So there we go, the conference is over, the vote has happened, we lost. The pro-HS2 motion, originally called “Fully fund HS2 and NPR”, now rebranded as “Green Rail Strategy for the Midlands and the North” went through, by 345 votes to 318. The Green Party now supports HS2.
Or does it?
Because the thing is, the motion passed at conference was so badly written that as far as we can see, the Green Party hasn’t actually changed policy on HS2 yet. It’s just that people who clearly haven’t read or understood the policy (namely the people who wrote and supported it) have decided that is what it means.
The synopsis of the original motion may say “This motion calls for HS2 to be funded and completed in full”, but the text of the motion which actually states that as a policy position was removed by conference. Specifically, the text: “The Green Party calls for the government to fund and build HS2 including the entire Eastern leg to Leeds” was the bit which would have changed GPEW policy to one of support for HS2, but it was deleted. It wasn’t in the final motion as passed. from the motion by Amendment 1. The amended policy as passed by conference can be found here.
It is a matter of fact that at the pre-conference workshops, more people voted for the motion with the amendments than did without and many people at the conference said they had been turned by the amendments. Additionally the Amendment 1 added these contingent conditions which need to be met for the party to support HS2:
“The Party’s support for high speed rail in practice is nonetheless contingent on its delivery aligning with Green values. Specifically, these values will necessitate:
· Proper timely data releases relating to the ongoing impacts of HS2, using up to date biodiversity metrics and not excluding any habitats;
· Limiting adverse impacts on biodiversity and bioabundance, and, where adverse impacts are unavoidable, securing a 10% biodiversity net gain within the development site;
· Independent monitoring of impacts and remediation schemes; and
· Proper compensation for those affected by the scheme’s construction.”,
Well, delivery is underway and on all of those measures, HS2 has already failed. This policy is absolute on this issue, that GPEW support for HS2 depends of four contingent tests being met, and there is no evidence that these contingent tests have even been assessed, let alone passed. So to say GPEW supports HS2 is most certainly not aligning with Green Values. With this amendment accepted, the policy sets down the grounds on which HS2 would be supported by the Green Party. It does not mean the Green Party supports HS2, and the dictionary backs us up on this one!
To be absolutely clear, as far as we can see, the policy which was passed means the Green Party hasn’t actually changed its stance on HS2 yet. To say that GPEW has is a selective and quite possibly illegal (we’ll get back to you on that one) reading of the policy.
So there is no evidence there has been any attempt to assess these issues, let alone prove them. And if this was done, who would be the arbiter? Handily, a Panorama investigation has come along just at the right time to provide evidence against the fourth criteria. One of the speakers for the motion said the other points had been put in specifically because of the Wildlife Trusts reports on HS2. We are unaware that anything has changed since their 2023 report.
But who gets to judge this? Where is the evidence that these tests have been applied? These questions remain unanswered, and until they satisfactorily are, GPEW surely remains in opposition to HS2, unless we are to pick and choose which words count from this policy?
This is what the policy says. Support is contingent on specific tests being met. They haven’t been. It’s that simple. It seems the proposers of this policy didn’t bother to pay attention to what all of the words actually meant. They seem to have assumed that they could get the policy through, that would mean GPEW automatically supports HS2, and they can sort out how exactly the conditions for that support are measured afterwards!
No, that’s not how this works! the word you put in the policy was “contingent”, meaning “dependent on”, meaning GPEW support for HS2 is dependent on these undefined tests being met.
So anyone reading this might want to point that out to various people within the party, ask questions and the like and maybe come back to this site on Tuesday, after the Panorama has broadcast on BBC1. Maybe you want to be on social media about that, but we think that is more going to be about the scandal of intense lobbying for HS2 aimed at ensuring the symphonising off of billions of taxpayers pounds into the construction industry.
But then again, what would the Green Party know about a scandal of intense lobbying for HS2 aimed at ensuring the symphonising off of billions of taxpayers pounds into the construction industry?
That is part of the “what now?” conversations which have been going on following the fact that we lost the vote on Sunday. The other saving grace is that even if GPEW did support HS2, as Natalie Bennett who spoke against HS2 has already pointed out, being a non-whipped party, you don’t have to. She certainly won’t be doing! You can see her being interviewed directly after the vote here.
The vote on E01 on conference floor came out 287 for and 226 against, and while after going to a card vote, those proxies did narrow the gap to 345 to 318, it was not enough. There were calls from Bennet and acting convenor of the Transport Group Jeremy Drew (online) to hold a procedural motion to refer the motion back as there are several issues in it which contradict existing policies, but this was not allowed by the chair.
And it’s clear this motion should have been referred back, not just because we are now in a position where we have a policy which cannot be enacted because it is contingent on conditions being met without any idea of how those conditions would be assessed or who would assess them, and also not just as you’d expect we’d say that it wrecks the credibility of the Green Party after a decade of standing up against the corporate lobby and a lifetime of standing up for nature, but because it is just a terrible policy and writes off the idea that the Green Party is evidence-based.
Sadly, after the policy was passed, co-leader Carla Denyer MP (who it was claimed would have spoken for the motion if not for illness) 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.”
Fundamentally, there are so many errors in that statement. Firstly, Phase 2 of HS2 is far longer than Phase 1 of HS2. Also to get through London, Birmingham and under the Chilterns AONB means there are far more tunnels on Phase 1, so only about a third of the environmental impacts of construction are already ‘baked in’. It is also the case that not all of the damage has even been done on Phase 1 yet. For example, Roughknowles Wood in Kenilworth which is due to have Cryfield Grange Road diverted through it still stands. In terms of capacity (not that HS2 delivers anything like the capacity uplift being claimed) HS2 itself hardly delivers any additional capacity at all in the North of England (though NPR would). Every element of the rhetoric that ‘railways have to be built right’ is completely counterfactual when you look at how HS2 Ltd have acted over the last 14 years, and as for not supporting blank cheques or offering uncritical endorsement – that’s exactly what we have just done! Since 2010, dozens of politicians have said there will be no blank cheque for HS2, but they never stop supporting it when the cost goes up. As for NPR, there is no official cost – this is the very definition of a blank cheque! And concerning that modal shift argument….
As has been said on numerous occasions, HS2 does not go to airports to discourage people from going to airports! We simply cannot understand how supporters of HS2 ignore the fact that bosses at both Birmingham and Manchester Airports have gone on public record saying they see HS2 as essential to expanding their international routes. And if HS2 was really intended to take flights out of the air, it would connect with HS1 and the Channel Tunnel, instead of stopping half a mile short at the wrong London station. Well, if it even gets that far……
As for making pragmatic decisions and moving on, first to do that was Mark Keir (pictured with Juliet Carter and Baroness Jenny Jones) who spoke against the motion and actually managed to resign from the Green Party before the conference had closed. There have been several more since that we know of, and many still considering the position and their next steps.
Mark stood for the Green Party in the Uxbridge constituency against Boris Johnson in 2017, an election he has repeatedly apologised for not winning. He was also labelled “Crazy Anti-HS2 Campaigner of the Week, Number 35” by Paul Bigland, the originator of the pro-HS2 social media tactic of “Dogpile and Bully”, an individual who disturbingly some in the Green Party are treating as a credible source of information.
Amongst many other actions against the unnecessary destruction of the environment carried out by HS2 Ltd, along with camps at Jones Hill Woods (the Roald Dahl one) and Colne Valley, Mark had been involved in the longest ever underground environmental protection action ever seen in the UK – lasting 46 days – one of three HS2 actions that saw environmental protectors underground for over a month. This protest was against the destruction of Bluebell Wood (below) in Swynnerton, an area where HS2 Ltd were going to go ahead with removing woodland habitats despite that section of the line not having been approved. As that section of HS2 has now been cancelled, these precious habitats have been saved. You have to understand that changing Green Party policy is telling nature defenders that they were wrong, that we have turned our back on them and if he were to go back into those tunnels he would be wrong to do so, because the Green Party have just passed policy which demand that this and many woodlands like it are destroyed by a railway which due to excessive proposed speeds, has been designed in a way which maximises environmental damage, and then as Mark and many others have seen in practice, built by construction firms who carry out far greater environmental damage than there was supposed to be.
If you didn’t know, HS2 is now subject to the largest anti-protest injunction in the country, and Larch Maxey who mentioned by Joe Rukin in his speech against E01 was in the tunnels at Bluebell and Euston and in the trees at Colne Valley, Crackley and Cubbington is now in jail. He got three years for a JSO tunnel, the day before Green Conference started. Click here for a post of him on a train to jail. And just to make sure you know where the party is going, here’s what the aforementioned Paul Bigland thought of the Bluebell action.
Given this, we’re shocked that people are shocked that people are resigning over this issue. The Green Party has already lost control Stroud Town Council, which is nowhere near the route of HS2, due to resignations over this policy.
If you are thinking of quitting, scaling back or reducing the money you donate to the Green Party, let us know. We know there are many considering their position, submitting motions at local party level, and waiting to see if GPEW will retract press statements made in support for HS2, and clarify that support for HS2 is contingent on certain tests being met.
There were thousands of people, many of whom were GP members in the protection camps, some of whom joined the GPEW because of opposition to HS2 as the “political wing of the environmental movement”, a title the party no longer has any claim to. They are the ones who have seen the reality of HS2, unlike some who claim being schmoozed by HS2 Ltd and shown what they wanted you to see somehow counts as an objective assessment.
How did they not see how such committed environmentalists would take this as an act of utter betrayal? It would be politically naïve not to do so. To claim a vote of 345 to 318 “moves us on”? Well being politically naïve is the best case scenario, as the other is knowing this would cause a self-purge of such people and being OK with that. And shamefully, several of the responses we are seeing on social media are very much OK with that.
But that is what this sort of campaign is about, it’s about showing masses of support on social media. All these vocal people, this whole mass movement, and the other side they’ve got no-one, no signs of support, maybe because like aforementioned Joe Rukin, he’s basically been bullied off social media by the pro-HS2 lobby. Just see some of the response to this tweet. Are they in line with “Green Party Values”? [POST PUBLICATION EDIT – well maybe new replies might be after we called them out, but they know who they are! Next time, we’ll screenshot!]
The thing is, the actual vote was 345 to 318, and it needed the support of the Party co-leader to get there, and so much of the policy which has been passed is just plain wrong. Not ideologically wrong, but factually wrong.
The Green Party now claims supporting HS2 would be in line with the strategy to reduce urban sprawl, despite the fact that large areas around Lichfield, Solihull, Coventry, Brackley, Aylesbury and the Colne Valley Park in London which were protected green belt are now along with dozens of more rural sites brownfield, and ripe for development.
The Green Party now claims supporting HS2 would be in line with the strategy to reduce carbon emissions, an argument which completely ignores massive carbon output caused by building HS2, with none of the three the official forecasts predicting carbon neutrality on a 120 year forecast.
The Green Party now claims support for HS2 could dramatically reduce rail fares due to higher capacity, despite the fact that HS2 will never make a profit and require a massive ongoing subsidy forever.
The Green Party now claims that HS2 would benefit communities in north and mid-Wales (Amendment 2), whilst claiming at the same time that HS2 is an England-only project (Amendment 3)!
And that’s the thing. This is not just about HS2, but this is an absolutely terrible policy which has not been scrutinised and lacks research on several levels, meaning the Green Party is now effectively endorsing one of the bodies whose profit-before-professionalism attitude helped bring us Grenfell.
The motion as passed the Conference states more than once that “Positive environmental outcomes will be delivered by each of the stations achieving a BREEAM status of excellent or better.”. ‘BREEAM stands for “Building Research Establishment Environmental Assessment Methodology” administered by the Building Research Establishment (BRE).
As a result, the Green Party has now advocates BRE as the arbiter of environmental standards in building, a company heavily implicated in the Grenfell disaster. It’s not that the proposers couldn’t have known this as the final report was produced just days before conference, it was revealed in 2022 that BRE had conducted a test of the Grenfell cladding which it had “failed spectacularly”. In the final Grenfell report published days before conference, the Inquiry found:
“Much of the work carried out by BRE was marred by unprofessional conduct, inadequate practices, a lack of effective oversight, poor reporting and a lack of scientific rigour. In some cases we saw evidence of a desire to accommodate existing customers at the expense of maintaining the rigour of its processes.”
So anyone who has had to deal with HS2 Ltd in the past knows they will fit right in.
But in some ways the commitment to Northern Powerhouse Rail is worse than the one to HS2. Of course we are for rail investment in the North of England, many of us are saying this is what should have been prioritised to start off with. But we don’t actually know what NPR is. There are some concepts, Transport for the North have got a lovely video, and some documents with suggested options and maps, but the last Government said in March they had only got as far working on developing a route between Liverpool and Manchester. So we don’t know what NPR will be. We don’t know the route, we don’t know the cost, and we certainly don’t know what the environment impact will be. But whatever those things are, we now want them. That’s not evidence-based policy. Instead of stating in policy that we want better rail links across the North of England (or dare we say it, in the whole country?), the Green Party has thrown it’s weight behind a slogan, and we will now live and die on that slogan, no matter what that slogan turns out to represent.
This is how political lobbyists operate. The same way an imaginary version of HS2 has been invented and lobbied for to get a policy through GPEW conference which can be distilled into “Green Party support for HS2”. The thing is this is what always happens, In 2006 the Eddington Transport Study for the DfT stated:
“The risk is that transport policy can become the pursuit of icons. Almost invariably such projects – ‘grands projets’ – develop real momentum, driven by strong lobbying. The momentum can make such projects difficult – and unpopular – to stop, even when the benefit/cost equation does not stack up, or the environmental and landscape impacts are unacceptable. The resources absorbed by such projects could often be much better used elsewhere.”
That was what happened with HS2 and that is now what is happening with NPR. The Green Party has never been lobbied in the way we have seen in the last few years over HS2 and NPR. But now, basically whatever NPR ends up being, it must be environmentally sound, because the Green Party already support it. The construction industry have tried to turn the Green Party into their apologists and lobbyists, and the moment the job is done. Now they move on, and a couple of days after the conference social media accounts for both Labour4HS2 and LibDems4HS2 were set up less than four hours apart. It might not be of surprise to see so many of the people who were involved with Greens4HS2 getting on board. So it seems for many people, the HS2 bit is more important that the political party they are allied to. But why on Earth would people be more interested in this multi-billion pound project than their supposed political principles……..?
So here we are. The idea was meant to be that no-one could ever criticise the environmental credentials of HS2 again, because the Green Party were meant to have seen the devastation and destruction and agreed with it, but that agreement turns out to be conitingent…..
We’ve now got a few actions we’d like to to take, which you can see at the top of the page.
Greens Against HS2 
Great article and analysis. The policy recognises that phase one ‘implementation has had significant ecological impacts’. We all know that environmental harm has been caused. The question now is how much damage and what can be done about it?
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Never easy to choose whether to leave, or to be “in and against”. Given the essentially more democratic structure of the Green party, I’m inclined towards the latter for the moment. Looking forward to a strong campaign based on the information shared in your post.
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