Dear All,
You will hopefully have seen the news since the weekend about the possibility of the Tories going soft on HS2 in some way in their manifesto, whether that is a pause, cancellation or review.
The first thing I want to make absolutely clear is that this is completely true.
In fact the situation is rather better than reported, as whilst Messrs Gillan & Bridgen along with other MPs went to see George Freeman about a list of issues including HS2, it turned out the team writing the manifesto had already picked up HS2 as an something they might change their minds on. I cannot stress enough that this is totally serious. Whilst it may have been dismissed by 3 Andys; Jones, Street & Percy, they aren’t the ones writing the manifesto. Personally I would doubt they would go as far as saying there would be a cancellation/pause/review in the manifesto, more likely they’d go for no mention at all which would them give the space for any of those three options. Then again, as they’ve already been willing to hint at tax rises, what do I know?
I covered this in todays article https://t.co/XgUiEIpMLN but have decided to leave it a bit more speculative in public, as whilst there is now work to do in terms of trying to influence this decision, I’d rather try and not let on that this is really up for grabs in public for as long as possible.
So that leaves a fortnight to try and influence the Tory manifesto, and indeed the Labour one. We’ve had a conference call today to get things going with other campaign groups and there will be meetings with Labour next week, but as Deanne has mentioned before, it continues to be ASLEF & TSSA which are heavily behind Momentum that are the problem with Labour.
For now please go to Conservative Home and fill in the survey below. When it comes to the rankings, please vote “Continuing with HS2” as zero, and try not to give anything else either a top or bottom score, as you’ll effectively be voting against yourself:
Attached are some of the banners we used at the last election. We may still have some physical ones left.
I cannot stress strongly enough that it really is game on, but in reality it’s not six weeks we have at this point in time, it’s two. More will follow in the next few days. Any ideas welcome!
Cheers,
Joe Rukin,
Campaign Manager, Stop HS2.
