable’.” Or so we were told.”
The motion passed read as follows:-
“TR244 The Green Party believes that long-distance service provision should not concentrate on high speeds where this will affect local service provision or take up an excessive amount of limited resources.
Current proposals for a new north-south high speed rail route are based on assumptions about continuing growth in mobility, energy use and CO2 emissions which are not compatible with Green Party policy.
The Green Party does not support the current high speed rail proposals known as HS2 but will review this policy if an when evidence emerges that HSR is embedded within an overall policy context that can deliver reductions in the demand for transport, energy use, land take and CO2 emissions” proposed by John Whitelegg, Jenny Jones, Emily Heath, Stephen Plowden & 2 others.
There was a High Speed Rail briefing note supplied to everyone in the main hall and I will post this later on today.
I am feeling very emotional at present and can not thank John Whitelegg and his team enough for ensuring the Green Party confirmed their position in the clearest terms possible. John kindly referred in his speech to attending our convention last weekend as a guest speaker and we are absolutely honoured to have welcomed him and that he found it an informative and constructive event.
Lizzy Williams
Chairman STOP HS2
we all need to be open minded here and david there may be something in what you say. all i know is that the film avatar had a real message – we are not robots and need our spiritual connection with the countryside. Think of our countryside as a resource just as valuable as the NHS. Everything we do should reflect that
Sorry,that comment wasn’t aimed at D.T.Breaker,but the person who looks forward to HS5!