Philip Hammond appears to be preparing for eventual defeat in Parliament over the HS2 proposal. Not that he actually said those words.
Yesterday, he was the keynote speaker at the HS2 conference organised by Transport Times. The speech is available on the DfT website, and we will be looking through it carefully for you.
But there was a surprising statement slipped in the middle –
“People claim … that we’ll never get this through Parliament in a million years.”
That was news to us!
Back in March, when the HS2 announcement was made, when we set up this website and organised meetings, the general feeling was that us campaigners have to do something, and with a lot of hard work, and a prevailing wind, we might – if we were very lucky – manage to get the proposal defeated.
It is great that everyone’s efforts – whether it’s signing the petition or walking the route – have made politicians see HS2 as a controversial issue that won’t sail through Parliament unscrutinised.