No.222 - HS2: Boris Scores Yet Another Own Goal

Dear James,

Go to France, go to Germany, go to Spain. Each of those nearby nations enjoy fast, efficient high speed rail networks that straddle most parts of their respective nations. For the last forty years, the French have had their TGV by which any traveller can set their watches and travel between Paris and Lyons city centres in comfort and at speed. In Germany, at Frankfurt Airport, you can quickly get onto their ICE network and travel to any part of that nation. Yet in Britain, the nearest we get to a fast and efficient rail system is the high-speed line from the Channel tunnel to central London. Some used to say it’s the penalty we pay for being the early adopter of railways. What is clear is that if a country wishes to be connected efficiently and quickly, to gain from the network effects of such systems, it needs a high-speed rail a system.

And until recently the nation thought that that was what they were going to get. Until a few months ago, Boris swore blind that the HS2 project in full would go ahead. That included the eastern spur into Leeds and Yorkshire, the very places that Boris claims to be ‘levelling-up’. Yesterday this part of the Boris promise went AWOL. Or perhaps MIA (Missing in Action) might be a better acronym? Yesterday the unfortunate queue of Ministers who are put forward to defend Boris’s dirty work, spewed out the terminally cheerful Grant Shapps, Transport Secretary, to plead that the people of Yorkshire were getting a better, faster deal without HS2. That’s not how those voters will see it. All they will see is another Boris promise broken. Another case of overpromise and under delivery. Another example of Boris Boosterism deflating to the sound of a very loud raspberry!

Of course, what we didn’t see was the behind the scenes fighting that caused this latest U-Turn. Rishi Sunak keeps a low profile during these scenes of perpetual government turmoil. Rishi’s just waiting for the final frost to loosen the link between the low hanging fruit and the tree, i,e before the top job falls into his lap. The scrapping of HS2’s eastern spur was a ‘Treasury Job’ if ever I saw one. Yesterday was yet another reason why no one can ever trust Boris Johnson again. If he had any guts at all, he’d have stood up for his vision. Instead he surrenders to the last person he spoke to, especially if they have the ruthless streak that he so obviously lacks. Think of the ERG in the Paterson scandal. Think of Rishi in No.11! Think of Jennifer Arcuri in the Mayoral office of Greater London!

High-speed railways offer much more than a speed advantage. According to the European Environment Agency, trains average one-fifth the CO2 emissions per passenger mile of aircraft and less than half of that generated by buses. They outdo planes on routes up to up to 400 miles. In 2019 the Eurostar carried 80% of journeys on the London to Paris and Brussels routes. But what does Boris do? He cuts the airport duties for domestic flights and cancels a large chunk of HS2. Consistency was never his strong suit. But this beggars belief.

As recently as the last Tory Party Conference, Johnson pledged that the government would build the NPR, (Northern Powerhouse Rail), a commitment he had made since becoming prime minister in 2019. Shapps said the Oakervee Review of the HS2 rail line and a subsequent National Infrastructure Commission report had shown a rethink was needed and that “strengthening regional rail would be most economically beneficial”. How convenient for Boris! I suppose Mr Oakervee can expect a place in the Lords for this?

Yesterday Tory MPs were furious. Huw Merriman, chairman of the Commons transport select committee, suggested Johnson was “selling perpetual sunlight and then leaving it to others to explain the arrival of moonlight”. Red Wall Conservatives such as Robbie Moore, MP for Keighley, said he was ‘bitterly disappointed’ and that his region had been “left completely shortchanged”.  Sir Edward Leigh, MP for Gainsborough, said the North-East had “heard these promises (to improve rail lines) again and again”. If HS2 was a white elephant, it was now “a white elephant missing a leg”. Andrew Adonis, the former transport minister who launched the HS2 project in 2009, said it was “a betrayal of the north” and warned that, with high-speed lines only in the west of the country, the “economic geography of England may be seriously deformed”.

This has been just the latest of Boris’s many ‘own goals’. In the process he is not only emasculating language itself - ‘Levelling–up’, ‘Northern Powerhouse’ and ‘Sunlit Uplands’ are becoming terms of derision – but he’s also driving our nation into an economic and political cul de sac from which it will take decades to extricate ourselves.

No need to respond James. Just to say that your government continues to disappoint. Massively!

BH – Your Concerned Constituent