He's always been rabidly anti HS2, and will exploit any point whatsoever in that cause even when the point itself is dubious, as with this signalling case. The fact is UK is not at all behind other European countries in renewing and replacing signalling technology, and most that are actively rolling out ETCS in the level 2 form (not moving block) are limiting it to particular European corridors and new high speed lines. Denmark differs in that they have committed to early network wide L2, but they are struggling with costs and timescales as they are effectively having to resignal their entire network in one go. UK's NR has previously declared network wide L2 as being the endgame, but that was in the heady days of high spending, while today's Digital Railway initiatives are more targeted and nuanced. For the majority of their lines, France, Germany, Belgium, Switzerland and others are instead morphing their legacy protection systems into a modernised Level 1 LS (limited supervision) ETCS implementation (using standard ETCS hardware to recreate Swiss ZUB, German Indusi functionality for instance). That approach, with a simple wired interface for each existing signal, doesn't require the complete replacement of all the underlying systems as has invariably been the case with L2 schemes to date. Modern UK renewal schemes are supposed to be 'ETCS-ready', which is mainly satisfied by the use of modern processor-based interlocking technology, routine today anyway.
