HS2 has been a fiasco. It’s time to ditch it for good

In a fantasy world of wise government vision and decision-making, HS2 would have been announced in November 1964, shortly after the Tokyo Olympics. Visitors to those games saw the future in the form of the Tokaido Shinkansen – the first Japanese ‘bullet train’, which raced 320 miles from the capital to Osaka, carrying 1,300 passengers per train and eventually running 360 trains per day, with average delays measured in seconds. But in that era, UK ministers thought only of axeing railways and building motorways.

A de novo British high-speed network could not have taken off in the 1970s, when the French were building the first ligne à Grande Vitesse from Paris to Lyon, simply because we were broke. Nor would it have happened between 1979 and 1997, because Margaret Thatcher and her successors would have insisted that it had to be done entirely at private-sector risk.

And so HS2 became a thing only in 2009: not so much a showpiece to match the best of Europe and Asia as a Keynesian fag-end of Gordon Brown’s regime picked up and tossed around by the Cameron coalition. With hindsight – though I was a supporter for most of the project’s first decade – it was always going to be cursed by nimbyism, cost inflation and officialdom’s propensity to tinker with lines on maps. As estimates for completion rose from £30 billion to £107 billion, so the enthusiasm of passengers for slightly faster journeys to the Midlands and further north was drowned out by demand for more frequent and punctual existing services, better on-board broadband and much better trans-Pennine connectivity.

Andy Burnham, Greater Manchester’s mayor, puts an eloquent case for the economic damage the non-arrival of HS2 in his region will cause. But I suspect the voting public, with no realistic expectation of ever travelling on it, no longer cares.