The cost of Britain’s biggest ever infrastructure project HS2 (i.e. the second High Speed rail line) is now estimated at £107bn (€125bn). That’s triple the initial cost of £32bn way back in 2012 when the line was first given approval.
I was Business Correspondent for Newsnight at the time and was sent out to cover the announcement by the-then coalition government in early 2012. We went to Amersham in a beautiful (and well off) part of England called the Chilterns. There we met some stiff resistance to the project - including from the famous actor Geoffrey Palmer.
Back in 2012 I spoke to a woman called Anne who was set to lose part of her garden to the proposed new track. Although it must be noted that Anne lived in a mansion with extensive ‘grounds’ rather than a few sq2 of grass that the rest of us call a garden.
Anne who was set to lose half her garden to HS2
I put it straight to her in my piece that she would be called a NIMBY for objecting to the line. Judge for yourself her reaction.
Further up the proposed track in the so-called ‘North’, the idea of massive investment to link it to London appealed greatly to the locals. Even the-then deputy Prime minister Nick Clegg (now Facebook’s finest) who was definitely not from the North - but whose constituency was in Sheffield - purred at the prospect of shaving 25 mins off the time to get from his mostly university electorate Hallam area to London.
But that’s the problem and it still is a decade and a referendum later: everyone was obsessed with getting a bit closer or quicker to London - irrespective of the voluminous cost, shocking upheaval and a timeframe of roughly one full generation.
HS2 construction in Birmingham_Curzon_Street_(photo by Geof Sheppard)
Back in 2012 no one was talking about levelling up or a ‘northern powerhouse’ or any such reversal of a century of investment in England’s south east. And that was one of the reasons why the ‘North’ decided to force the ‘South’ to leave the EU in order to change all that.
Now all we hear about is levelling up and ‘red wall’ seats. Judging from the recent By-election result in that very area (Amersham), almost a decade later there is still quite a bit of resistance to HS2, even to the extent that lifelong Tory voters might lend that vote to the Lib dems.
And the by-election has brought into sharp focus the zero sum game that geographic politics is in England these days. If you invest heavily in London and the South as successive Westminster governments have for generations, the ‘North’ will resent it and coerce you through the ballot box to change. But if you tack too far to the North, the ‘South’ will punish you by the same means.
I’ve been living in the UK for 20 years but I’ve seen that resentment and dichotomy thrive in that time. And it’s unlikely to abate any time soon.
Nick Rose - Leader of the Chilterns Council in 2012
Back in 2012 I ended my report by jokingly predicting that we might be able to teleport between cities by the time HS2 was fully completed. I now think that teleporting will certainly have been invented by the time the North v South debate in England has ceased to exist.
