Over in England, the costs for building a high-speed railway line keep increasing because it turns out they’re as obsessed with “diversity” as Americans, according to writer Guy Adams.

Writing in the Daily Mail this week, Adams pointed to a “remarkable official report” published last year by High Speed Two Ltd., the taxpayer-funded company reportedly building the High Speed 2 (HS2) line.

“The document, which runs to no fewer than 145 pages, is described as an ‘Equality Impact Assessment’. It appears to have been commissioned because HS2 bosses were required, by law, to establish whether the construction of a 52-mile stretch of the railway, linking Crewe with Manchester Piccadilly, might somehow upset minority communities,” he explained.

“Over page after torturous page, HS2 tells readers how building a train line might somehow impact people with ‘protected characteristics,'” he added.

Does this sound familiar? The same thing is happening in the United States, where long-established highways are being torn down for the sake of “equity.”

Pete Buttigieg commissions first grant to tear down ‘racist’ road in Detroit https://t.co/a5aAYdriQE pic.twitter.com/5hXegCNpMT

— BPR (@BIZPACReview) September 19, 2022

Returning to the report, it gripes that HS2 will cross many communities that are disproportionately represented by minorities.

“Some 62 areas have ‘a disproportionate representation of residents of ‘Mixed’ ethnicity’, while 21 have ‘a disproportionate representation of residents of ‘Asian/Asian British’ ethnicity’, and 35 ‘showed a disproportionate representation of residents of ‘Black’ ethnicity,'” Adams noted.

Oh no!

But it gets stupider.

“Elsewhere, the chin-stroking report worries that an HS2 construction site north of Crewe could ‘give rise to disproportionate and differential effects on pregnant women’ because it would take them longer to drive to the maternity unit at nearby Leighton Hospital,” Adams explained.

“Meanwhile, the temporary closure of a road near Manchester Airport might discriminate against ‘disabled children’ on the grounds that they often use it to visit a local Adventure Farm,” he continued.

The document reportedly continues like this almost indefinitely, with the writers “fretting” about how construction of HS2 will victimize this or that special interest group, including “old people,” “young mothers,” and even so-called “sex workers.”

“If HS2 is built, the report notes that they will lose the use of a ‘drop-in centre’ on Fairfield Street near Piccadilly that provides ‘sexual health services’ and a needle exchange,” according to Adams.

Here’s what the report itself reportedly says: “‘The permanent loss of this facility may give rise to a disproportionate effect for women and a differential effect for women working in the sex industry in Manchester.”

The horror!

And then there’s this: “Worse still, building the train line could for some reason apparently be particularly bad news for drug addicts and prostitutes ‘with English as a second language,'” Adams  notes.

Seriously?

To be fair, there’s a lot of appeasement of drug abusers here in the U.S. as well:

Homeless woman says Portland makes street life ‘a piece of cake’: 3 meals a day… just wake up, get high https://t.co/jf3RkTiQ8L pic.twitter.com/M5gYi4lFFd

— BPR (@BIZPACReview) January 3, 2023

According to Adams, the “most bizarre” part of the report complains that HS2 could somehow, someway impact minorities who’re already suffering “higher than average levels of concern about crime.”

But what does crime have to do with a railway line? Better yet, what it does have to do with so-called hate crimes? Adams notes the report contains “several stern paragraphs” about the number of LGBT community members who’ve experienced hate crimes in the past year.

This brings us to the money aspect of the story. Adams rightly notes that keeping all these special interest groups happy will obviously require spending more money, which therefore explains why HS2 has become “the single most costly disaster in British public-sector history.”

“The massive infrastructure project was supposed to cost £33 billion when it was unveiled in 2010. That rose to almost £56 billion in 2015. But now it’s on course to chew through an astonishing £180 billion, according to Lord Berkeley, vice chair of an official 2020 review of the project. That equates to more than £6,000 for every household in the land,” he wrote.

Likewise, while it was originally supposed to be ready by 2026, the end date has since been extended to sometime between as early as 2029 and as late as 2041. Fantastic …

To be fair, there are a few other factors at play, including “increases in the cost of concrete and other building materials, delays due to Covid, appalling oversight by politicians and civil servants, and endless pushback from Nimby-ish local residents and environmental groups who have spent years lobbying for tracts of the railway to be rerouted underground.”

But the “biggest” factor, according to Adams, is the obsession with “diversity.” And that obsession exists within the framework of the project, according to MP Greg Smith, precisely because it’s a government project.

“The biggest problem, which this diversity stuff is a symptom of, is that HS2 is an entirely state-sponsored project. There is no private money at stake. There is no investor putting pressure on people to deliver on time and under budget. Instead, they know the taxpayer will always be there to bail them out,” he said.

Bingo! It’s a problem very familiar to those in the U.S., where the big, centralized government of President Joe Biden loves nothing more than to destroy otherwise noble projects with its focus and obsession on all the wrong things.

Remember Afghanistan? Exactly …

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Vivek Saxena

Senior Staff Writer
Vivek@bizpacreview.com

V. Saxena is a staff writer for BizPac Review with a decade of experience as a professional writer, and a lifetime of experience as an avid news junkie. He holds a degree in computer technology from Purdue University.

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