They Meant Well – But Built HS2

HS2 is yet another predictable government project disaster.

HS2 from the air near Hinton dropzone (photo courtesy of Madeleine, thank you!)

In 2010, I stood up in Parliament’s Westminster Hall and asked whether it could possibly be right to drive a railway viaduct across the Colne Valley and the Chilterns AONB in pursuit of the supposedly overwhelming national benefit of HS2. Sixteen years on, HS2 has given us an answer. The beauty has been blighted, the property rights have been overridden … and we reap hideously expensive failure.

This is not a story about trains. It is a story about institutions: about how a politicised rail system, prestige politics and concentrated interests produced a project that looks, in retrospect, uncannily like a case study from the Institute of Economic Affairs.