• Stark facts

Few recent national schemes have gone so badly off-course and have led to so much wasted money and damage to the national reputation as HS2. I watched the most recent Panorama programme about this (The railway that blew billions). Not everyone thought it was good, as this discussion on X shows. Certainly, it didn’t break any new facts and re-visited a number of issues that had been aired some years before, including the accusation that Parliament had been misled, which was covered by The Guardian in 2018. I was also struck by how little there was in the way of a justification for the project: though possibly the BBC found it hard to find anyone prepared to put that point of view.

None the less, a few stark facts emerge. It will cost between two and three times the original budget for about half the amount of track. It will not now go north of Birmingham and will thus not produce any capacity increase to the over-crowded West Coast Main Line. Its shortcomings have been subjected to a number of scrutinies, though none of these have managed seriously to disturb this vast beast which has for so long been peacefully grazing on the Treasury lawn. One of these, in 2020, was the review board chaired by Douglas Oakervee (a strange choice given that he had run, for two years, the company that was building the line), which was dogged by accusations of an over-cosy relationship with consultants. The qualified approval this provided could be seen as a piece of political stage management designed to support Boris Johnson’s ambitions – “Boris loves big, stupid projects,” as long-standing HS2 sceptic Andrew Gilligan told Panorama.

There’s more. There are accusations that the compulsory purchase orders (CPOs) of the properties in the route have been badly handled, though there are always two sides to such stories. It’s certainly caused considerable environmental damage, particularly in the Chilterns. It’s further tarnished by having been an eye-catching project supported by former PM Boris Johnson. It’s been cut back more than once but still seems to rack up more and more costs.

In short, it’s going to be late, it’s going to be (and already is) expensive and, by not going to the north, it won’t be doing much levelling up, either of capacity or the economy. Not a great look. Manchester Mayor Andy Burnham described it as a cautionary tale for Whitehall to ponder.

If it’s not going to the north, it may not going to central London either. The current plan is – pending yet more funding, possibly from the private sector – to terminate the route at Old Oak Common in Acton, a station which has yet to be built. This will increase the journey time from, say, Euston to perhaps more than the train currently takes, so eliminating the main advantage that HS2 was meant to have.

Indeed, this obsession was probably the main problem with the scheme. Apart from Newcastle, all the main cities in England are within about 200 miles (320km) of each other, which means there’s not a lot of time to shave off. By contrast, Paris and Marseille, Hamburg and Munich, Madrid and Barcelona and Turin and Napes are all between 625 and 890km apart.

The fact that it was going to be really fast (over 350km per hour) meant that the track had to be really straight; which severely narrowed the route options. For this reason, due to environmental and political concerns, about a fifth of the route will be in very expensive tunnels.

There were a number of trenchant accusations made by several participants on the Panorama programme against HS2’s board. A spokesperson for the company in response to more than one said that HS2 “did not recognise” the accusations; which is not quite the same as saying they’re untrue. If they are true then they seem pretty serious. What most people in the UK recognise, however, is that the project is little short of a national embarrassment which will, at vast cost, probably achieve none of its stated aims. Residents of Acton will get a shiny new station, though.

• Independence

The BBC reminds us that the last vote on Scottish independence was 10 years ago this week. On a very high turnout, the remainers won by 55 to 45 per cent. This was not, of course, a result that was to be repeated in the Brexit vote two years later.

The two might be similar in that both leave campaigns were appealing to nationalistic emotion. It wasn’t possible to say what Scotland would look like after independence as, in recent times, it’s not happened. The UK out of the EU was slightly easier to imagine as we only signed up in 1973. That’s not a decade that many would want to go back to. The signs of post-war and post-imperial decline were all around us but few were prepared to admit them as realities.

The idea of Brexit being a return to an age like that was, frankly, laughable: so Farage, BoJo et al painted a picture going 30 years further back again, to a dark time of isolationism from which the country emerged, as it happened, on the right side of history. The appeal was also to an idea of Merrie England that never existed at all, in which the country was wholly free of tyranny and oppression and existed in a kind of permanent real-ale and Morris-dancing festival. In reality, it’s hard to think of a country which has been less oppressed and tyrannised than our own. Most of the time, it was us doing that to others.

Including to Scotland, I freely admit. We imposed dynasties, captured and on one occasion executed their monarchs, nicked their coronation stone and then, in a supreme act of irony in 1603, made their ruler king of England. That didn’t end well for them but, 100 years later, enabled us to forge a kind of strange hotch-potch of a constitution which is in many ways with us still.

The Scots may feel they’ve done badly out of the deal. It depends how you define it. The country has benefited hugely from the Union and, incidentally, produced a wave of inventions that are probably without parallel in the world. It feels it could do better alone. Nationalism is never far from the surface, however. I’m not immune. I regard myself as English rather than British largely because, given that about 45% of Scottish people want to be independent, I’m not sure what the word “British” now means. Also, we have separate football and cricket teams.

If Brexit has taught us anything, it’s that political divorces cause more problems than they solve. Scotland is also more closely tied to the UK than the UK ever was to the EU. One of the motives for the independence vote in Scotland is that the country can re-join the EU. Well, possibly: if the EU will have them. The thought of dealing with yet another border between the UK and the EU is one that will make brains in Whitehall whirl.

Given the current parlous state of the one-trick-pony that is the SNP, another referendum any time soon seems unlikely. None the less, it’s worth reminding ourselves that such things can, particularly if there’s an inept campaign to defend the status quo, produce unexpected results. As matters have shown with Brexit, these results can also be unwelcome.

• Pager rage

One of the oddest and most worrying stories of the week concerns the extent to which the Israeli secret services managed to intervene in Taiwan, Hungary and probably other places to ensure that numerous pagers used by Hezbollah in Lebanon exploded. This has caused deaths (including to children), horrible injuries and a lot of diplomatic fury. Pagers are used as a means of communication to avoid Israeli interception, so this strikes at the heart of the organisation in a way that killing a senior operative or two could never accomplish. It was very clever. But was it a good idea?

Some might argue that tensions in the Middle East are currently so high that one more attack makes little difference. The conflict is becoming ever more an existential struggle for survival. As with the Scottish question above – the significance of which pales into insignificance by comparison – I’m hampered by having no experience whatsoever of what it must be like to be either Jewish or Muslim, Israeli or Arab. I studied the Crusades in some detail at university and that offers few insights, except that some parts of the world produce more history than they can consume locally. The Middle East was, and is, one.

I blame God. He promised the Fertile Crescent and its seaboard to three different peoples, all of whom have fought bitterly over it ever since. Monotheism has produced many evils. The worst has been to have three such implacable creeds strike their flags in more or less the same place. Polytheism worked fine: you conquered somewhere else and you added a few of their gods to the pantheon. You have a favourite deity? No problem. You do something great and want to become a god yourself? That can be arranged. It was a wonderfully fluid and pragmatic way of looking at life.

It’s the pursuit of a certainty that can never be proved or provided that screws us up in the end. When you get three in the same place – similar enough to make them really hate each other, in the way that complete strangers never can – then you’ve lost all hope. If God is reading this, I hope he’s reflecting on what he’s done. I also hope he has a good lawyer: for if the Jews, Christians and Muslims can see what the real problem is here then they should be able to join forces and launch a really powerful class action.

• New towns

A statement from government on 17 September states that the Deputy Prime Minister has addressed the first meeting of the New Towns Taskforce, asking them to identify and recommend locations for new towns within the next year.

“Building on the appointments of Sir Michael Lyons as Chair and Dame Kate Barker as Deputy Chair in July, the government has appointed an additional eight members with a wealth of expertise to drive forward the government’s ambition to deliver the next generation of new towns. Together, the Taskforce brings vast knowledge across key sectors including planning, infrastructure delivery, architecture, investment, funding, and urban regeneration.”

The Local Government Chronicle reported that Sir Michael Lyons had said that “it is ‘absolutely inevitable’ that infrastructure will be a key focus of the new towns taskforce” and that “wherever possible” infrastructure investment will be in place before any dwellings are occupied.

If so, the project would require serious underwriting by the government. Even the largest private developers would struggle to fund the construction of public buildings on the scale required before they’ve sold a single home. This would also require a degree of joined-up urban planning that the country hasn’t seen for decades. Do the necessary skills exist in Whitehall? If not, they’ll have to be bought in. Already I can hear the clatter of the consultants’ hooves as they start herding the projects into the shape most suitable for their ambitions. All the more important, therefore, that the many lessons of HS2 are learned.

 • And finally…

• Looks like the train drivers have finally settled with the government. First the teachers and now them. It appears our new rulers are dealing with opposition in advance before a wave of something even more unpleasant, possibly in the form of a new austerity.

• Back on the US election trail, the town of Springfield, Ohio seems to have calmed down after Trump claimed, falsely it would appear, that the town’s Haitian immigrants were feasting on local pets. Mind you, the remark got attention and created dissent, which was all it was probably designed to do.

• The re-vamped Champions League has kicked off with a new group format so complicated that even a footie-nerd like me can barely work it out. The usual raft of predictions have appeared, with few looking much further than Real Madrid or Manchester City as the winners. I have my doubts. I think Real could find that assimilating Mbappé and replacing Nacho might take a bit longer than anticipated, while City might get distracted by the vast number of legal actions brought against them about financial fair play. My left-field tip is for Bayer Leverkusen to beat Liverpool in the final with Barcelona and Atalanta as the losing semi-finalists.

• Few people in British public life are as reviled as Prince Andrew, so the news of a new three-part series about his infamous 2019 interview caught my eye. One has been done before, with the excellent Rufus Sewell: but this one has the divine Michael Sheen, an actor who looked and sounded more like Tony Blair and Brian Clough than they did themselves. Think I’ll be watching…