HS2

Sunak announces replacement to HS2 for those of us in the north -

I’d say they couldn’t organise a piss-up in a brewery, but that’s the only thing they are actually good for.

By-the-by, I hadn’t heard the phrase white elephant in years, but heard it just the other day… and it was said by a train guard.

It was a silly idea in the first place. The trains are needed in the north and locally. Undoing some of the damage of a car focused Beeching destruction would be good. They ( a Brown cabinet ) took literally ten minutes to wave this project through with no discussion at cabinet level of cost and future plans. Cameron ( let’s be honest, both the big parties supported this) liked the Japanese bullet trains he saw. Give me strength. He had no understanding of how Japan got their infrastructure going, how UK lagged behind; his understanding of history and his arrogance has almost ruined this country. But not quite. If they do really improve the transport in the northern tons and the links across the country, you never know, it might help us all.
The companies making money will scream and shout, the vested interest people will yell and squark. But get these workers going in the right places, people won’t suffer lack of income.

It's entirely about capacity. There are virtually no paths left per hour on the West Coast Mainline for passenger services, never mind future freight increases.

Getting somewhere faster is not the justification for building new tracks. The reason you want trains to go as fast as possible on new dedicated lines, is because the faster they go, the more trips per day each trainset can do, and therefore the greater the capacity.

If a future government does not build new tracks, expect fare increases to be used to ration train demand.

The £36bn "saving" that Sunak reckons will be invested in numerous other projects is less than the expected cost of the one proposed East-West fast trans-Pennines route he shouts about, that hasn't yet even had any consultations or planning permissions.

This spending has been cut solely to enable tax cuts immediately prior to a general election. The Tories always put themselves first and business and the country last. They are the polar opposite of patriots.

I think it had to be stopped given the rising costs and the damage it would/will do to the countryside. Funnily we never heard one voice from the green lobby this week over this.

There's considerably more histrionics over this "destroying the countryside" than any road project ever proposed or built. It's just a convenient talking point, not based in reality. Those histrionics are a big reason why the costs are rising, seeing as NIMBYs meant it had to tunnel expensively through the Chilterns, rather than running at ground level...

This is where I am, too. As a public transport nerd, the appalling state of the UK's rail provision is mortifying and embarrassing to me. It really should not have been allowed to stagnate into its current state, where getting from one place to another by rail is a universally expensive, stressful and miserable experience and it simply is not surprising that so many people choose to travel by car. HS2 represented a step in a positive and progressive direction, a sign that maybe our government was finally capable of long-term and ambitious thinking on this particular issue, and it's all been felled by countryside NIMBYs and a flailing Prime Minister desperate for a short-term victory whilst knowing he's on the way out. We will never progress or develop as a nation as long as we're controlled by such thinking.

Good on you.  I strongly feel that in the long term it will be understood how the very weak Cameron, has been worse for this country than the cumulative effects of Corbyn, Boris and Truss together.

I think it was the hobby horse of a man called Andrew Adonis. He's still on Twitter and comes across as detached from reality, recently tweeting that China manages to get these things done - yeah, when you're a dictatorship with poor human rights and can just order whole towns and villages out of your project's pathway.

Japan had the bullet train going back to the early 1980's minimum when they showed it on Blue Peter. HS2 would have been the sort of thing I could have seen Tony Blair really backing. Gordon Brown being more fiscally cautious I would have thought him being concerned about the cost but with possible benefits for Scotland he'd have seen the political attraction of that.

I think Phase 2 should have been scrapped totally once the pandemic cost was mounting and that was before the cost of living issues in last couple of years. It would be a nice thing to have but there are other spending priorities and more voter attractive ideas to spend the money on IMO.