This would have sounded more plausible if they'd mentioned it five or ten years ago...

From Midlands Connect:

* Revealed for the first time, 73 stations on the existing rail network stand to benefit from improved passenger services as a direct result of the capacity released by HS2, including 54 stations with no direct HS2 services;
* Evidence submitted to the Oakervee HS2 Review by Midlands Connect;
* High speed line will take long-distance rail journeys off the existing network, providing capacity for new routes, as well as faster and more frequent local and inter-regional services;

And so on and so forth (they seem to be repeating the same basic argument over and over).

Quite clearly, HS2 was never about improving the London-Birmingham connection, which was absolutely fine. Trains every 20 or 30 minutes, sub-2 hour journey time and a reasonable ticket price (compared to some routes on English railways).

Somebody calculated that even at the original £20 - £30 billion estimate (ha!), it would be cheaper to demolish Birmigham and just rebuild it half an hour closer to London on the existing line.

Hooray for local public transport and local passenger trains, of course. If they had advanced this as their original reason for building HS2, people might have bought it, but to suddenly "reveal for the first time" at this late stage in the game seems a bit desperate.

This all reminds me of the reasons trotted out for introducing ID-cards, every few months they'd think up a new one to see if any of them stuck. None did, and the scheme was quietly shelved.

Fun Online Polls: HS2 vs the Graduate Tax; When did The Big Ship sail?

The results to last week's Fun Online Poll were as follows:

If the UK govt had £60 billion to spare, what's a better use of the money?

Spend it on the HS2 railway - 16%
Waive the 9% Graduate Tax - 84%

Good, that's what I thought.

A low turnout on an obscure issue. Some people missed the point - at present the UK government probably doesn't have £60 billion to spare, in which case it should do neither.

This was just a dig at the Tories who insist that HS2 is a good investment (if Labour were in power, no doubt they would say the same, having dreamed up this crap pre-2010) but that writing off student loans/waiving the Graduate Tax is unaffordable.
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Something else that has been bugging me recently is, when did The Big Ship sail on the Ally-ally-oh?

The way we sang it when we were at school, it was the Nineteenth of September, but that's a long time ago, and it didn't strike me as very important, being a silly nursery rhyme.

However, having Googled it recently, it turns out that some people sang that it sailed on the Last Day of September.

Hmmm.

So that's this week's Fun Online Poll.

Vote here or use the widget in the sidebar.

Fun Online Polls: Influencing the goverment; HS2 vs student loan write-offs.

The results from last week's Fun Online Poll were as follows:

Which is the better strategy for influencing Labour or Tory policies?

Join the party and agitate from the inside - 11%
Vote for another party whose policies you agree with - 89%

Which is what I have observed. I'm relieved that so many agree. Thanks to all who took part.
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I know that it is silly to match receipts from particular taxes with particular items of government expenditure, but it's sometimes useful to do so to put things into perspective.

Last week, the Transport Secretary insisted that the white elephant vanity HS2 railway line would come in on time and on budget at £55.7 billion.

Most are agreed it is a waste of taxpayers' money, of benefit only to a very few (the construction companies and some landowners) and nobody in his right mind believes it will be on time and on budget. In fact, we know it won't, because the original budget set in 2010 was £32.7 billion.

The Tories then went on the offensive and claimed that it would "cost" £100 billion to write off student debts, forcing the innumerate Labour education spokeswoman into an embarrassing and unnecessary climb down. That's the nominal amount of the outstanding loans, but they will be collected via a graduate tax and lots will be written off, so what's relevant here is the net present value of the tax receipts, let's call it £60 billion in round figures.

So you could argue, future graduates are paying 9% extra income tax on income above the £21,000 allowance in order to fund HS2.

Which I hope most would agree is completely bonkers.

So that's this week's Fun Online Poll.

Vote here or use the widget in the sidebar.

"Lawyer launches petition against HS2 after saying she will have no choice but to sell her home"

Emailed in by Chrome Man from the Manchester Evening News:

A lawyer who feels she has no choice but to sell her home over plans to build a railway beneath it has launched a petition against HS2...

There is one fairly obvious alternative to selling her home i.e. not selling her home. As she can sell her home, there are people willing to acquire it and continue using it as a home.

A 7.9 mile, 45m deep tunnel will be dug from Wythenshawe to Ardwick as part of the £56bn project...

So a heck of a lot of money will be spent on minimising the impact of HS2, and our lawyer is one of the many home owners who will benefit from that.

But Hamida Khatun, 38, first realised the HS2 track was routed below her home when the M.E.N reported on it. Despite government assurances residents won’t feel the effects, Hamida’s horrified...

The tunnel is going to be a staggering 45m down, you will not feel anything at ground level.

... and believes a ‘legacy’ to her children has been destroyed.

It's a bog standard house.

And although she could apply for compensation under HS2’s ‘Need to Sell’ scheme, she knows - and HS2 Ltd has confirmed - that success would be unlikely.

The tunnel will be 45m down. A lot of homeowners will benefit from the improved transport link (or that's the intention, at least) and some will benefit more than other. Perhaps it is true that the tunnel will shave a few quid off the value of her 'legacy' but overall, the increase in value because of HS2 will far outweigh it. And why is it that people demand compensation if something happens which depresses the value of their home but won't countenance the idea of paying a bit more tax if something happens which increases the value of their house?

The mum of two, of Reynell Road, Longsight , said: “When I bought this house 15 years ago and then slowly added value...

Slowly watched it go up in price along with house prices generally, more like, for no effort on her part.

"I thought I would leave it to my kids to pay off their debt..."

What debt? What has that got to do with anything?

"I could have moved to London but I made a sacrifice to live in this community..."

Condescending cow.

"My friends and family are here..."

Ah, perhaps that's why she stayed in Manchester.

"... and now HS2 are [sic] forcing people to change their way of life."

How? It's a house, for people to live in.

“If I can find a buyer, I will, because we don’t feel able to leave this for the kids to help their future."

Why not? It's a house etc.What will the new owner do differently?

Hamida and husband Jamal, 40, bought the house for £45,000 in 2002 but after investing heavily it was worth £150,000 at its last valuation.

The bulk of that increase is down to normal house price inflation and has naff all to do with any improvements they might have paid for. And if she sells it, she will get considerably more than £45,000 plus a few quid for new carpets or whatever.

They had planned to buy a second house while holding on to their Longsight property as an investment for daughters Zara, eight, and Liza, 12.

Aha. She doesn't even need the house and they can afford to buy another one.

Residents living under the tunnel are only entitled to a £50 payment for their subsoil plus £250 to seek advice.

'Under' the tunnel?

Other than that, they can apply for Government cash with the ‘Need to Sell’ scheme, but applicants must first prove their own attempts to sell have been dashed by HS2.

They don't need to sell, end of.

Alternatively, if their home is damaged during construction, they can claim later - although HS2 say modern construction techniques mean tunnelling effects are ‘generally small and typically go unnoticed’.

Half of central London is above some tunnel or other, they dig new ones all the time and I've never heard about anything bad happening at ground level.

Maybe Boris Johnson understands more than he lets on?

From The Daily Mail:

While some Tory ministers were under pressure from voters to oppose the HS2 Bill at second reading last night, Mr Johnson declared he had always been a fan of big infrastructure.

In a swipe at critics, he told Total Politics magazine: "It’s b*llocks. They’re not campaigning for forests, they’re not campaigning for butterflies. They pretend to be obviously, but what they’re really furious about is that their house prices are getting it."

Mr Johnson added: "People are in the humiliating position of having to pretend that there’s some environmental objection that they have, that the great crested grebe is going to be invaded or whatever. What they care about is their house prices. It’s tragic we have protest groups talking about ‘this ancient woodland’ when actually there’s no tree in this country that’s more than 200 years old."

He added that the average life expectancy of a tree could not be ‘more than 60 years’.

Mr Johnson urged the government to adopt the ‘French approach’ and wave an ‘absolutely massive chequebook’ at concerned residents to buy their homes off them for ‘top dollar’.

"Then when the whole thing goes in and is a success and generates a movement to the area, lifts the economy and the prices go up, well who’s quids in? The Government," he added.

The right thing for the wrong reason - again

When I saw that MPs were calling for the trains on HS2 to be slower, I thought there'd been an outbreak of common sense and that someone had spotted that it would make the project much cheaper to have a lower maximum speed, but I was doomed to be disappointed.

No, the lower speed is all about being green, so of course the officials in charge of building the railway came rattling back with "cutting the top speed from 360km an hour to 300km would slash the cost-benefit ratio of the £42.6bn project by 25 per cent". This may well be true, but only if the projected figures for patronage hold up in reality, which is far from certain.

I note also that, although only the first stage of the railway, to Birmingham, has been given the go-ahead, it is now spoken of as the "London to Manchester and Leeds railway".

They own land! Give them money!

Exhibit One

From ALTER:

Squaring the circle is hard, but according to Stuart Roger UKIP wants to achieve something even harder. They are determined to ditch Europe but equally determined to hang on to its biggest gravy train: the Common Agricultural Policy. Money from CAP goes to some of their most enthusiastic supporters: rural landowners and farmers…

At present the EU ladles out between £60 & £90 per acre to these and other lucky landowners. UKIP's agriculture spokesman Stuart Agnew is guaranteeing that rural landowners will still receive £80 per acre from the UK taxpayer if we quit Europe, and will have to comply with fewer irritating Brussels rules to get their mitts on our dosh. Courtesy of UKIP we will continue to subsidise the wealthy but will get even less for our money.

From the UKIP leaflet:

£80 per acre on lowland, pro-rata decrease on marginal and hill land, capped at £120,000.

Having a cap is a good idea, although it is still far too high and can easily be fiddled by splitting up a farm. I assume that Stuart Agnew's farm is just a shade underneath the £120,000 limit, that's not a random figure.

But what is nonsense (and existing EU rules are the same) is having higher subsidies for more productive land; the subsidy is supposed to "help struggling farmers" or some such bullshit, in which case the subsidies ought to be higher for marginal land.

Exhibit Two

Via LVT Campaign, from the FT:

The government has spent £63m buying up 106 homes blighted by the proposed HS2 high speed rail link. Estate agents say tens of thousands of homes along the route have lost up to a quarter of their value.

Although the future of the £50bn north-south rail link is still uncertain, more than 500 homeowners have applied to have their property bought under the government’s exceptional hardship scheme.

Of these, 340 claims have been rejected, but 106 homes have been purchased at an average price of just under £600,000, highlighting fears of how soaring property prices could inflate the final compensation bill.

The government is spending £1.1bn in this parliament on consultants, preparatory work, compensation and other expenditure. The majority of the properties it has bought have since been rented out.

Unlikely Georgists: Simon Heffer

From his column in today's Daily Mail:

The campaign to stop HS2 has my full support. To spend £17bn (for starters) on taking a few minutes off the rail journey between London and Birmingham is outrageous. We don’t have the money and even if we did, it wouldn’t be good value.

Still, how the property spivs who fund the Tory Party must be rubbing their hands at the thought of the rise in price of otherwise cheap and cheerful land in the Midlands and the North. Thanks, Dave!

Psst! Two 149-acre farms with planning for sale, going cheap!

From yesterday's FT, more HS2 tomfoolery:

The Department for Transport estimates 338 homes will have to be demolished to create the line, about two-thirds of which are in Euston...

Right, so they are going to have to displace 225 households in north/central London, pay up, move on.

Meanwhile, Knight Frank, the property services group, estimates that more than 800 houses – 250 of which are in the top bracket for council tax – along the 140-mile stretch of railway will suffer some kind of adverse impact. James Del Mar, head of Knight Frank’s HS2 team, says it is impossible to quantify the impact the project will have on property values along the route, as compensation for land affected will not be granted until 2015...

Somebody somewhere is missing a right old trick here.

Ninety-five per cent of the route is through open countryside, which is why there are only 113 houses which will have to be demolished and 800 which will "suffer an adverse impact". Let's say the houses were worth £600,000 and halve in value to £300,000. The government could bung them all £600,000 compo, total cost £548 million, about two per cent of the total cost of HS2 (before inevitable cost over-runs) and tell them to lump it.

Or The Man From The Ministry could wise up and realise that what's being affected here is purely the location value of those houses, and, seeing as those houses are in The Hallowed Green Belt, the scarcity value - it is nigh impossible to get planning for a new house in the affected areas. So the £600,000 value consisted of £150,000 rebuild cost/value of the building and £450,000 location/scarcity value of the planning permission (which has now fallen by two-thirds).

Therefore, the correct strategy from the point of view of the government (on behalf of the taxpayer as well as on behalf of those affected) would be to grant each and every single affected owner the personal right to build a carbon copy of their house anywhere they wish within a 2-mile radius of their old home. Once they have tracked down farmers who'll sell them the required bits of agricultural land for a few thousand quid (land without planning permission is dirt cheap), the government can then build a carbon copy of their old house for £150,000 and do a straight swap, old-for-new. They can even chuck in a free removal service and get the local Lord Mayor to bring them some champagne and flowers.

The total cost of this exercise is thus £137 million (913 x £150,000). The income from this exercise is the value of the 800 houses which the government gets in exchange and which are "affected" but don't have to be demolished. At depressed price of £300,000 each, that's still £240 million, which is more than enough to cover the cost of building the carbon copies, with £103 million left over as net profit!

Now, see if you can apply the same logic to sorting out Farmer John:

But at the far end of the line from Euston, in the rolling open countryside around Lichfield, John Barnes is preparing for his family’s 300-acre arable and sheep farm to be sliced in two.

“The railway will literally [sic] cut us in half. We’ll end up with the farm shop on one side of the track and a grain store on the other. Everything in the middle, including our home, will be wiped out,” he says. Mr Barnes, who also puts on weddings and runs a farm shop, says he fears for his children. “Whatever happens, it is blighted now and is unsaleable. But it is the next generation I am worried about; this place has been in my family for 100 years and it is their future that will be affected.”

Additional information: the average English farm is surprisingly small, somewhere in the region of 100 - 150 acres.

HS2 illustrates the point nicely

From the BBC:

Mr Levett had hoped to downsize but said he held out no hope for selling his house because of the HS2 plans. Despite being vehemently against it he said: "In a way I hope that it does go through my garden because if it goes through part of your property you can get the government to buy the whole plot. That's probably the only way we are going to be able to move now."

Some estate agents believe the development could help home owners in the neighbouring village.

Anita McKeogh, director of Connells Estate Agents in nearby Balsall Common, said: "For those who live too close to the line it will have a negative impact on their ability to sell, but for other people in Balsall Common I think it could help house prices. Homes have been selling well here and we had a good year last year. People want to buy here because of the good schools, it's close to the motorway and close to the train stations too. You can get to Birmingham from Berkswell train station in 15 minutes and then pick up the high speed rail, so yes, it could make it more desirable to have better rail connections."

The point being of course that rental values are determined by the surplus which society generates as a whole, and total rental values are thus more or less constant. It is quite true that rental values are not permanently attached to exactly the same physical bit of land in eternity, but this is no more than the shifting of the tides; when we have a high tide, somebody else has a low tide and vice versa - the total amount of water in the ocean does not change. Except that rental values move around over a period of years or decades rather than every 6.25 hours, obviously.

Whether or not the whole HS2 thing is a waste of money, it is not being paid for by people who 'own' the land affected (whether adversely or favourably) and in terms of total rental values, or from the point of view of land 'owners' as a whole, HS2 is at worst a zero-sum game. So Mr Levett might lose out but somebody else in Balsall Common wins; and ultimately that rental value (as capitalised into the selling price of their houses) which has passed from one to the other didn't belong to either of them in the first place.

Philip Hammond on top form

Philip's getting increasingly exasperated with the NIMBYs:

Critics say the £33billion rail link proposal from London to Leeds/Manchester is not green enough and far too expensive. But, talking exclusively to Metro, Mr Hammond launched his most scathing attack to date.

Nimby is an acronym of Not In My Back Yard – a derogatory term for people who would be in favour of something were it not taking place near their home.

‘There is not much more to their argument than Nimbyism,’ he said, ‘I hear lots of arguments about whether the country can afford it, value for money and the business case. But 95 per cent of these arguments come from people who just happen to live in [affected towns] Wendover or Aylesbury or Amersham. I don’t blame them for fighting their corner but they should be honest that their objection to this project is that it comes through their backyard. It is not a principled objection.’

Mr Hammond said instead of putting up fares, many could drop dramatically as operating companies try to compete on price with the new 250mph trains.

Ralph Smyth, of the Campaign to Protect Rural England, said: ‘It is completely wrong that this is Nimbyism. If you are spending £33billion it shouldn’t just be carbon neutral, it should be positively green.’

The Times must think most of its readers are stupid...

Exhibit One

Their wildlife correspondent wails on about the proposed HS2 route 'affecting 160 wildlife sites' and provides the map below. Now, it may be that the last remaining 160 wildlife sites in the Great Britain happen to be exactly along the route, but is it not more likely that the whole of the Great Britain is dotted fairly evenly with wildlife sites, even in towns and cities?

The total surface area of the HS2 route is only about two square miles, out of a total surface area of 88,749 sq miles, so it strikes me that a more accurate headline is "HS2 route will affect 0.002% of wildlife sites in Great Britain".
Exhibit Two

The Home-Owner-Ists have to maintain the illusion that houses are really worth what they say they are, i.e. that prices rest on fundamentals or 'pent up demand' and were not merely inflated by reckless lending, and they have produced the handy chart below which gives you the impression that the demand is there, even though gross mortgage lending fell by over sixty per cent between 2007 and 2010*. The sub text is: "Hey first time buyers! Jump on the housing ladder quick or else we'll just buy up all the houses anyway!" or something.

They are of course not comparing like-with-like, between 2005 and 2007, quarterly sales were around 400,000 of which about 22% were cash sales (= 90,000 per quarter). In 2010, quarterly sales were 200,000 of which 35% were cash buyers (= 70,000 per quarter).

So if anything, while the number of cash buyers jumped significantly between 2004 and 2005, it has been fairly stable/drifting downwards ever since). * Gross mortgage lending in 2007 was £362 billion and in 2010 it was £136 billion. Net mortgage lending has fallen to plus/minus nothing, of course.

Philip Hammond's dry sense of humour

I happened to catch a debate about the electrification of railways in Wales on BBC Parliament, the man actually seems to know what he is talking about and is genuinely enthusiatic about improving the rail network etc, but the highlight was this (Column 197, Hansard):

Mr Wayne David: In the spirit of St David's day, I respectfully remind the Secretary of State that St David probably lived in west Wales. Has he made any assessment of the extent to which west Wales and Swansea will lose out from his partial electrification of the south Wales line?

Mr Hammond: Many people coming from England will access west Wales through Cardiff, and journey times to Cardiff are being reduced. Everybody would like a high-speed railway running right to their front door, but as we - [ Interruption. ] Okay, to the next street...

The [interruption] was of course all the Tory-NIMBY MPs from the proposed HS2 route shouting "shame" and Philip Hammond was grinning broadly* when he conceded the point and said "Okay, to the next street..."

* By his standards, narrowly by anybody else's.

I'm starting to like Philip Hammond.

Two stories from The Daily Mail:

Exhibit One: Motorway speed limits could rise to 80 mph to shorten journey times and boost the economy under a radical review of road safety, Transport Secretary Philip Hammond signalled today.

He is concerned that anti-car campaigners have for too long used 'road safety' as a convenient excuse to both stymie raising speed the limit on motorways from the current 70mph, and to push for more 20mph zones* in urban areas - even when they are inappropriate.

Exhibit Two: Residents’ groups, some councils and several Tory MPs are firmly against the [high speed London-Birmingham rail link] and there are concerns that the planned 2015 start date for the scheme will be hard to meet. The 140-mile first phase could cost £17 billion and plans for extensions to northern England and Scotland will take until the 2030s.

Mr Hammond said: "Until now, the people who are opposed to it because it is in their back yard have made all the running. Now that we are getting to the real crunchy bit, the people who are going to benefit from it – which is everyone in the UK except those who have got it in their own back yard – are beginning to mobilise and articulate the significant benefits that will be delivered."

* I'd say that this is up to the people living on each individual street to decide.

NIMBYs Of The Week

From The Evening Standard:

A cemetery containing the graves of playwright Harold Pinter, retail magnate WH Smith and engineer Isambard Kingdom Brunel could be disturbed under plans for a new high-speed rail line, it was claimed today.

The “preferred route” for the High Speed Two rail link between London and Birmingham goes under Kensal Green Cemetery which contains 130 listed monuments and a Grade I listed chapel from the reign of William IV.

And, possibly the most vomit inducing NIMBY comment of all time...

Campaigners today said it would be “madness” to cut under the cemetery. Lee Snashfold, director of the General Cemetery Company, said Brunel “would be turning in his grave”.

However, HS2 said the tunnel would not affect the graves. A spokesman added: “The preferred route for consultation goes under Kensal Green Cemetery, between 80 and 115 feet below. Because of the depth of the tunnel the graves will not be disturbed.”

Readers' Letters Of The Day

From the FT:

... With regard to compensation, many affected residents feel that the "preferred [High Speed 2] route" has been chosen precisely because the government believes it can minimise pay-outs on the simple premise that the fewer the number of houses deemed to be affected, the less will have to be disbursed.

They contrast this extensively rural "preferred route" with the route chosen for High Speed One (formerly the Channel Tunnel Rail Link). The latter was built almost entirely along its length directly beside high-capacity transport corridors – the A2, M2 and M20 – which generate a correspondingly high level of noise.

The same criterion was not applied to the choice of route for HS2. The effects of 225 miles per hour trains almost every two minutes will be far more acute in a rural setting rather than adjacent to a busy motorway...

Marilyn Fletcher, Great Missenden, Bucks.
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Also from the FT:

Sir, John Kay's article On guard against the robber barons of the Rhine (Comment, August 18) was clever in the tactful way it raised important questions. Are the hedge funds toll collectors or value creators? One feature of the toll collectors of the Rhine was that the travellers had no choice but to use the Rhine and pay up.

Hedge funds may be the ultimate "heads I win big, tails I do OK" contract for the manager. But we don't have to use hedge funds, so we can't call them robber barons...

Martin White, Chairman, UK Shareholders' Association.
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Correct - hedge funds may well fleece their investors, but nobody is forced to invest in them, so AFAIAC, they are neither toll collectors nor robber barons.

But it's a useful analogy...

The first letter turns all logic on its head. The area between London and Birmingham is nigh uninhabited anyway, so if you just drew any old straight line, only a few hundred buildings would need to be demolished. But all things being equal, is it not better to put a few curves in so that only a few dozen need to be demolished? Isn't it reasonable of the government to try and minimise disruption - for its own sake and to minimise compensation claims?

The idea of running the line along the M40 motorway (or using the old Great Central Railway) is not entirely without merit, but again, this goes closer to existing towns and villages (which in turn have grown up around the junctions), so it would require thousands, rather than hundreds or dozens of buildings to be demolished.

So I think we can dismiss the first letter as special pleading - what the lady wants is extra 'compensation' from the people who want to travel from A to B. Using the analogy in the first letter, put yourself in the position of somebody who wants to travel from A to B - what do you call people who demand money from you along the way?

Toll collectors, robber barons or even highwaymen? I'd hardly call them 'value creators'.

More on HS2

The map above shows the course of HS2 passing Brackley on a 15m high viaduct. Predictably, the inhabitants of Brackley are up in arms. However, it is not all the NIMBYism you might expect. A few residents have realised that, were Brackley given a station on the new line, everyone in the town would benefit by a rise in property values that is not just due to the bubble.

Of course Brackley used to have a station, and the building still survives, but for some reason the DfT have decided not to follow the route of the old Great Central Railway (visible curving along the edge of Brackey in the map above) in favour of the 15m high viaduct mentioned earlier. The Green Party suspects this is gold plating by the DfT and I for one would not be surprised.

Perhaps, with the financial squeeze on all government departments, the DfT might be persuaded to look at cheaper alternatives, like reusing more of the railway lines we already have, be they in use or disused.

NIMBY Of The Week - Update Update

Welshblogger has found another map which shows that the edge of the cutting through which the proposed Birmingham to London high speed rail line will pass will just clip the schools at the north east corner of Chipping Warden (and not run a mile or two to the south west, as we had assumed).

Luckily, that map (click link for full version) also has a vertical scale at the bottom showing that the cutting will be over ten metres deep (the scale on the bottom right is metres above sea level, not feet - I've checked and the village is reported to be 152 metres above sea level, not 152 feet). Therefore, the high speed train will be virtually inaudible in the village itself and nothing to worry about.

NIMBY Of The Week - update

Bayard has uncovered what appears to be yet more NIMBY untruthinesse in that article:

... the Labour government announced that the proposed £30 billion high-speed rail link between London and Birmingham would cut through a stretch of land 200 yards from her house in the village of Chipping Warden, Oxfordshire.

Nope.

According to Google Maps, Chipping Warden (red marker) is about half way between Banbury and Daventry:
Here's the map of the route (from Wiki), which shows the line a mile or two to the south west of Chipping Warden:

It's a conspiracy, maan!

From that article again:

"Conspiracy theorists have suggested that the route of the proposed rail line ploughed through rock-solid Tory constituencies on purpose given that the constituents were unlikely to vote Labour anyway."

It's high speed rail! They go in straight lines! The article helpfully includes a map of the planned route, looks like a straight line to me:

And as the General Election results map shows, you'd be hard pushed to draw a straight line - or any sort of line, come to that matter - starting from London (the little red patch in the south east corner) that doesn't go through 'rock solid Tory constituencies' (i.e. the blue bits):