I am really pleased that the billions we are coughing up for HS2 will be breaching the North South divide so we will ALL benefit.

Can't wait to use this new hi speed link from Hartlepool to London should be able to get there in around the same time as now. ..Northern my arse.

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Unfortunately hs2 is providing 1000s of highly paid job's for about the next 10 years as will that other white elephant hinkley point.

These jobs can't be replicated by building more social housing.

Way of the world unfortunately.

I dread to think what THE REAL NORTH will be like in 10 ton15,years time when we are all supposed to benefit. I think this divide should be renamed Northish South divide

All these billions getting spent, so Southerners can get to London 12 minutes quicker, yet there isn't any money for a toilet after 6pm in Hartlepool station.

HS2 means you can get from London to Birmingham half an hour earlier. So, why not just change the timetable so it leaves half an hour earlier and save all that dosh.
Meanwhile we have a shit hourly service that finishes early and have to travel in 'trains' so old, the only thing holding them together is the many coats of paint the new franchisees slap on them when they take over the contract.
Public transport is a joke by all parties, even Labour when last in power did did sod all about bus privatisation or the trains.

Southern Rail must be one of the worst services in the World.

The purpose is to expand the London commuter belt and turn the Midlands into a series of dormitory towns for those who can't afford a flat in London but will be able to afford a season ticket on HS2.... That's what HS1 has done, my in laws live in Ashford and suddenly in the last few years there's all these smart flats, office block conversions etc going on...

It pains me to say this, but what can we do about it?

We live in a remote redneck town that has been on the main line for anything.

There are 5 centres in the UK now, Leeds, Manchester, Birmingham, Cardiff and London.

I am sure we could all get well paid jobs in one of those areas, if we wanted to. But most of us dont, we prefer to live here, and expect the businesses and jobs to come to us.

Thats not the fault of any government.

If HS2/3 extended to the North East, it would be Newcastle. It still wouldnt help Hartlepool.

And from the plans it is going to York.

Which seems OK to me.

But if HS2 is going all the way to York, how is that going to benefit people from the north east? By the time you travel from anywhere in the north east to York and wait for the connecting HS2 to take you round the north west of the country you might as well have stayed on th old east coast line with either Virgin or Grand Central, probably get to London quicker

but if it extends to Newcastle, how does that benefit Hartlepool? How far do you take this?

And f every town with a station was connected, and it stopped at every town, it would take all day to get anywhere.

Not sure what the point is. We dnt live in a commuter town. Thats our choice isnt it?

A recently built estate in Mexborough is to be bulldozed. The residents are ecstatic over HS2.

Well that's another issue. Some of them have stables horses and have owned the land for decades.

They should be compensated 10 times the value but they won't. They are expendable. The corporate machine doesn't give a shit.

All the evidence suggests that this is the case. HS2 will only benefit London, not the Midlands or the North.

The Mancs think they're doing alright. Time was it was only Manure fans who had an over-inflated sense of their own importance. Now it's the whole damned city.

I wouldn't care, but I prefer Leeds, Sheffield, York, Newcastle, Liverpool, Hull any day of the week.

If push comes to shove, I'd rather spend the weekend in Manchester than Middlesbrough.

I agree about Manchester. I spend lots of time now across the country, and some places I love, some I hate and some I just dont get.

London I love
Liverpool Love it
and Edinburgh.

Leeds I can take or leave

Birmingham and Manchester I hate.

Glasgow I just dont get.

Cardiff looks fantastic but has more homeless peolel and beggers than all the others put together.

all this money spent just to get to london a few mins, quicker is beyond me. much better spent on opening a few closed lines. for one northallerton to harrogate. there,s plenty of these throught the north where the talk is millions not billions. not everyone wants to travel just to london for a start.

I like London if work are paying for me to go, or I'm down for the day watching Pools.

All those cities you mentioned are great, with the exception of Birmingham, which needs to try harder. Brummies are nice people but they are really happy to accept 3rd rate.

I was very disapppinted in it when I was there last week.

Lacks something and needs a massive facelift.

It possibly is, but that's not helped by the fact that London is overheating ,because successive governments but the tories in particular are creating a demand down there , rather than diverting some business further up the country.

But why would businesses want to come North?

Seriously?

They come here for what reasons?

I know a couple of firms that moved North but now spend more money than it was worth going back and forward to London on the train and hotel bills, as most of their lucrative clients are there.

We live here through choice. Like I said earlier, we need to move to where the jobs are.

Mr I, Fat Man, NottinghamPoolie, and plenty of others have moved through work.

I am struggling to see ow you can force companys to move to Hartlepool. Therfore we get the rail link applicable.

There was a survey done in he national press about populations in the north east a while ago.

Hartlepool is now just about the smallest by population in the whole of the North East.

Stockton
Gateshead
Durham
North Tyneside

All bigger.

We are well down on any rail link food chain

Companies do relocate out of London if they are on a good line there. Prime example is Leamington Spa, loads of business started to relocate there about 20 years ago as they are an hour or so from London. Problem is that the house prices there are astronomical, same as anywhere within the London pull.

Leamington Spa is ideally located for businesses that work nationally.

Hartlepool isn't.

In fact if a firm did want to relocate to the north east I doubt hartlepool would be in the top ten places to do so.

Well most don't , for obvious reasons, that is why you need state intervention. Labour always made sure there were lots of public sector jobs up here, now there aren't even those jobs in great numbers. Having good transport links helps as well, but ours are shi*e and will continue to be so under a tory government. What we are getting in the North East is a microcosm of the current trend for all investment to go to cities, in the NE those cities will be Newcastle and the fake one Teesside, that investment will be the death knell for what's left of any services in Hartlepool such as Hospital, Law Courts, Jobcentre, Railway station etc.

Firms have came here though because of the cheap labour available and government subsidies, Nissan for example and probably Hitachi as well

I agree with all that Mr horden.

But the fact remains we don't have to live here.

And nothing is very gonna change what's happening.

At some point in the future places that are in now will become the next ghost towns.

Nothing lasts forever.

Obviously if London is the epicentre of business, then all those within a 100 mile radius stand to benefit, such as Leamington, Swindon, Slough, Reading , Cambridge etc

A few have. But not many. A few more tried and failed. Samsung and Siemens.

I work for a firm now with a 1.6 billion turnover building huge structures all over the country.

Except the north east. We don't have one project here. I was on the train going thru Newcastle about 6pm tonight and I could only see 4 towe cranes.

Go to any other city and there are hundreds.

Even Newcastle isn't booming.

We don't , but then again , if people cant afford to live down South , then maybe they do have to live here. It has always been the same in respect of house prices, but whereas when I lived in Swindon it was a struggle, now it would be impossible to buy a house their on the wages I was earning back in the day. I agree the Northern satellite towns like Hartlepool and Rochdale , Bury , Halifax , the future looks grim. In saying that some of the Southern satellite towns like Swindon and Luton are struggling now.

Yep and then it will be others that think they are booming now.

It's mental what is happening at the moment.

And yet we have people living on the street.

World's gone mad. And the UK is just as bad.

Anyway how are pools getting on?

Funnily enough I was in Newcastle drinking one afternoon the other week, and I said to my mate, this place is dead, you could just feel it, sense it, other than weekends the glory days are over even for places like Newcastle. There are many reasons for this, one of them kids don't have the money their parents did at the same age, another is those kids that do would probably rather go to the gym than the pub, but the main reason is people just haven't the money in their pockets. That will only make things even worse as more businesses close.

Getting beat 1-0 , Laing gave away pen. Hawkins and Oates missed easy chances, Oates went off injured , 4700 approx., 2500 Mackems approx.

Pools: Loach, Magnay, Laing, Harrison, Adams, Newton, Hawkins, Woods, Donaldson, Oates, Amond.
Subs: Catterick, Richardson, Donnelly, Munns, Travers, Mondal, Risborough.

Sunderland: Stryjek, Jones, Matthews, Browning, Kone, Cattermole, Asoro, Gibson, Vaughan, Maja, Honeyman.
Subs: Domingues, Djilobodji, O’Shea, Love, Lens, Ndong, Khazri.

Gerrin !! Donaldson 1-1

I have to add if you live in Cambridge people generally work there for uni or spin out companies from it. I in the science area is reason I am here

Of course it is, because we're our own worst enemies.
The tories can ignore us, we don't vote for them and Labour have us tucked up snugly so can ignore us too.
Until this area shakes off its past and plays clever, we're going to be taken for granted. Wisen up. The world's moved on, so start playing the system for our benefit or carry on feeling sorry for ourselves and stagnating.

I feel really sorry for those ordinary people who live in the south east, who are basically priced out of everything. Where will it end? As London's tentacles spread even further out, what is going to happen to all those who aren't hedge fund managers or commodities traders?

You don't have to spend long in London to realise that most of the ordinary people doing the low paid jobs that keep the city's retail, hospitality and a lot of other sectors going are fairly recent arrivals from other countries. London literally couldn't function without them.

A strong work ethic is one reason they are there; another is a willingness to put up with housing conditions that we were supposed to have left behind 50 years ago. The Grenfell Tower disaster has lifted the lid on low standards and overcrowding in the social housing sector but loads more folk are living 6 and 8 to a room in the rip off private rental sector.

But hey, as long as there's somebody there to sell London's better paid their skinny lattes to go, it's all good. And if the oiks who used to live in London's working class boroughs are in the outer reaches of Essex grumbling about migration, fuck 'em - they're missing the point.

The world's metropolises have functioned like this since the industrial revolution - a.k.a. the birth of capitalism. Nothing really changes.

We need to be careful not to turn this into a race to the bottom.

Hs2 will happen and won't be coming to hartlepool. It never would.

It will get to the majority of the main cities in the UK.

Yes big cities have a café culture now that's pretentious and they have luxuries that outpost towns don't.

But instead of aspiring to get more like them and become more affluent we turn it round saying it's wrong. It isn't.

What's wrong is that small towns can't be like that. Or more worryingly don't want to be like that.

They should be more like us.

Bo they shouldn't. Everyone should be better paid and better off and have luxuries.

Towns like hartlepool have lost their ambition.

Even if Hs2 was coming here most would hate it and claim it's just a waste of money. We don't need the likes of that here.

The tall ships partly failed for that very reason. It wasn't well enough supported by hartlepool folk.

Most didn't want it.

Even though it was bloody marvellous.

Nah it wasn't for the likes of us. Can't be going there on a Sunday when the bingo is on in the club.

We deserve all we get. Fuck all

If a staunchly working class city like Liverpool can become what it is now then hartlepool should be able to do something.

We have one of the best coastlines in the UK. Yet it's more less unused.

I bet nowhere else on the planet wouldn't turn that into its main income money earner.

Like I said. No ambition.

Agree ! and that's why the elite were quite happy to flood the country with immigrants and those from the EU ( old eastern bloc countries) , as British people had learned how to circumvent the system and live on benefits rather than work and still have fook all.

I couldn't believe what I was seeing the other week, when the government said they were turning a blind eye to those living in Grenfell who shouldn't have been. FFS! they are more or less admitting that there are people living in tower blocks all over the country who are unaccounted for, that in itself is a H&S risk. Those who are sub letting council flats should go before the courts and have the book thrown at them. What sort of civilised country wouldn't want to prosecute? and turn a blind eye. They know though that it will open up a can of worms and expose a lot of their supporters who rent out property, possibly creating a paper trail that may end up at the door of some MP's.

Its madness ! there just aren't the well paid jobs around, yet those in power think its a good idea to keep raising the retirement age, on the grounds that people are living longer, another myth. The rich are living longer, the poor are not, and in 25 years time due to poor diet and obesity, longevity among the poor is predicted to fall for first time since the creation of the NHS, wonder if they will lower the retirement age then? ... nah doubt it.

I think there are those who have put a lot of effort into shaking off our past. Where I live , you would never know there was once a coal mine in every village for miles. I think that is the problem, those in power have tried to recreate the North East and failed miserably. The North East is only here because of industry , now it has gone , is there any reason for the North East to exist anymore, clearly there are those in Westminster who think not, but have the attitude , if you want to live there fair enough , but you will have to feed on the scraps. The North East can only survive with a leg up from the state. Its not getting that at the moment and that is why it feels like is bumping along the bottom. The only way I can see us flourish is under a Socialist Labour government, who would distribute the money more evenly across the regions, or we become independent or threw our lot in with the Jocks.

they will struggle big time and the struggle will actually get worse if transport links do improve as it will take even more out of the towns and not into it. people have got used to working and shopping in the big cities and only really live in the towns you mention. halifax station is busy on a saturday morning and dinner time with loads going to leeds or manchester with very few getting off the trains at that time. same at keighley station where its standing room only to leeds about 12o,clock.

These figures ahould make people think.

And this is being instigated by the UK's largest construction companires.

Frances HS rail, £22m a mile
HS1 £70m a mile
HS2 £400m a mile

And nobody has asked why, but given them contracts to commence instead.

I wonder how many tory MP'S have shares in the contractors awarded contracts.

It always cost us more , that's the way we do things in the UK, all the rich and powerful with their noses in the trough, syphoning off public money. HS2 will probably end up costing more than the figure projected. A nation of Tw*ts and Pirates.

Places like Hartlepool and the like will just become one big housing estate, with no services to speak of, with people having to travel to Middlesbrough to do anything . There will be plenty of betting shops, tattoo parlours, takeaways and charity shops though

Don't blame ordinary people for this. If all you've known is the shit end of the stick, how do you make improvements?

If all you do to a dog is kick it you can't complain if it bites.

If it wasn't for the north east then Britain would never have acheived the status it did (and still has). Time for a bit back I reckon.

London is a bloated entity. It should have had its government departments moved out years ago. The immigrants brought in to service the place are there to keep wage rates down and property prices up for the more affluent residents. A prime example of globalisation in action.