Bigger questions than HS2 need answering

Most of the ‘anti’ points and indeed the ‘in favour’ points have been made time and again both in this newspaper and in the national media at large. May I mischievously suggest that just perhaps if the wrong question is asked it is perhaps not that surprising that a definitive valid answer fails to materialise.

Mr Poole, in stating that with a rising population that we will simply run out of railway capacity, has made a valid point if this rising population is an inevitability. However, as someone who has been alarmed at what I consider the over population of this country since my long discarded youth when the population was said to be 48 million, it is this inevitability of population growth both nationally and internationally that needs addressing. I accept that internationally we can have no influence and, whilst a member of the dysfunctional European Union, we are in a similar space. The European Union needs drastic reform or it will inevitably go the way of similar ‘power blocks’ and I simply do not believe that long term it is feasible to have in effect a continent with such differing cultures and individual identities settling for the status quo being dished out from Brussels.

At present we have no control over what our population might become as, in theory at least, most of the continent’s citizens have a full legal right to settle here. If even a modest proportion were to do so even a dozen HS2 projects would leave us short of capacity and with a quality of life that would plunge to an unbearable standard.

Under the present ‘rules of engagement’ all our planning strategies are hopeless guesswork and depends on so many unknown variables so as to be virtually meaningless. It could be that in building HS2 we in effect encourage the growth of population that would be needed to make it at least semi viable but would this be an overall plus? I think not. Certainly it would generate economic activity with far reaching consequences such as the need for more schools, hospitals to cater for the increased population.

We are, I fear, chasing the wrong goals all the major nations are fixated on attempting to foster growth but with not enough emphasis on sustainability.

My ideal United Kingdom would be one that not only governed itself but one that would seek sustainability through attempting to be capable of feeding, fuelling and defending itself and one that sought to pay its way in the world by making sure that the national balance of payments statistics were at least close to balancing.

Pie in the sky I know but ‘to build or not to build HS2’ - should this be the question or should the question be a far bigger one? - H Pearce, Church Lane, Lighthorne, near Warwick.