Oh, really? That’s really interesting.
You must be in contact with Pier Andrews and people like that, then, from New Zealand?
That’s good.
Oh, OK, yeah.
It’s badly managed, the whole thing. There’s so many towns on the route which are going to be flattened in order to drive it through those. I think the consultation has been limited to non-existent for the entire time. It will be an interesting thing to get into. We could look into that issue.
It’s still seen as a thing 10 years down the line, even though they are starting to build it now. Certainly, these communities that are on the line itself which are being affected, which people care about, which is difficult.
Especially because it’s such a huge investment as well. There’s so much political investment in it now that people’s careers are on the line if they backtrack, or if it goes dramatically over budget. I think as a result of that, the consultation has been going badly.
That is definitely an interesting thing. We could look into that.
Exactly, which is a bad sign, isn’t it?
Especially because a lot of people are questioning why we were building this in the first place. It connects towns to London, but then a lot of people are arguing that it’s not about connecting places to London. It’s about connecting places in the north of the country to each other, or connecting Edinburgh better to Manchester, or Manchester to Liverpool.
That’s where the growth opportunity is. London can only grow so big. Dragging more people into London [inaudible 16:54] , it’s going to have a limit, I think. That’s what a lot of people are questioning, I think, with the investment itself.
It’s such a huge amount of money. As in, it could have been spent doing lots more basic things on the northern railways, maybe, and just making sure...There are still diesel trains that run up north, rather than electric.
A lot of our system isn’t electrified yet. There’s a history to it, which I think has been ignored up until this point. It’s a really interesting topic.
I’m afraid that would not be possible.
We’ll consider. That’s really interesting. It was good to hear that High Speed Two has traveled over to Taiwan.
Sure.
