IN the Knutsford Guardian of June 29, 2012, George Osborne dismissed alternative and substantive plans to the new A556 road, paraphrasing the highways authority’s ‘it’s not good value for the money’.

These plans were to route northbound M6 traffic to the M56 at a novel and effective configuration at junction 20, eastbound towards Manchester, and to detrunk the existing A556 to alleviate the understandably intolerable burden on the current residents.

That nebulous statement and refusal of our Tatton MP or the HA during 2012 to fairly reappraise costs of the professionally prepared and re-costed – at the expense of affected residents – new junction 20 option was illogical and difficult to understand. Some 2,000 signatories have put their names to the subsequent petition, including residents of Mere who want to preserve our green belt, calling for a rethink on the ‘preferred route’ for the new A556. On January 28, the announcement of the preferred route for the high speed HS2 reveals the real reason for that intransigence.

The carefully-hidden agenda – hidden from the electorate and without any form of consultation – was to ruin rural parishes, Tabley, High Legh, Millington, Rostherne, to name but a few, transforming the green belt of north Cheshire into a new concrete and steel commuter corridor. The motive for the secrecy is patently obvious.

Furthermore, the high-speed HS2 preferred route has costed into it, an additional £600 million detour north, then easterly detour through the green belt of north Tatton, whereas the far less costly, shorter, and logical route is for the HS2 to branch south of Lower Peover, Knutsford and Mobberley, but to the west of Wilmslow, heading directly north to the Airport and central Manchester. So, we, the electorate, are confronted with no to the junction 20 alternative to the new A556 because it’s five miles further, and no to the direct, shorter and less costly HS2 route.

But we are also presented with the six miles further (unnecessarily further and costly) detour of the HS2 route.

Quite apart from the issue of whether the HS2 is genuinely all it is hyped to be, or is indeed needed at all – most of us are very happy with the current two-hour express to central London.

It rather smacks of Benjamin Disraeli’s opinion of his own party (House of Commons, March 17, 1845) – “A Conservative government is an organised hypocrisy.”

FRANCIS W BALLARDIE