INTRODUCTION

‘It's tragic that we have protest groups talking about “this ancient woodland” … It's bollocks. They're not campaigning for forests, they're not campaigning for butterflies. They pretend to be, but what they're really furious about is that their house prices are getting it’. These are the uncompromising words of Boris Johnson, the current Mayor of London and common media figure, when he was asked to give his view of the opponents to the High Speed 2(HS2), the UK's £50bn+ highspeed rail project to speed up travel between London and Birmingham – and eventually Manchester and beyond. According to the proponents of this massive development project, the HS2 link is necessary to alleviate overcrowding on routes in and out of London and will be an engine for economic growth for the north of England. As it often goes in such cases, the opponents of the project refute these claims and argue that the Y-shaped HS2 railway project is a ‘disastrous white elephant’ to which there are better and less harmful alternatives. According to the anti-HS2 campaigners, the promise of ‘growth, jobs and productivity’, rests on fiddled economics. Obviously, Boris Johnson's statements are deliberately provocative as they were meant to serve a political purpose. In the spring of 2014, the ‘hybrid bill’ paving the way for the HS2 high-speed rail link was up for vote in the House of Commons. By claiming that opponents of HS2 are simply ‘pretending’ to have an environmental objection when they in fact are ‘furious’ about house prices decreasing because of the £50 billion railway route, Boris Johnson probably hoped to mop up the last pockets of resistance against what is to become the UK's biggest development project of the coming decades.

It would be easy to dismiss the statements of Boris Johnson as simple electionyear politicking or populism. As a matter of fact, he is but one of the many politicians who believe that environmental law has gone astray by providing the wider public and environmental NGOs with additional procedural environmental rights which could be used to block or at least delay large infrastructure projects.