The ruinous HS2 fiasco is a rehearsal for net zero catastrophe

As the nights draw in and the country lurches from one crisis to another, you could probably do with a good laugh – recognised as therapeutic in all situations, even when it can only be classed as gallows humour. Since Russell Brand is unlikely to be around to entertain us in the foreseeable future, let us turn instead to a new, unfortunately anonymous, comedian who, apparently with a straight face, produced this rib-tickler two days ago: “HS2 Ltd is committed to controlling costs and takes its responsibility towards value for money very seriously.”

If that doesn’t leave his audience hyper-ventilating, what will? That, 14 years into the crazed HS2 squanderfest, this unknown spokesman for the project should feel able to utter such a sentiment in public testifies to the total divorce from reality of everybody associated with this notorious white elephant. HS2 has acquired an almost voodoo totem status. Budgets are slashed, projects are shelved, a pandemic has ravaged businesses and their supply chains, British taxation is at its highest level since the Second World War and approaching 37 per cent of GDP, UK government debt has exceeded 100 per cent of GDP for the first time since 1961 – yet still HS2 creeps on, immune equally to cancellation and fiscal reality.

HS2 was a product of the last Labour administration, a vanity project in the tradition of the Millennium Dome, Tony Blair’s fatuous monument to now long-dead “Cool Britannia”. Yet Blair’s dome cost £789m – £1.6bn in today’s money – which is small change in comparison with HS2. The high-speed rail project was originally costed at £32.7bn, but in 2013 the Government set a “funding envelope” (classic weasel vocabulary for squandering the taxpayers’ money) revised upwards to £42.6bn, plus £7.5bn for rolling stock, thus breaking the £50bn barrier.

Yet, even at that stage, some sober heads in the Treasury were estimating the true cost at £73bn and Peter Mandelson, an early supporter, was denouncing HS2 as an “expensive mistake”. Simultaneously, the National Audit Office said the benefits were “unclear” and the timetable “over-ambitious”, while the Major Projects Authority graded HS2 “amber-red” – at serious risk of failure. That was 10 years ago: for a decade, the government has ignored repeated warnings, stubbornly throwing good money after bad.

The comedy duo Dave and George, masquerading as prime minister and chancellor respectively, were fiercely protective of this vanity project, by now a virility symbol for those charlatan politicians. Under Cameron, the Tories had adopted a “green” emblem in the shape of an oak tree. The rape of the Chilterns – wildlife habitats, landscape, water table and the compulsory purchase along the route of farms that had been in the same family for generations – testified to the credentials of the historic Tory Party in the context of conservation.

It is startling to remind ourselves what was the purpose of this brutal disruption and expense: to enable businessmen to travel from London to Birmingham in twenty-five minutes’ less time. In the age of the laptop, Zoom and ever more sophisticated means of communication, why would any business traveller be concerned about so minuscule a supposed advantage? If it were ever completed it would have the opposite effect from its declared objective: funnelling people from the Midlands down into the maw of London, rather than dispersing investment-bearing Londoners northwards.

At every stage, the project has been mismanaged to the point of caricature. As was pointed out from day one, the route was wrong. The proposed speed of 400 kilometres per hour was unnecessary in a relatively small country, dangerous and impractical. The speed was cut to 300 kph, the wrong trains had been proposed, the outer branches of HS2 were amputated, one after another. Most symbolic of all, the notional train will not now even start at Euston – after spending an outrageous £289m on plans for Euston station. Who made those drawings – Leonardo Da Vinci?

While farmers and taxpayers may have been badly hit by HS2, for some it is a dripping roast. Mark Thurston, departing chief executive of HS2, was paid £676,000 last year, including a £39,000 bonus, presumably because the project is going so swimmingly. Optimists now believe its attenuated version could be completed as early as 2033. Alan Foster, chief financial officer of HS2, was paid £513,000; and so on, down the high-speed gravy train.

To the original lunacy of the whole concept has been added the more recent insanity of “inclusivity”. Last month HS2 published its latest annual Equality, Diversity and Inclusion report, which proudly announced that 38 per cent of its workforce is female (which, in a railway construction project, seems curious) and so is 40 per cent of its Executive Leadership Team. Of its workforce, 24 per cent is ethnic minority – far above the percentage of the population in that category – which suggests that HS2 may be better at social engineering than railway engineering.

“EDI is embedded in everything that HS2 Ltd does,” boasts the report, indicating that the false priorities of woke boardrooms have intruded into the most expensive construction project in Europe, funded by the UK taxpayers. In every respect, for the past 14 years, the interests of those taxpayers have been trampled on by the government. Because HS2 has been around for so long, its extravagant lunacy has somehow become part of the landscape. But we can no longer afford to indulge the egos of our politicians on so extravagant a scale.

Old Oak Common is a congenial, Tolkien-sounding name for a place with which few people are familiar. However, it is not situated in Middle Earth – a description that might now more appropriately be applied to the Chilterns – but in Acton, London, where a former maintenance depot is being converted into a huge railway station to serve as a terminus for HS2. Passengers from Birmingham arriving there will then change to the Underground Elizabeth Line for Euston and, with a bit of luck, arrive there only a little later than they did in the days before £107bn was spent on expediting their journey.

This is insane. But so is nearly everything that those who govern us do nowadays. The naked emperors are full of jargon expressions to trot out in television interviews, they generate rainforests of official papers justifying their conduct, they are assisted by an army of imposing-looking Sir Humphreys from Whitehall who are, if anything, more demented than their ministers. They exude the entitlement of people to whom no one ever says “No”. They regard the taxes accrued from the hard-working lives of ordinary people as Danegeld which it is their right to squander on any vanity project that takes their fancy.

They are clowns, charlatans and incompetents, but it is our money they are wasting, with unprecedented prodigality. If there was a shred of accountability surviving in the British political system, HS2 would have been scrapped a decade ago. Instead, the entitled belief of ministers and MPs that the train set is theirs to play with as they wish has replaced the former checks and balances. HS2 is not just an unconscionable, wasteful extravagance, more importantly it is an illustration of how far the British public has lost control of its supposedly accountable government.

Which brings us to the elephant in the room: the unspoken, but all too real, significance of the HS2 fiasco. Unless our rulers are brought to heel, it will be a rehearsal for the ultimate driver of national bankruptcy: net zero. Just as the £1.6bn Millennium Dome was dwarfed by the £107bn (and rising) HS2 fiasco, the same forces of entitlement and self-serving dogma are preparing to escalate their prodigality into the trillion-pounds stratosphere of net zero.

In exactly the same way that real reform of rail transport could have been effected, at a fraction of the cost of HS2, by building an east-west rail network across northern England, facilitating commerce and passenger travel, any concerns over climate change could have been met by convening an expert commission of scientists who had not taken the IPCC shilling, to design a bespoke plan for this island to prepare for possible threats such as sea-level rises.

But that was not good enough for our grandstanding prime ministers, who have preferred to embrace the UN climate alarmists’ agenda, earning the applause of the Thunberg tendency by spouting hot air at gatherings such as COP26. We have seen the chastening example of HS2 – criminal waste and prodigality, in a country where an increasing proportion of the population is finding it hard to make ends meet. We should take due warning from that experience and compel our leaders, before they embark any further on the most ruinous financial splurge of all time, to abandon net zero and adopt a serious and responsible approach to climate issues.

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