TUESDAY, May 19 saw another Waterside politician show a basic failure to research a subject before speaking about it (Cllr Colin Smith) – and sadly it is from the same party as before.

Cllr Smith repeats his own earlier failure to understand the HS2 strategy but wastes no time in populist diatribe against what is admittedly a very complex but very detailed infrastructure project.

For his benefit, transport improvements that anticipate or keep pace with demand are necessary for all of our longer term prosperity, or the economy stalls.

HS2 is just such a project, and it is not all about speed, as the uninformed continue to repeat, it is about capacity, and it is cheaper to build two tracks that run fast than four tracks slow, and it is cheaper and less disruptive to build HS2 than to try and build any of the the ill-thought and inappropriate alternatives with which I am sure he is familiar.

There is not the space to summarise hundreds of pages of publicly available, reasoned and objective project analysis, and Cllr Smith’s own contribution is so misleading and bereft of insight as to defy rebuttal.

Even the ‘£80bn’ figure he quotes is so distorted by ‘scope creep’ as to be a meaningless comparator to the actual construction costs, which are a fraction of that figure yet Cllr Smith accepts it without due diligence.

For example, had the M3’s planning costs been similarly burdened in advance with, say, all the new homes and feeder roads to be built as a result of the greater mobility it provided, then the M3 may also have been described as an expensive and unnecessary ‘vanity project’ by some forgotten local politician.

Would we benefit today if the M3 did not exist? Could we have just closed the existing A33 for a year and added a lane?

Of course not.

The bigger point here is that all us ultimately suffer by the low calibre, short termism., and unseemly vote grabbing tactics of populist politicians of all parties.

We can see this in the mess and lost infrastructure opportunities that litter our area like a monument to local political failure.

To see the latest in a long line of locally elected fools hubristically showboating the very same faults on a national subject with no apparent insight into the consequences of his argument, let alone an alternative proposal, is more than the electorate deserve.

‘Vanity Project’ indeed.

The mere use of such a simplistic inappropriate phrase in his letter tells us how to rate Cllr Colin Smith’s understanding of his subject, and a lot more about his capabilities.