HS2 an expensive gesture

 Both Peter Black and John Redwood have covered much of the ground that I intended to base this post on. However, there are one or two points I would like to elaborate on. 

The HS2 project was originally conceived as an attempt to keep up with the Japanese (the "bullet train") or the French (TGV). So it was already a solution in search of a problem when the thin business case Mr Redwood refers to was concocted. The fact that millions will have been spent on PR over the lifetime of the project (over £20m by the end of the next financial year, judging by Daily Telegraph figures) tends to confirm the view that HS2 has always been a vanity project rather than a useful contribution to UK transport. Just as our ineffective nuclear arsenal has sucked funds from where they were really needed in conventional defence, so HS2 has diverted money from the completion of the electrification programme brought to the coalition by the Liberal Democrats and killed off by the Tory government which followed. Even more desperately needed were reliable trans-Pennine services and it must have been a huge kick in the teeth for local authority leaders in Yorkshire and Lancashire when it was bruited that not only the Manchester-Leeds spur of HS2 was to be delayed but that the whole of the project north of Birmingham was to be shelved. 

To my mind, the real justification for HS2 was to link the lively Midlands industrial and commercial scene to the parts of northern England which needed reviving. To take away that link leaves HS2 as no more than a memorial to British design and engineering, like the SS Great Britain, magnificent but irrelevant.

There is hope, however, that something can be recovered. It is virtually certain that Labour will be the majority party after the next general election. On yesterday's Radio 4 PM programme, a senior shadow minister Nick Thomas-Symonds stated unequivocally: "We will build HS2 in full and we will build Northern Powerhouse Rail in full."