Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

Now is the perfect time for George Osborne to stop wasting money on HS2

It’s not just Ed Miliband who’s facing pressure over HS2. George Osborne’s famous political antennae must be twitching furiously by now  — does he really want to be the last man in England backing this? Alistair Darling’s case (£) reeks of cold logic: he has become the latest public figure to withdraw support for HS2 because the costs now outweigh the benefits. The facts changed; he changed his mind. This is what rational people do. Unless you’re ideologically wedded to the idea of HS2, then there’s now not much grounds for supporting it – as a glance at the latest the Institute for Economic Affairs report attests.

Ross Clark writes in this week’s magazine that funding for a high speed project between Nice and Paris has been frozen – the money is being spent upgrading the network in other places.

My colleague Sebastian Payne is still keen on HS2, and his position is certainly intellectually honest. He doesn’t pretend to care about an economic rationale. It’ll be okay in the end, he says, just like the M25 which was attacked as a ‘road to nowhere’. We discuss in in this week’s podcast, below:

But Osborne is the puzzle. He’s still cheerleading for what he must know is a doomed project – the only question is how much taxpayers’ money will be racked up before it is scrapped formally. Soon it will be seen not as a transport programme but a metaphor for political tin-earnedness and vanity.

If Andrew Adonis (the main HS2 evangelist) wre not a senior adviser to Ed Miliband, then Labour would be its (inevitable) abandonment. A Newsnight report suggested HS2’s costs have grown to the extent that it now has a negative return on investment.

Already a subscriber? Log in

Keep reading with a free trial

Subscribe and get your first month of online and app access for free. After that it’s just £1 a week.

There’s no commitment, you can cancel any time.

Or

Unlock more articles

REGISTER

Comments

Don't miss out

Join the conversation with other Spectator readers. Subscribe to leave a comment.

Already a subscriber? Log in