High-speed fail

A year ago the electoral strategies of the two main parties seemed set. The Conservatives would stand as the party of prudence, claiming to have saved Britain from a Greek-style meltdown through austerity measures which, though painful at the time, had eventually borne fruit in the shape of a private sector-led recovery. Labour, meanwhile, would stand as the party for public investment, promising to repair what it saw as the damage wrought by cuts.

Since then, things have got better for the Tories than they could have imagined. Not only did a threatened triple-dip recession fail to materialise, but revisions to economic data concluded that Britain did not even suffer a double dip. While debt is running well ahead and growth is still lower than the forecasts he made in 2010, George Osborne can no longer be accused of causing a recession and can now invite the public to wonder how much larger the deficit would have been had Gordon Brown been allowed to continue trying to spend the country out of debt.

Yet a rather large fly has just landed in the Conservatives’ electoral ointment. The government’s determination to commit itself to HS2 no matter what the cost has allowed Labour to steal the mantle of prudence, while the Conservatives seem to have a wide-eyed faith in extravagant public-sector spending.

Labour appears to be wavering in its support for HS2. This week the party reiterated its commitment to the project. At the same time, however, it backtracked by adding strong caveats about the costs.

Ed Balls’s sudden scepticism is, of course, highly opportunistic. It was Gordon Brown’s government which first backed the scheme. Balls is treating the £42 billion to be saved from scrapping HS2 as if it were a windfall; by his logic we could all make ourselves rich overnight by planning to spend £1 million we don’t have, then deciding not to and counting the forgone expenditure as if it were money in the bank.