The UK’s High-Speed Rail Fiasco Is a Gift to Farage

Britain’s high-speed rail debacle was made to measure for an insurgent movement keen to highlight examples of establishment failure. HS2 bears the fingerprints of both main parties, having been conceived by Labour and enacted by the Conservatives. A cost originally put at £35 billion ($47 billion) is likely to end up being at least three times that, for a railway whose size has been cut by two-thirds. The Labour minister who has taken over responsibility calls it an “appalling mess” and a parliamentary committee has described it as a casebook example of how not to do an infrastructure project. Why wouldn’t Nigel Farage’s Reform UK be making hay?

Hungry for divisive issues beyond immigration, Reform has laid down some bright lines distinguishing it from the cross-party consensus that propelled Britain’s high-speed ambitions. In the foreword to a paper by the Policy Exchange think tank published this week, Farage’s deputy, Richard Tice, promised that Reform would cancel the Northern Powerhouse Rail project if it wins the next election. This plan for high-speed links between cities in the north of England was first put forward by the Conservatives more than a decade ago; Labour is expected to revive the initiative at its conference later this month. At a panel discussion on HS2 a day later, Tice repeated his leader’s call to scrap the rump of the network, which now consists only of a single line between London and Birmingham, and advocated diverting funds to more modest intra-city transport improvements in the north.