Here in the UK some politicians have taken a break from their self-appointed world policing roles to support a deeply unpopular rail scheme known as HS2. The aim of the scheme is to build a high speed rail link from London to Birmingham and then extend it north to Manchester and Leeds. It has already been covered here several times before. And despite not yet being approved project staff are in post and more are being recruited – in London SW1 of course.
This week the latest ministerial line is that this project is too important to be stopped. It has to go ahead no matter what. [Remember ministers saying that the banks were too big to fail – so had to be bailed out; no matter what]. This approach suggests politicians are loosing confidence in the scheme and having to resort to arguments that seek to ignore the substantial risks and growing public mistrust. Which is a pity considering that it is the public that are going to have to pay for it. [Perhaps ministers need to be made personally liable for their wasteful schemes]
Back in 1833 when the first project for a railway from London Euston to Birmingham Curzon Street was launched it was funded by raising capital from investors. Today few, if any, investors seem prepared to carry the obvious risks of HS2 themselves – instead they fall on the tax payer.
But if that approach is irrelevant ancient history how about this example. In 2011 the Beijing-Shanghai high speed rail link opened. It had cost £21,400 million and taken 39 months to complete – for a distance of 820 miles. The typical travel time is 4:48 and the most expensive ticket in 2011 was £170. The route also carries high speed freight. So that puts the HS2 project in some sort of world context. The British project is already expected to take much longer and cost much more to build – yet the route is much shorter and for passengers only. And no one is denying that ticket prices will have to be much higher – even if subsidised by the tax payer ad infinitum.
Now if the proposed high speed lines had linked Plymouth (or even Cornwall) and Cardiff with Glasgow, Edinburgh and Aberdeen and also connected directly to the Channel Tunnel then perhaps there would have been a better chance of spreading the promised benefits nationally. Scotland may even have felt part of the United Kingdom again. And if the Chinese project team from the Beijing-Shanghai link could come to build it for us – at half the cost and in a quarter of the time – it would be winners all round …