Three weeks before the Green Party Spring Conference in Birmingham, a few of who had been long-term opponents of HS2 did something we never thought we would have to, we formed Greens Against HS2. This was because, much to the surprise of many, there was a motion before Green Party Spring Conference to change the party policy from long-term opposition, to support for HS2.
The motion “Fully fund HS2 and Northern Powerhouse Rail” would have been a worry at the best of times, but this was coming on the back of the Wildlife Trusts producing yet another report condemning the deliberate attempts by HS2 Ltd to Greenwash the project. In February 2023, the Wildlife Trust reported that HS2 Ltd had amongst other things: used inconsistent modelling which overvalued new habitat creation whilst undervaluing existing habitats to be destroyed; failed to count ponds, trees and hedgerows; and that the nature loss would be 7.9 times more than HS2 Ltd had accounted for on phase one of the project.
It also seemed odd that one of the reasons put forward as to why the Green Party should now change policy was because “HS2 is now a substantial way through construction”, seemingly suggesting that something we thought would be a bad thing before it happened stops being a bad thing, just because it is now happening! But while there has been a lot of destruction on Phase 1 of HS2, there hasn’t actually be so much construction besides some tunnels and bridges. The contracts for ‘railway systems’ – things like rails, electric gantries and signals haven’t even been awarded yet, and that’s on Phase 1. On most of Phase 2 – which is the majority of HS2, work hasn’t even started. The thing is that in the Green Party, a small number of people on the other side of the HS2 argument had been making all the running for the last three years with little or no pushback, and that’s how these things happen.
So we had to start to organise. Over the last thirteen years since HS2 was first announced (the Saturday of the conference would actually be the 13th birthday of HS2) there have been many Greens in steadfast opposition to HS2, many others had joined the party because of the position on HS2, some had been involved in campaign organisations such as Stop HS2 and the XR offshoot HS2 Rebellion, and of course others have been long-standing supporters of NGOs like the Wildlife Trusts and Woodland Trust which have exposed the reality behind the HS2 corporate Greenwashing.
But no-one had ever tried to get all these people to work as a group, many had grown weary of fighting HS2 and let’s face it, we were complacent, we never though that there would ever be a need for a group called ‘Greens Against HS2’. Now had three weeks to try and stop this from happening, from a standing start!
So the message had to be got out, but thankfully there didn’t need to be a hard sell, as when people heard that there was a chance that the Green Party might support HS2, the messages of support and offer of proxy votes came flooding in in far greater number than we had anticipated. This exposed our biggest failing, we simply hadn’t anticipated the sheer amount of admin there would be! Late publication of the procedure for issuing proxy votes didn’t help one bit, but as everything by its nature was last minute we were massively swamped, but in a good way.
The thing which was the biggest surprise was how many messages came in from party members who said the support of HS2 would see them leaving the Green Party. You might expect that a councillor in a ward somewhere along the route of HS2 would have to consider their position if the party decided to support HS2, but it was more of a surprise to see that support of HS2 was stated to be a resigning matter for members from the Malvern Hills, Islington, Shropshire, Wiltshire, the Forest of Dean and others.
[Oh and sorry if your message hasn’t been published yet – we do intend to put them up on the website eventually, but after the first set was published, that task was buried at the bottom of the mountain of admin!]
Another problem was that we kept thinking of extra bits of work to do, such as the Emergency Motion which came about as a result of a ‘slurry pool’ appearing in Ruislip over an HS2 tunnelling site. This – rather conveniently for us – happened on the day after the agenda was published, meaning it could be an Emergency Motion. The important issue with this Emergency Motion on the Chiltern Aquifer wasn’t so much the slurry pool itself, more that its existence proved that HS2 ltd were using a chemical process they said they wouldn’t use, as they themselves said it would pollute the aquifer which supplies drinking water for London.
The first sign of a debate on HS2 came on the Wednesday before the conference in the workshop session. It was clear quite early on in the workshop that there was a majority against the motion, and as we only realised when we got to conference and number were read out for other workshops, with 74 attendees it was one of the best attended workshops. Besides the vote on the motion itself, there was a motion to ‘refer back’ – this is basically a vote neither for or against, but saying there is a problem with the motion itself which needs work. meaning it shouldn’t be debated but sent back for an edit and brought back at the next conference.
The argument put forward for referring back was that the motion was about HS2 and Northern Powerhouse Rail, and that if the motion was defeated, this would mean that NPR could not be debated for another two years. For anyone who doesn’t know, the rule is that if any issue is debated at Green Party Conference, it cannot be debated again for two years. This is to make sure a contentious issue doesn’t take over conference after conference. The thing is, on the face of it, supporting NPR itself is problematic as there is actually no defined plan, no route, no budget and certainly no environmental impacts – effectively NPR is just a slogan at this point, an alluringly good sounding slogan, but a slogan nonetheless.
The workshop vote to refer back won 56%-44%, whilst the motion to ‘Fully fund HS2 and NPR’ was defeated 37%-63%. Even though workshop votes are non-binding advisory votes, this was a good start for us.
So anyway, there had been a gargantuan task of getting the message out about conference, producing the open letter, the banners, the leaflets, the video, sorting out all the proxies, and all the admin that went all of that, and finally we were ready for conference.
The conference was mostly a joy to be at, there were some great policies passed and it seemed a thoroughly cordial affair between the sides, although there were a couple of heated debates between opponents on HS2 as you might expect. From our point of view there was just one big downside, that we, “the anti-HS2 banana fringe” were accused of “threatening people and being generally awful” almost as soon as we turned up by someone who wasn’t even there.
Now, we’ve had long discussions about whether we actually wanted to mention a tweet posted on the 11th of March and finally deleted (over a fortnight after this article was originally published) on the 29th of March 2023.
This sort of thing is just not the Green Party way, and there was a thought that drawing attention to this would in some way diminish our souls. The deciding factor was that this accusation doesn’t just sling mud at us, but we feel it brings the Green Party itself into disrepute. The accusation that Green Party Members were threatening other Green Party members at Green Party Conference and getting away with it without consequence, is a very serious one which reflects badly on the party. If such a thing had actually happened right at the start of the conference, you would expect it would be the only thing anyone there would be talking about, and you would also have expected people to have been expelled from the conference. None of those consequences happened, because there was no substance in the accusation whatsoever. It simply did not happen.
While original replies to that tweet doubled down on the whole threats thing, the author stil states that the reason he claimed that the ‘banana fringe’ was threatening people was because he wanted to “keep the HS2 discussions civil”. This is one of the may reasons why we have asked the Green Party if they can facilitate mediation between the sides.
The debates about HS2 did not take place on the conference floor, as while on two occasions the motion E05 to ”Fund HS2 and NPR” was the next motion to be debated, on both of those occasions it was bumped.
The way the conference was structured was that: On Saturday Plenary 1 would be A & B motions with Plenary 2 being C & E motions; on Sunday Plenary 3 would be D motions with Plenary 2 being the remaining D & E motions. This meant that the HS2 motion being E05 would be heard in the second session on Saturday or Sunday.
Although many people were saying that the conference would run out of time, the chances of HS2 being debated accelerated very early on as two of the other E-motions, on water quality in rivers and the coast and on banning dolphin hunts were fast-tracked without debate. This obviously made a lot of sense – it was always highly unlikely that someone was going to stand up at Green Party Conference and dare to say that hunting dolphins is a good thing!
At the start of the Saturday evening session there was an interjection – an attempt to suspend standing orders to hear an Emergency Motion on Gary Lineker, with reference to his Twitter row over asylum policy which had seen his suspension by the BBC, causing a mass walkout of football presenters in solidarity. The Standing Orders for the conference state that Emergency Motions should ‘normally’ be heard in the last 15 minutes of the day at the discretion of the chair, and maybe as importantly was that at this point in time Standing Orders Committee had not had time to review the Lineker motion and see if it was in order. Top of the list of legitimate Emergency Motions at this point in time was the one about the Chiltern Aquifer, and we had been waiting, as we were meant to for the last 15 minutes. Later on, there was another interjection about the Lineker motion, and it seemed obvious that the chair would accept it being debated at the end of session, by which time it had one more supporter than the Chiltern Aquifer. With 20 minutes left of the session, and E05 the next ordinary motion to be discussed, conference moved onto Gary Lineker.
Because of this, during the Saturday evening something which should have been rather obvious struck us: just two days earlier there had been a massive announcement from Government, that the cost of HS2 had gone up yet again, more delays had been added – also yet again, and there had been a super element of spin as after over a decade of saying delays add costs, in this case they said an added delay would actually save money! This clearly should be another Emergency Motion! We were amazed we hadn’t seen this before. Sometimes, you’re just too close to see the obvious.
An Emergency Motion to renew party opposition to HS2 following the implosion of the project earlier in the week was written and submitted late on Saturday night. By the start of the second session on Sunday, it had passed the number of co-proposers of both the Chiltern Aquifer EM, and more importantly had more people behind it than the Lineker motion, which had already been discussed. After a minor amendment was added during that session, it was ruled in order by Standing Orders Committee, so everything had been done right and it was good to go.
But there was another thing. Remember all the way back to that workshop? Remember the there had been a narrow advisory victory for referring the motion back? Well, we’d been so wrapped up in this that we hadn’t really thought about that until the break before the final session and we found out there were “stacks of proxies ready to refer back”.
So we had to make a decision, and what passed for a caucus was called to discuss this on the ground. The great thing about the conference venue is that all we had to do was stand in a group talking near reception, and eventually most of the rest of us would happen to walk past and join in!
After a long discussion which involved almost everyone changing their minds at least once, the conclusion was that the pro HS2 lobby were running scared, we had the numbers. They’d had three years, we’d had three weeks, and we had the numbers! We didn’t want to have to do this all over again in October, a win today would put the debate about HS2 to bed for two years. If a motion to refer back came forward, we would be bold, we would vote against it and play for all the marbles.
Now the final Plenary was due to be D & E motions, and it had been made clear in that respect that it would alternate, going D, E, D, E etc. However, there was one B motion hanging over from Plenary 1, and it had been decided to go back to that. Even with that, HS2 would be the third motion, after B03 and D06, but no, even with that, Standing Orders Committee had apparently decided to pull D06 – which was their own motion – meaning HS2 was due on second, and there were two Emergency Motions on HS2 in poll position for the end of session too. We were told there might be a debate on some Late Motions (‘late’ is late, while ‘emergency’ is super late!), but that would be right at the end, and there was only one motion to get through! OK, B03 was about peace and defence and contained contentious parts and amendments like NATO as well as other things, but it was just one motion. We had to get through that, right?
Wrong!
The thing is, while B03 was contentious, it wasn’t an hour and three-quarters contentious! Despite that, it went on to take up almost the entirety of that final session, a complete anomaly compared with the way every other session of conference had zoomed through the order paper. It seemed that an unusually large amount of procedural motions were cropping up, and there were far more speeches which were going well over the allocated time, all of which ate up precious time. To use an analogy Gary Lineker would approve of, it was just like when a football team is desperate not to concede a goal at the end of a match, and they try to hold the ball in the opposition corner in order to run down the clock……
It became very clear that E05 was going to fall off the end of the agenda. But that didn’t necessarily matter, because we were heading into that final 15 minutes when Emergency Motions could be heard. though of course this would be at the discretion of the chair. So when B03 finally passed, there was a very quick hand up for a procedural motion from our side, to suspend standing orders to allow the Emergency Motion to renew opposition to HS2 to be debated. It was made clear to the chair that this motion had more support than the Lineker motion which had been debated, but the chair chose to spend the last few minutes debating Late Motions instead. To be fair, the chances of getting through any of the HS2 motions in 15 minutes were slim, but it would not have been the first time a Green Party conference session had gone over time!
And there we were, despite there being three motions on HS2, and people saying before the conference that it was important to now have the debate, there would be no debate on HS2.
So where we are now, is we have to do the whole thing all over again at the main conference in Brighton on the 6th to 8th of October. We just have to do it better next time, but next time we will have longer than three weeks to prepare………
Greens Against HS2 