WE couldn’t contain our excitement on hearing HS2 might be brought forward.

Cheshire can now look forward to being just another suburb of the London commuter belt with all associated problems for roads, schools, hospitals etc.

While some jobs will be created during the construction, we assure you that once complete, it will be computerised, robotised and controlled by a box the size of a microwave miles from Cheshire and very few humans will be allowed anywhere near it.

Meanwhile the council and developers will use the HS2 card to build over vast areas of glorious countryside in the name of progress, the council having abandoned trying to protect green spaces under sustained pressure from planners and developers, some of whom are quite prepared to tell us all that what we need is a dose of the plague and that we deserve it.

The ‘affordable housing’ mantra will be trotted out.

We know other countries have high speed rail but many have much more land than we have.

Will we not need our land to grow food when exporting countries need their surplus to feed themselves?

If it is ever completed, the current officials and planners will have long since retired and when asked by their grandchildren what they did when they had power, they will be able to tell them they were responsible for every bit of green disappearing between Wilmslow and the Staffordshire border.

What a legacy to leave them.

H & M Taylor