Politics

Jeremy Hunt’s HS2 comments from 2020 come back to haunt him

A tweet sent by Jeremy Hunt in 2020 has come back to haunt him.

The chancellor praised the government’s ambition after Boris Johnson delivered a speech to Parliament highlighting the necessity of HS2 to modernise Britain’s ageing infrastructure.

“Whether you are stuck in a jam on the A303 or on the outskirts of Lincoln. Whether you are trying to get from Warrington to Manchester or toiling across the Pennines by rail, you know that this country is being held back by our inadequate infrastructure.

“And so in the next few weeks this government will be setting out more details of a transport revolution”, he said.

The comments have resurfaced after Rishi Sunak defied senior Tories and business leaders to scrap HS2 from Birmingham to Manchester saying “the facts have changed” and the cost of the high-speed rail scheme had “more than doubled”.

It would be less than ideal, therefore, if this tweet by his chancellor was to get shared around widely:

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Jack Peat

Jack is a business and economics journalist and the founder of The London Economic (TLE). He has contributed articles to VICE, Huffington Post and Independent and is a published author. Jack read History at the University of Wales, Bangor and has a Masters in Journalism from the University of Newcastle-upon-Tyne.

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