HS2

HS2 meeting and report 27^th November 2019

Going into this meeting my main thoughts were as follows:

• The premise of this project is that development is happening elsewhere. 
  It then becomes a question of how quickly we can get to it or bring the expertise inherent in it to us. 
  But then we are not developing what is native to us in our immediate environment: the needs expressed there and our resourcefulness in responding to it.
  
  
• I question whether we can enhance the quality of our own lives by trampling life underfoot in pursuit of that. 
  This project would do this on a massive scale, more than capital projects before it have. 
  It will also bring about redistribution of wealth but to whose benefit? 
  Natural beauty at present available to all will disappear or be obliterated whilst some enlarge their
  income sufficiently to be able to buy a piece of land and enjoy it just for themselves.
  
  
• Jobs will be created by the project but what will we actually produce as a result of it? What will we have as a lasting legacy in terms of enterprise and growth, when all the growth associated with the building of the infrastructure itself has retreated?
  
  
• It is a wrong and wishful thinking that if you create a structure - or infrastructure - growth and development will come into it as if by magic.  Rather businesses, like seeds, need to grow from within their own soil. 
  Then that growth can assume the forms relevant to it and this includes connectivity to markets and so on such as will produce an infrastructure as a result of that growth rather than as some kind of dictatorial precursor to it. 
  I think we have got our thinking the wrong way round in relation to this.
  
  
• How this project affects us personally will determine how we feel about it. 
  Will we be winners or losers?  This will largely be expressed in financial terms. 
  So it’s about money. 
  But is this the only thing that really matters? 
  As I say, there will be a redistribution of wealth but how will the means to it be decide upon:
  
  
• weighted voting (10 votes if you’re within a mile of the epicentre; one vote if 10 miles away)
  
  
• by being as moved by the impact of this on others as we are on ourselves

As a result of the meeting I think I now see it more as follows, in terms of three principal strands:

Firstly, at the top of the tree of those who really want this to happen and because, in one way or another, it would be the best thing to happen from their point of view.  This could be because they are adherents to and advocates of the beauty and sophistication of modern engineering and such beauty and sophistication, such excellence, must have the right to express itself and at the same time bring about some public good. 
Or they could be entrepreneurs, industrialists or developers who have some personal or business interest in developing and delivering this project and have therefore introduced and advocated, lobbied for or otherwise exercised influence in order to bring it into effect. 
They are those at most risk of being viewed with suspicion and attaching to themselves the term ‘vanity project’.

Secondly there are those - businessmen, industrialists or political insiders too - who have less to gain (or offer) financially to the project but who believe in it for its purported benefit, who see real potential and progress in it and who advocate (and even agitate) accordingly. 
On a ‘making and delivering the case’ basis these are probably those most deserving of our respect, for their motives may be less mixed.

Thirdly there are those whose personal or business circumstances make them most directly, and dramatically, the victims of this project; those who will lose homes or businesses and will have to live with this blight on their lives. 
I think we have to give particular ‘weight’ to those in this position and ask ourselves ‘what would it be like to be in their shoes’? 
We should make sure they are properly compensated and not on mean valuations which are designed to service more the profit margin than the personal impact.  For this is an aspect of the real cost of the project. 
It should it not to be distorted or denied.

And then, as a fourth strand, there are the rest of us who, it is said, will benefit as a result of growth and development,
reduced journey times, better connectivity etc. on the one hand but will have to live with the environmental blight this development will bring about as part of our natural appreciation of the landscape. 
When we go for a walk along the Erewash canal for example we won’t just have the occasional train rattling along fairly unobtrusive track alongside us from time to time in our faces but something far more intrusive, however aesthetic all the engineering ‘beauty’ capture in it is.
We will be beneficiaries of reduced travelling times, greater business opportunity etc. too but at a stage further removed from those feeling the greatest impact (as victims) or gaining the most (as victors) and who are - as winners or losers - most of the epicentre of it. 
We can take a somewhat more relaxed view and be for or against it with less personal vehemence.

We might see knock on benefits for our business’ or a rise in property prices, or experience less dramatically the detrimental effects. 
And yet we in the middle are the voters who can sway the result one way or the other. 
What should we be directing ourselves to when deciding it? 
We are the leverage everyone at the opposite ends of the spectrum would like to enlist.

Here I think is where there most of all needs to be a process designed and fit for the purpose at hand. 
It was said last night we are all intelligent and capable men and women; why do we have to be taking sides almost from the off? 
Why can we not sit down together calmly, hear and weigh all the evidence, hear from the experts,
examine the facts and figures, projections, aspirations and claims and weigh against that the costs - personal, financial and environmental -
and make a decision most in keeping with all the interests, whether that is to go ahead or not.
And if the decision is to go ahead, then to attach the conditions to it that will most honestly and effectively
reveal the true cost and deal with the various impacts.

Until we have all sat down together and done this, we are not really equipped or sufficiently informed to make this decision in the first place. 
And that, for me, is where we are at present.

So let’s show that we really do live in a representative democracy by now arranging to do this.  
I think as an outcome of last night we should now resolve to do this.
Whatever further impact we feel this may or may not have, it’s the right thing to do and it’s something to model to others whether or not they listen to or follow it.  it will be the right response on the right basis and we should be prepared to honour that.

The greatest juxtaposition highlighted for me last night was the picture of the engineering excellence on the one hand and the admiration we can have for that and the grotesque blight on the landscape its application would produce. 
Here is a dilemma indeed and just because we can, it doesn’t mean we must.