Excellent discussion between Digby Jones and Andrea Leadsom.
Lord Jones says HS2 will make “Birmingham the most northern suburb of London”.
2 comments to “Digby Jones on the BBC”
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Excellent discussion between Digby Jones and Andrea Leadsom.
Lord Jones says HS2 will make “Birmingham the most northern suburb of London”.
How true Finmere. I have never understood how economies are continually expected to grow. The same applies to business, if a company does not increase it’s profits year on year, it’s seen as failing! HS2 is certainly at odds with the way things are going and the only impact it will have is negative, especially environmentally. I am concerned that as so much money has already been spent on it, with no benefit and despite the huge opposition to it, politicians will be too scared to say, acutally it’s a bad idea and we are not going ahead with it. I would love to see sense prevail but that commodity is in short suppy where politicians are involved.
Digby Jones and Andrew Neal were right in saying that HS2 will never actually be built but I’m surprised that Digby Jones doesn’t think the money is a problem. A pity Andrew Neal didn’t ask him where it’s going to come from. He’d probably come out with the normal spiel about recovery, infrastructure stimulus packages, and return to normal growth. It’s about time that everyone got real. I cringe when I hear talk on the news about normal recoveries and double-dip recession. As one financial guru recently put it “We have never been out of recession, so how can we avoid a double dip recession.”
We have come to the end of an unsustainable era in our economic history and corrections to the system are inevitable. People expect the economy to grow at over 2% forever just because it has for the past few decades – but it can’t. Politicians and commentators have yet to come to terms with this. Energy, sustainability and the environment will be the overarching determinants for policy making in the future, not economic growth.
Against a background of pay cuts, job losses, increasing cost of living, cutbacks in public services, mounting government debt, and growing social unrest, spending billions on an environmentally destructive and unsustainable railway will be impossible to justify. The worrying thing is that by the time politicians realise this, a lot of time and money which could have been used for something useful will have been wasted. We are seeing another Nimrod type project in the making.