HS2: How Andy Burnham shows up region’s response to axing of high speed rail’s Leeds link – Yorkshire Post Letters

AS the Bill regarding the Manchester leg of HS2 goes before Parliament this week, the thought occurs that, had both legs of HS2 north of Birmingham been cancelled, Andy Burnham would be making much more of a fuss than Yorkshire’s politicians about the cancellation of the Leeds link. Even more so had the eastern leg been left as the sole surviving route.

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What is needed is a loud, immediate and sustained response by our political and business leaders objecting to the exclusion of the HS2 link to Leeds, focusing on its reinstatement.

This should include the need for an HS2 link beyond Leeds to the further north, taking full account of its contribution in taking traffic off M1 and A1(M) motorways and enabling the existing rail network more capacity to deliver a better service, rather than the promise of the upheaval of constant upgrades to deliver partial improvement to the now perpetually inferior East Coast Mainline services.

Our political leaders have failed us and they need to take urgent corrective action, starting now, before our economic prospects decline relative to elsewhere, now subsidised by the cancellation of HS2 to Leeds.

The cancellation not only fails to address the famed north-south levelling-up promise, but introduces a new east-west chasm.

From: James Buick, Northallerton.

HOW can Boris Johnson’s biography of Winston Churchill, or any future work, be taken seriously when, in response to his former colleague David Davis (Tom Richmond, The Yorkshire Post, January 22), he denied knowledge of Leo Amery’s quote ‘In the name of God, go’?

Let me put it another way – Churchill never brought the Office of Prime Minister in such disrepute when he responded to questions from MPs. He was a statesman, not a serial liar and international embarrassment.

From: Peter Buckley, High Hoyland.

INSTEAD of MPs agreeing not to lie in respect to their Parliamentary duties, they should swear to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth; they should agree that to not answer or give a devious answer to a legitimate question in Parliament is a fraud for which they will liable.

From: Malcolm Naylor, Ilkley.

THE concentration of mainstream media on the PM’s parties, whilst our economic system collapses and Russia, Ukraine and the West prepare for war, is a disaster.

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