HS2: The day they cancelled the 21st Century

This is the day he does it. It's the day Rishi Sunak gives up on the future.

This is the day he does it. It's the day Rishi Sunak gives up on the future. 

It's the day Britain is consigned to the 20th Century, or perhaps the 19th, moulding away in stasis while the rest of the world moves swiftly on. It's the day we get fucked.

This wretched little man, with his tiny mind and his tiny vision, is doing incalculable damage. He's like someone in an IT department plugging away on Windows 95 because he doesn't think it's worth the money to upgrade. And that's what he's doing to Britain. He's turning us into a Windows 95 country in a world of MacBook Airs.

The prime minister's cancellation of the Manchester-Birmingham leg of HS2 is a historic mistake. It's an error of multiple dimensions: political, infrastructural, environmental, economic and moral.

The political mistake is the most obvious and the least important. For some galaxy-brained reason Sunak has contrived to announce the decision in Manchester at the exact moment he fucks the city, after allowing speculation about it to derail his own conference. He has taken the worst possible decision in the worst possible way. 

But we'll soon forget the mutilation he has imposed on his own prospects. What we won't forget, and will not be able to, is the harm he has inflicted on our daily lives and our economy by his narrow-minded bean-counter suffocation of a strategic vision for the British economy. 

HS2 was never about speed. The fact that people think it is is testament to the complete failure of the British political class - politicians and journalists - to explain what is ultimately a very simple concept. HS2 is about capacity.

You know what it is like to get a train. It's shit. They are late. They are slow. They are expensive. They stink of piss. 

When you imagine your journey, you think of yourself with your headphones on, legs stretched out, gazing out the window as the British landscape slides pleasantly past you. But when you actually make your journey, it is spent standing in the corridor with your bags, the train stuffed to the rafters even outside of rush hour, crammed up for hours on end, and much the poorer for it.

It's telling that Britain's one really effective train line, HS1, takes you out of the country altogether to France, where you are invited to experience a sense of sustained national humiliation. You get a train from Paris and everything is completely different: impossible speed, reasonable prices, sufficient seats, and civilised cafe cars where you can stand and mingle and eat decent food. That's when you realise: We're so far behind. We've made such a cunt of things.

One of the chief reasons is that we use mixed-speed trains on a single track. Our rail network chucks together long distance high speed services with three other types: regional medium speed services, stopping trains and slow freight. 

This is not the way to do it. When trains are all travelling at the same speed, you can run them nice and close. But when they're not, you need big gaps to leave space for the long distance trains because of their speed and acceleration.

The idea behind HS2 was simple: Take the high speed long distance trains and put them on a dedicated line. This will free up the existing line for the other trains, which can then operate a more efficient service. That will then allow more trains to be put on, as they're all going at the same speed. And, crucially, more freight can then travel by rail, which takes it off the roads, easing car congestion and improving the environment.

"More people live in towns than in cities," Sunak said earlier this week, in an obvious hint of the direction of travel on HS2. But of course, even this is utterly misleading. One of the core benefits of HS2 is precisely to help people who live in towns taking stopping trains, by alleviating pressure on the line. 

This, incidentally, is why the reports this morning that high speed trains can switch onto the existing track after Birmingham and go on to Manchester are such meaningless horseshit. Putting those trains on the main line defeats the purpose of the entire exercise. The fact they can even be stated as if they are of the least relevance is testament to the lack of basic understanding about the issue. 

Instead, we're left with a rail system which is at capacity and in serious decline. The Department for Transport's business case for HS2 found that the West Coast line was already above capacity. "Operating at this intensity makes it challenging to maintain acceptable performance levels, resulting in a frustratingly unreliable service for passengers," it said. 

It's why the trains are late. It's why the service is unreliable. It's why you have to stand. If growth in passenger numbers continues - and we should want it to if we give the remotest shit about the environment - there will be 60% more passengers than seats on West Coast Line inter-city services by 2033. 

Read that again. Sixty per cent more passengers than seats. That's what he's consigning us to.

The secondary advantage of HS2 was that it would address regional economic injustice, which we now refer to with the philistine term 'levelling-up'. If there was one good thing that came from the Brexit nightmare it was that this mission took on a key role in British political discourse. But now that too has been quietly parcelled up and tucked away in a Treasury drawer somewhere. 

Sunak will tell us today that it can't be done because it is too expensive. But in fact the opposite is the case. In the long term, it is too expensive not to do it. It is a shackle upon our economic growth. As John Maynard Keynes said: "We do nothing because we have not the money. But it is precisely because we do not do anything that we have not the money."

Why is London such a successful global city? One of the key reasons is that its transport system allows a ready flow of skills, services and products into and around the city. Twenty-two per cent of its daily trips used rail in 2017. In the north, that number stood at one per cent.

The second phase of HS2 connecting Manchester to Birmingham was intended to replicate that arrangement. By improving journey times, travelling conditions and reliability, it would drastically improve connectivity. This would encourage businesses to establish themselves outside London and help northern cities attract financial services, tech innovators and creative and digital industries. It would be a catalyst for job creation, new home development and regeneration.

The project would have had similar beneficial effects for net zero. Effective high speed rail services take passengers off planes and cars and onto trains. Every one of those adapted journeys results in significantly improved carbon emissions. HS2 would have delivered 8g CO2 per passenger kilometre by 2030, compared to 67g for car travel and 170g for domestic aviation. 

But as Sunak has now made perfectly clear, he couldn't give a damn about the environment. Indeed, this act of vandalism chimes neatly with his idiot creed about preventing an imaginary war on motorists. If the original proposal had been about building a new motorway, he might have been more sympathetic.

Cancelling HS2 doesn’t even save money. It loses it. The government uses something called a 'central-case benefit-cost ratio' to evaluate how much money it expects to get back after investing in a project. It is a very stripped down and conservative method of estimation. It doesn't include the increased employment and therefore economic demand you get from the construction of the project itself or the skills the workers engaged in it will gain. Nor does it include the transformative benefits from changes in business location decisions.

But even then, the ratio came in at 1.2:1, meaning that every pound spent would result in benefits of £1.20. Certain things have changed since that assessment was made - not least the cost of materials and labour and the economic impact of our habitual national nimbyism. But even then, those familiar with the project say the current unpublished ratio remains above 1. That means that we get the benefits to transport, levelling up and the environment while actually making money in the long term.

As the Department for Transport said: "The Strategic Case provides compelling evidence that HS2 offers the only viable long-term solution to overcrowding on the rail network transport and will be a major contributor to the objective of levelling up the economy. The Economic Case demonstrates that HS2 offers value for the taxpayer under all but the most extreme scenarios."

Self-harming, small-minded, short-sighted idiocy of the highest order. This is the reality of what Sunak is doing today. He is turning Britain into a museum - a place for tourists to come visit so they can see some lovely old buildings, but with no modern capacity to function as a successful economy. And even those tourists, if they dare to get a train out of London, will quickly see the reality of the place: a crumbling country, beset by regional injustice, whose government does not care enough about it to commit to its future. A shitheap.

That conference speech today is a national crime scene. Sunak is the culprit. They should throw the fucking book at him.