HANG round long enough and a bad idea the fag end of which you can just about remember from last time round will resurface in a slightly-altered guise, yet much the same arguments will be trotted out, albeit suitably reconfigured. I was about 15 when Concorde took to the air for regular, scheduled services, and even at that late stage there were lingering hopes it would prove a commercial success and be sold to airlines round the world.
In the event, just two airlines bought the supersonic passenger jet: British Airways and Air France, by no coincidence at all the flag carriers for the two nations that had built it.
Now we have Concorde on rails: High Speed Two. This ludicrous railway-vanity project, which will cost the taxpayer £30 billion (and the rest), is being justified on a number of grounds, none of which stands up to much scrutiny.
One: it will help close the north-south divide. Oh yeah? The history of increased speeds on Inter-City railway travel – 100mph in the late Sixties, 125mph in the late Seventies, 140mph (in theory at least) in our own century – has been of a widening north-south divide. Why wouldn’t it be? In the days before the railway, a solicitor or accountant wishing to live in, say, Guildford or even Croydon would have had to practise there too. After the railway, they could commute to the City or West End.
Railways increase the concentration of business and industry, they don’t disperse it.
Two: it will generate benefits of at least twice its cost. Aside from my comments about infrastructure schemes in general in my column in today’s edition of The Mail on Sunday, we have also provided a breakdown – on page 74 – of how Whitehall has arrived at this calculation. I hope you get the chance to read this piece, because it is entirely forensic and uses Department for Transport documentation to list the numbers being put on gains such as less crowded trains or reduced greenhouse-gas emissions.
Whether you accept the claimed benefits is up to you.
Three: it is a sort-of slow-motion 2012 Olympics in that it shows Britain at its best, confident, able to face the future…you know the sort of thing.
Four: it will create lots of jobs. Sure. At the cost of jobs somewhere else. I rarely agree with the late Milton Friedman, but he correctly pointed out years ago that the beneficiaries of direct taxpayer support for job creation or preservation knew who they were, whereas the losers not only did not know who they were but had no way of finding out. Thus the electoral imperative for officeholders was pretty clear.
1) It’s the way they tell them
THOSE of us who grew up in the age of disillusion with Concorde-style prestige projects may remember the backlash. By the Eighties, few such schemes were being given the go-ahead, and those that were, such as the Channel Tunnel, contained special provisions to ensure private shareholders took the risk, not the taxpayer. No longer. The official documentation on HS2 contains some forlorn-sounding hopes concerning private investment in the project, but seems pretty well resigned to the State footing the bill. There is also some stuff about ensuring that ordinary people are able to afford tickets on the British bullet trains. This rather ignores the fact that the whole point of high speed rail in Europe has always been to whisk business executives, officials and VIPs from one city to another along special train corridors with minimum intermediate stops. Ordinary people don’t really figure.
With luck, this whole misbegotten scheme will fall victim to either a triple-dip recession or a Government fiscal crisis, or both. We were stopped from cancelling Concorde by the penalty clauses in our treaty with France. Fortunately, HS2 is an entirely domestic folly.
2)Europe: Once more with feeling
ABOUT ten years ago, Tony Blair and Gordon Brown announced they would be joining forces to tour the country and build a pro-European consensus. That worked really well, didn’t it?
Last week, we learned that Kenneth Clarke and Peter Mandelson would be at the forefront of – that’s right – a national campaign to build a pro-European consensus. Like long-fallen heavyweights returning to the venue of their greatest triumph, Britain’s pro-European grandees are forever reliving the glory days of 1975, when they persuaded the electorate to vote 2-1 to stay in what was then the European Community.
Deep down they believe that all that is ever needed is for the - you know? - serious, sensible people to sit on the same platform together, exuding gravitas, and the public will see where its best interests lie. It worked then. Why shouldn’t it work now?
Well, one reason may be that trust in grandees is not what it was, not least because a lot of people believe they were misled in the Seventies on the European question and do not plan to get fooled again.
3) A right riveting listen
RADIO 4’s Saturday drama yesterday was an excellent hours’-worth of suspense. Boots on the Ground, by Don Webb involved a British soldier fresh from the battle front – played by Lee Ingleby – arriving at a Ministry of Defence research centre, where he has volunteered to take part in some speed-reaction tests. It emerges not only that a mate of his took part in the same tests and then disappeared mysteriously, but that the leading character’s main purpose is to investigate this disappearance.
The play’s ending involves that much-misused phrase, a coup de theatre, which I understand – perhaps incorrectly – to involve a turn of events that (a) completely changes the audience’s understanding of the play and (b) could, in retrospect, have been foreseen by the aforementioned audience.
My advice is to try to catch it on the BBC’s ‘listen again’ facility.
Thanks again for reading and enjoy the rest of the weekend.
Going South: Why Britain Will Have A Third World Economy By 2014, by Larry Elliott and Dan Atkinson is published by Palgrave Macmillan