Delegates at Green Party conference in Manchester have voted for HS2 to be funded and completed in full, including the entire Eastern leg and an underground through station at Manchester Piccadilly. The policy development comes as phase one of HS2 between London and Birmingham is well under construction.
Commenting on the revised Green Party policy, co-leader Carla Denyer MP, said:
“The Green Party has long supported the principle of a new north-south high-speed rail line but had serious concerns about the specific route of HS2 and the environmental impacts of this route.
“However, this first phase of HS2 between London and Birmingham is well under way and most of the environmental impacts of construction are already baked in. So this is a pragmatic decision by the Green Party. It moves us on.
“Crucially, we have also acknowledged that the northern leg of HS2 was always the most important in terms of tackling capacity issues on our railways as well as addressing regional inequalities. So the line must be completed in full.
“We also say loud and clear that our railways have to be built right – for habitats and wildlife, for local transport users, for affected neighbours and for government coffers. Greens will not support blank cheques or offer uncritical endorsement.
“We need to move at great speed to shift travel away from cars and flights to public transport. HS2, in full, can play an important role in achieving this shift.”
The vote passed with 345 for and 318 against.
Definitely the right decision. I criticise the Greens a lot for letting their nimbyism trump their environmentalism, so it’s only fair that I praise them embracing their yimby side!
The UK is like: Brexit is over how can we forget divide the country?
The Green party (leadership) takes such a weird position so often.
Sacrificing improvements because they aren’t perfect, opposing HS2 because it could be better and in the process stick everyone in cars for longer.
This was a good move, but an absolute shame that it came to this.
I think it’s a consequence of the weird coalition of competing factions they have to deal with. Among the at least four different ideological groups in the party, ideas are often contradictory between them and lead to the party’s policy positions often being weird and hard to predict.
Here, the climate concerned, net-zero, ‘public transport is good’ crowd lost out until recently to the ecological preservationists and ‘green spaces’ lot. Recently, the former group also lost out to the NIMBYish group on green infrastructure in Ramsey’s constituency, making the party look ridiculous and hypocritical yet again.
I don’t know what the solution is but I hope they figure it out and start treating politics a bit more seriously if they’re going to be a mainstay in Parliament.
This isn’t unique to the Green Party, pretty much all the major parties have internal divisions. Take the recent Labour stuff where the socialists have butted heads with technocratic front bench over the two child benefit cap. The Greens are different in that they don’t whip their MPs or Cllrs, as they believe they should be free to vote with their conscience, which has the major disadvantage of making the party line muddy and hard to count on.
I don’t know what the solution is
Presumably one of the ranked voting methods. Any would be better than the current situation, and would allow the Greens to fragment and the voters to order their priorities. Rather than the current situation where I went for Labour over Green because of the anti-HS2 sentiment.
318 people still care about the feelings of the innocent trees that would be cut down to build the railway.
