I look forward to using my pensioner’s pass on HS2 – and I’ve spotted the people to run it

Investing £33 billion in HS2 — £46 billion if you accept the Taxpayers’ Alliance’s calculation — won’t boost us out of this triple dip, but it might ease the one after next, early in the reign of hugely popular, three-times-married King Harry, in whose favour his elder brother will abdicate, Dutch-style, after his 50th birthday. It’s a constant theme of this column that all prediction, even one year ahead, is (in Sir Mervyn King’s phrase) ‘a mug’s game’: every element of that first sentence may turn out to be bunkum. Even so, the announcement of second-phase HS2 routes to Manchester and Leeds, with stations for Derby, Nottingham and Sheffield, makes a far more compelling case than the first-phase promise of a few minutes off the London-to-Birmingham run in exchange for dynamiting the Chilterns.

And that case deserves support without excessive scrutiny of the numbers attached, which constitute little more than a ‘Yes, Minister’ exercise in arse-covering. I’ve said here before that ‘a high-speed rail network between major cities is a 21st-century essential and I look forward to exercising my pensioner’s rail pass on it’, but that doesn’t mean I place any credence on the claim that it will generate ‘£47 billion of business benefits over 60 years’ — based on highly imaginative valuations of ‘business time’ saved by faster journeys. Likewise, ‘70,000 jobs in Leeds railway revolution’, reported almost as fact by the Yorkshire Evening Post, is an example of think-tank futurology that will never be measurable against real outcomes because so many other factors will have changed unforeseeably by the time the line comes into operation in the 2030s.

So, like great infrastructure schemes of the past, this one demands to be embarked upon as an act of faith in the future, underpinned by the more reliable prediction that in 20 years’ time our highways will be gridlocked, our other railways will be overwhelmed by passenger demand, and no government will ever budget, year by year, enough to maintain them in decent order.