Tory tears welled at County Hall this week, when Cllr Richard Clewer, leader of Wiltshire Council threw his teddies from his pram over the Government’s motion to cancel the A303 Stonehenge tunnel project, while The Stonehenge Alliance welcomed the announcement by Chancellor Rachel Reeves to cancel the £2.5bn scheme as a “low value, unaffordable commitment.”
Clewer whimpered, “We are extremely dismayed and disappointed at the Government’s decision to cancel the A303 Stonehenge tunnel project. These improvements are needed now to ease traffic congestion on the A303 and reduce traffic in our communities, and also ensure economic growth in Wiltshire, unlocking jobs and investment in the wider south-west region.”
The Stonehenge Alliance alongside supporter-organisations such as Ancient Sacred Landscape Network, Campaign to Protect Rural England, Friends of the Earth, Rescue, the British Archaeological Trust, and Transport Action Network, believe the road should have been binned in 2020 when it was recommended for refusal, after a six month examination, for the damage it would cause to the World Heritage Site. The Examination Report, written by five planning inspectors, who presided over a six month examination, recommended that the application be refused.
Yet Cllr Richard Clewer continued, “It has taken many years of lobbying and working closely with partners, including National Highways, to bring this major infrastructure project to Wiltshire, and so it is a huge blow to get to the stage when construction is ready to begin, only to have this taken away from us at this late hour,” despite it seems these studies and a refusal from the High Court, the Conservative government at the time simply ignored them and continued to award contracts to construction companies regardless. So when the WC leader states, “There has already been £160m spent on this project, and cancelling it now wastes that huge investment,” who’s fault is that?! If I didn’t get planning permission to build a shed in my garden but paid a bloke to carry out the work anyway, I would bear the cost for my misjudgement, surely? It’s called acting responsibly!
John Adams, chair of the Stonehenge Alliance said, “This is a vindication of all the work of so many people over so many years from supporters around the world. National Highways’ misguided project was called out for what it was: low value and unaffordable. It was also highly damaging. Now that it has been scrapped, we need to move on. As soon as the budget is there, we need to ensure, as a priority, that local traffic is better managed and rail access to the South West improved.”
Tom Holland, historian and president of the Stonehenge Alliance, expressed his enthusiasm for the cancellation. “This is wonderful news,” he said. “This entire monstrous project, a proposal to drive a gash of concrete and tarmac through our most sacred prehistoric landscape, should never have got off the drawing board. That cancelling it will also save £2.5bn is obviously an additional perk.”
The councillor proposed the ‘monstrous project to drive a gash of concrete and tarmac through our most sacred prehistoric landscape,’ would “return the Stonehenge landscape to something like its original setting.”
He’s certainly done his homework, young Dick, because it’s a lesser known fact the ancient Britons built a gurt concrete motorway tunnel underneath Stonehenge, and it even had a Little Chef. The Egyptians built a flyover over the Pyramid of Giza too, to ease 4th dynasty congestion in Cairo. The Hanging Gardens of Babylon was just a multi-storey car park decorated with a few hanging baskets, and the Mohawks made a giant plug to plug up Niagara Falls, so their canoes could cross the sea five minutes quicker!
Its original setting is impossible to recreate now, unless you’re Dr Who, and it’s as close as it ever will be, with the mounting campaign to wreck it, which the councillor is promoting and cannot see the hypocrisy in his outburst! But to further the gibberish, Clewer finished this sentence with the unbelievable, “and allow local communities greater access to the ancient stones and the surrounding World Heritage Site.” Greater access, really? I beg to differ, it’s been fine for five thousand years, now, all of a sudden, it feels like they want to hide it, unless you cross their palms with silver; typical Tory all round.
They’ve already rerouted traffic on the upper road, so you cannot access it unless you cough up £37 for a ticket, and should the tunnel have been constructed you’d never know it was there at all. The next generation of locals would be like Tess of the d’Urbervilles, despite living close they’d be oblivious to its existence.
Face it, his last paragraph was simply a smokescreen, when really the focus of his whinge was more about reducing “rat-running in our communities, to reduce journey times to the wider south-west, to boost economic growth in Wiltshire, and to unlock jobs and investment across the region.”
It may’ve eased congestion, but destruction of the environment to do so would have been certain. We risked losing our World Heritage Site, its status as such, the appeal to tourism, the capital this brings to the county, and its historical and sacred connotations, and let’s face it, for nothing more than to get Gareth and Diane from Shrewton to Andover five minutes earlier. And that’s the real truth about this vanity project, a complete disregard for our environment and the financial benefits obtained from it to small businesses relying on tourism, simply so colossal building contracts can be backhanded to Conservative donor bum chums.
There never was a thought given to the elephant in the room, that the area is littered with undiscovered sites of archaeological importance, which once discovered by digging there, potentially wrecking, would halt the process and massively increase the cost of the project, spiralling it billions over budget. It would have been a horrorshow for future generations to frown upon us and ask “what the hell were they thinking?”
The Stonehenge Alliance explains the original budget of £1.7bn is from around 2017 and is clearly out of date. In an answer to Danny Kruger MP’s Parliamentary question on the 12th March 2024, which admits that even in 2018, the construction cost was estimated to be £1.9bn with maintenance costs of £8m a year. With construction inflation being so high since then, it is likely that the combined total cost of the scheme is over £2.5bn and that’s before it runs into any difficulties tunnelling in phosphatic chalk.
Regardless of the facts, Cllr Richard Clewer concluded, “We will remain committed to this project and will continue to work closely with all stakeholders to try to bring this project back to Wiltshire.”
But who is the proverbial “We” here? The Wiltshire Council press release suggests all the councillors are behind Mr Clewer on this one. Rather I favoured to ask our shiny new MP, Brian Mathew, also on Wiltshire Council, a penny for his thoughts, not that I gave him a penny, but still he replied, “I have been against the Stonehenge Tunnel since I first heard about it in around 2009. I was the only Councillor to speak out against it in 2017 when I was first elected to Wiltshire Council.”
When Rachel Reeves outlined her proposals to Parliament, she said Labour would not go ahead with the A303 Stonehenge scheme, but she didn’t say it was cancelled. However, in the published policy paper the scheme is listed as cancelled, therefore Clewer’s claims to remain committed to a project definitely cancelled is wasting time in office and even more taxpayer’s money; they failed to fix the existing roads from defects the size of moon craters for years, let alone engineer a project as technical as this!
It surely then serves as an example of how this immature response to the results of the general election in many of our Conservatives remaining in positions of power is simply going to hinder progress, and it’s time, now the deed is done in parliament, to eradicate this Conservative ethos which values the financial gain of multinational companies over that of smaller businesses and the aesthetics of our communities, across the board, once and for all.
Much less, we suffer from hairbrained vanity building schemes such as this, destroying our heritage, wildlife and tourist attractions just for the sake of easing congestion without the need for the drastic environmental measures necessary to be sustainable. It’s time to improve public transport in Wiltshire, so Gareth and Diane can get from Shrewton to Andover by choo-choo train. Get with the program, silly boy!
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