Shahrar Ali on Stop HS2 and Greens for HS2 Panel

I enjoyed the “reverse” hustings hosted by Greens for HS2 on 22 September 2021 – where leadership candidates were invited to quiz a panel of pro-HS2 party members – but was left unmoved that the current Green Party position to Stop HS2 was anything but correct. Here are a few reflections on why that might be.

Firstly, there is always a great risk of confirmation bias when views differ on the rights and wrongs of a political topic. We risk looking for evidence which supports our preferred view; or discounting or minimising the weight of evidence which might support the contrary view.

With that caveat in mind, I wanted to use the hustings as an opportunity to see if there was something I had been missing and my open question to the panel was intended to do just that: Under what circumstances, if any, would HS2 stop being a viable project? The main answer I got back was only once planes were no longer filling the sky or cars filling the roads. In my follow-up, I put it that this was rather a high threshold and that a more realistic threshold would take into account the post-pandemic business case and the fact of changing working patterns.

Further answers came back that physical and mental health had deteriorated due to working from home (as a reason to discourage it), certain sector or lower paid jobs were greatly limited to site working, and that some employees had decided to move further away from work meaning that when they did travel there might have to be more of it.

However, none of these answers accepted that work practices and commuting patterns were still, overall, going to be sub-optimal for the business case upon which HS2 originally relied, let alone once reviewed. Nobody was saying that office working had stopped just that it was unlikely ever to return to its pre-pandemic peak. Nor was it likely that zero-hours employees were likely to be using London to Birmingham rail. 

My biggest challenge to the panel was that the time frame for this project was simply not going to deliver carbon savings in the time we had available (ironically) to save the planet. Rather than the project being “necessary”, our imperative was to redirect large infrastructure projects to renewable energy generation initiative instead. (The reverse hustings is available here and my intervention happened around the 39 minute mark.)

Just to deal with what I take to be a few further red herring arguments (as courteously as possible):

• The panel implored us to have alternatives on offer to HS2. Well, cancelling the project is an alternative, and stopping a bad idea doesn't necessarily put the onus on having to have a better idea first. The better idea might just be to stop it – although we can of course continue to talk about investing in active travel and upgrading services in North.

• “Talk more about RIS2 and road building.” Again, not being able to talk about two bad projects at the same time doesn't mean one can't just talk about one thing at a time, or even to the exclusion of the other thing from time to time. If some people want to fixate on campaigning against HS2 because it has a higher media profile so be it.

• Destroying ancient woodland in England cannot really be justified by saying there will be less deforestation globally because of the project. The point is to stop deforestation and biodiversity loss everywhere. Think global, act local.

• The economy and, in turn, the spiralling cost of HS2 may not be “real” money but it does represent genuine opportunity cost. Once one takes into account unaccounted carbon spend that makes project even less viable.

• "No point trying to stop something that's going to happen anyway." That's just defeatist and stopping the project now would mean averting significant further damage to the environment.

There are motions coming to the Green Party conference in October and I just can't see our policy changing, but rather being reaffirmed, especially when we have our best Stop HS2 campaigners speaking.