Feels like we’ve been in this position over and over… the people shouting against it now (Jenkins, Green Party, shady right wing think tanks etc) were always against it, I don’t know any high profile public figures who has changed their minds on it, just like most people on here seem to have the same opinions they had before - we can use Covid/ Brexit/ emergency budget etc as reasons why it’s now more important to ma make a decision one way or t’other, but really it’s the same people rehashing the same points they’ve always felt (the likes of Jenkins would seize upon any excuse to trot out an article explaining that “now we should cancel it”, whether that’s a recently discovered black hole in public finances, a war or Jupiter being retrograde in Scorpio)
I was against it a decade or so ago, then I realised just how complicated all of the alternative options were/ how they wouldn’t actually solve lots but only push the bottleneck down the line a little bit (e.g. I assumed that four tracks at Digswell would free up a lot of capacity on the ECML but you’d still be dealing with the finite platforms/ throat at King’s Cross , the three track section towards Peterborough, the flat junctions further north like the crossing at Newark… plus seeing the delays/overspend/ months of closures from trying to upgrade an existing line like the WCML twenty years ago… all of a sudden the appeal of building a brand new line look a lot better, in the way that it was better for motorists that were invested in motorways rather than trying to add an extra carriageway to lots of dual carriageways)
Post Covid, HS2 looks less important IMHO, but it’s being built to last generations so we have to look long term
A few points (that I’ve made before and will no doubt make again when we next have people demanding HS2 is cancelled)…
1. It’s funny how Keynesian a lot of enthusiasts are when it comes to reopenings etc yet very conservative when it comes to HS2. One moment I’m reading passionate pleas that spending money on reintroducing old lines will create jobs and stimulate demand to escape recession… but when it comes to HS2 the same people feel we must cancel any investment the moment the economy catches a mild cold
2. Same with expected passenger numbers; the Covid slump didn’t stop people passionately arguing for SELRAP etc (and are keen to point to lines that have bounced back to 100% or more of their 2019 passengers, yet the same folk insist that there’s no point in HS2 because the passenger numbers will have gone down significantly (presumably these are people who believe that nonsense about HS2 only being used by “businessmen”, because of course there’s no Leisure passengers between Manchester/ Birmingham/ London…)
3. You can’t insist that we spend the money “saved” on paying off national debt AND schools AND hospitals AND in general improvements to the classic rail network, especially as most of that money was going to come back through the HS2 fare box anyway
4. Weren’t we having the same arguments against Crossrail, before it opened, although now the complaints are about a lack of capacity on Crossrail (and the trains should have been longer, and at a higher frequency, because population growth will see it above capacity very shortly). Once HS2 has been running for a year, it’ll be impossible to think that people used to argue against it
5. Yes, it’s gone over budget, the BCR isn’t as good as it was, there have been delays. So just like pretty much every other heavy rail project in my lifetime then. Except that the people moaning about the “white elephant” are generally quick to excuse the increases subsidies required to fund loss making lines like Tweedbank because “you have to appreciate the bigger picture, take a holistic approach and see the unquantifiable social benefits that justify it”. Yet taking thousands of vehicles off the UK’s motorways presumably cash be ignored when it comes to HS2 and we are allowed to feel it a failure if it hasn’t returned sufficient surplus after a few months to pay off all infrastructure costs?
6. Some of the (English) “Green” criticism seems a bit strange, but then the Greens have recently been arguing against nuclear power stations because “we don’t get the benefit for twenty years” and hoping that we won’t notice that they were making similar arguments two decades ago about new power stations, power stations that would be very handy if coming on stream right about now!). At least the Scottish Greens seem to have a sensible policy on it, and I say this as someone who’d argue against most things that the Scottish Greens do!
7. Can’t help but think that a lot of enthusiasts would have very different opinions about HS2 if only it faithfully followed the (much slower) Great Central track bed in more places. Maybe, if the Government had called it “The London Extension Of The Golborne, Crewe & Curzon Street Railway”, we’d see more people in favour, because the GCCSR sounds like a suitably quaint project to get behind!
8. Rightly or wrongly, I can’t see Hunt/ Sunak scrapping it, the message it’d send out about “levelling up” and “green technology” would ruin their reputation. Defer/ descope, maybe, abandon what’s left of the Yorkshire bit for now, but given that there’s bound to be another freeze on fuel levies/ motoring taxes (to “stimulate the economy”) then cancelling the biggest railway project will look very bad
9. But, if it IS cancelled, then don’t be surprised if the general rail budget is badly hit too, rather than proportionately increased. Hunt isn’t going to suggest we use the billions “saved” to spaff on Okehampton - Tavistock, or whatever branchline you are obsessed about. Now that the Government controls pretty much everything on the railway (with no Branson/ Souter etc to be wary of), they will squeeze existing budgets; and since some costs are rising above the rate of inflation, that means real terms cuts to a lot of things. All I’m saying is, don’t rejoice if HS2 is cancelled, because if they ditch it then they’ll clearly ditch anything
