HS2 Nowhere

Britain’s major Blairite vanity project, the HS2 rail line is nothing short of a national disgrace verging on scandal. Mind you, for sheer comedy value, you can’t fault it. It’s the only gravy train that manages to run without tracks; it starts somewhere in London that nobody can find, and goes to somewhere up north nobody wants to go. And at the latest estimate the total cost of this fiasco will be £182 billion (but wait to see how quickly that reaches £200 billion and counting).

The project seems to be the case par excellence of a sunk cost project. It has proved so expensive to date that we cannot afford to pull the emergency brake lever. Instead, we simply make it shorter and more useless all the time. The Chief Executive has just stepped down amidst revelations that he earned in excess of £600,000 annually, and got a £39,000 bonus on top of that. The salary is outrageous, but what on earth was the bonus for? The project is decades behind schedule, not an inch of track has been laid and, with less ambitious proposals for where it will serve, his portfolio surely got smaller. Apparently another 44 executives are paid at least—at least—£150,000 annually.

I have no strong views on what should happen to the HS2 project, except to stop paying quite as many people so much money for achieving so little. Peter Hitchens is convinced that we do not need it, and makes the case that existing services could be upgraded at far less cost. He could be right, and that is something we all want given the woeful state of parts of our existing network.

My own town of Kingston upon Hull was promised an electrified line in its ‘year of culture’. That was 2017 yet not one single volt has pushed an amp along the rail line east of Doncaster. This means that if you catch an early morning train from Hull while all the trains are warming up, you have to stand in a fog of diesel fumes that, frankly, you can still taste when you get off at King’s Cross station. Mind you, vaping is not allowed; can’t be too careful. However, amidst all the electrification at King’s Cross station you can always find the Hull train. It’s the one belching out diesel fumes. Every cloud (literally).

I do think that the British HS2 project may have been a tad under-ambitious, in fact. I mean, who would build a high-speed train line from the south coast to St Pancras station and then propose, as it was initially, to start the high-speed line to the rest of the country from a different station, Euston? Surely, to be of any use the lines would connect – meaning that folk could get speedily from gay Paris to the architectural and cultural splendour of Birmingham. And why stop as Birmingham (and nobody in their right mind would), why not have a high-speed link all the way to Edinburgh and Glasgow and even to Inverness?

I have travelled on high-speed trains in Spain, Taiwan and China. Naturally, budgetary constraints and environmental concerns are unlikely to derail rail projects for the Chinese. The Spanish will have built theirs with lashings of investment from the EC who have just given them another €411 million to add another high speed line to their already extensive radial network. The initial investment will have included a great deal of British money when we handed it over to Brussels, pre-Brexit. Mind you, the EC did give us some money towards the cost of ours as part of its ‘Connecting Europe’ project; more fools them! But in Taiwan, the high-speed rail runs the length of the country and, instead of cutting the unsightly scars in the landscape that HS2 has done, it is an aerial track. It looks magnificent and is a joy to ride.

If the present timetable for HS2 is adhered to I will long have made my last rail journey and will be in eternal repose so, whatever the outcome, it will never trouble me directly. Meantime, I will continue to reap the benefits of high-speed rail networks built on other parts of the world. If they can do it, why can’t we?

Roger Watson is a retired academic, editor and writer. He is a columnist with Unity News Network and writes regularly for a range of conservative journals including The Salisbury Review and The European Conservative. He has travelled and worked extensively in the Far East and the Middle East. He lives in Kingston upon Hull, UK.

If you enjoy The New Conservative and would like to support our work, please consider buying us a coffee – it would really help to keep us going. Thank you!