Regular readers will know that I’ve become very cynical about the quality of journalism in the mainstream media over the past few years. Chiefly because so much of it is lazy and uninformed. It’s also incredibly incestuous, with people copying each others articles and amplifying erroneous comments and conclusions rather then (heaven forbid) doing their own research or fact-checking. We’ve seen this recently with the media falling over each other to rehash the same story that HS2 was described as ‘unachievable’ in the Infrastructure and Projects Authority annual report which I described in this blog.

It’s no wonder the British public is so ill-informed on so many subjects when the members of the 4th Estate either can’t be bothered to give them the facts or analysis, or (worse) put their own slant on things which ends up (accidentally, or deliberately) misinforming people. Nowadays, journalists are held in low-esteem but in many cases they’ve only themselves to blame. Today it’s often difficult to tell politician from Journalist and vice-versa – just look at ‘GBNews’ to see where this leads.

Sadly, it’s not just the ‘red tops’ that do this. Supposedly reputable newspapers (what used to be called the broadsheets) are doing exactly the same, as are the likes of the BBC. It’s not just the right-wing press either. That bastion of the liberal middle classes, the Guardian has a history of allowing people like Simon Jenkins to come out with absolute garbage on subjects like HS2. I examined one of his latest fact-free rants here.

Yesterday it was the turn of the Guardian’s Economics Editor, one Larry Elliott, who came out up with this awful opinion piece titled “HS2 is the white elephant in the room. If the Tories won’t scrap it, Labour must”

The headline rather sets the tone. HS2 is a ‘white elephant’? Gosh, how original. The sub-headline is even worse!

“The vanity project is scandalously over budget. Finally cancelling it would show the party is serious about public finances”

“Vanity” project? My BS Bingo card is filling up fast – and we’ve not even got into the article yet! Let’s just deal with that tired and trite old canard first shall we?

Perhaps the intellectually lazy people who insist on trotting out the line that HS2 is a ‘vanity project’ can answer this. Since HS2 was first begun by a Labour government in 2009 we’ve had a coalition Government and a Tory majority one. We’ve had six Prime Minsters (Brown, Cameron, May, Johnson, Truss, Sunak – and no doubt soon a 7^th). We’ve also had six Transport Ministers (Adonis, Greening, McLoughlin, Shapps, Trevelyan, Harper – and no doubt soon a 7^th). The phase 1 bill passed with the biggest majority of any Coalition Govt bill. The phase 2a bill also flew through Parliament with no real opposition – as did the Phase 2b (Crewe – Manchester) Hybrid Bill in 2022, by 205 votes to 6.

All the above politicians backed or back HS2. So do Labour (who’ve said they’ll build all of HS2 when they inevitably get into power) the Lib-Dems, the SNP and the Tories. As do the regional elected Mayors of all parties and a vast array of local politicians, business groups and business. The list is huge.

So, exactly whose bloody ‘vanity project’ is HS2 meant to be?

Having already set the bar low, Elliott rolls up his sleeves and lowers it even more….

His opening gambit is to mention the IPA’s ‘red’ rating for HS2. What he fails to do is put it in any context, like mention that the report doesn’t actually talk about HS2 at all. The only mention is in an Appendix as 3 lines on a chart that lists all the projects that fall within the IPAs remit. Instead, Elliott tries to pretend the explanation of the red rating is specifically talking about HS2 rather than describing that category. Now, for context, he could’ve mentioned that Crossrail once had a red rating, as did the two Queen Elizabeth class aircraft carriers, or the new Intercity IEP train fleets from Hitachi. All those ‘unachievable’ projects have been delivered, but that doesn’t fit the narrative and requires some research, not just copying what others have said.

Elliott then claims that “in a sense the IPA report told us nothing that wasn’t known already” Well, actually, if he’d ever bothered reading the report he’d know this is untrue as Hs2’s ‘red’ rating is just for phase 1 and 2a. Last year the phase 1 rating was amber/red and the year before that amber. Phase 2a has gone from Green to Red whilst Phase 2b has gone from Red in 20/21 to Amber for the past two years.

The only conclusion to be drawn from Elliott’s simplistic (and wrong) claim is that he’s never actually read the report.

Anyone with any knowledge of HS2 could have told Elliott why Phase 1 is now Red – it’s because the Tories have dithered and delayed and changed the plans for Euston station yet again, bumping up costs, adding delays and leaving a trail of uncertainty over what the station and oversite development will look like. Apart from the Euston fiasco the rest of Phase 1 is progressing well with around 40% of construction complete.

Elliott then asserts that HS2 is “a vanity project that has caused immense environmental damage”.

I’ve already dealt with the first idiotic claim. The second is just as easily dealt with. Elliott offers not a shred of evidence for his assertion but we can see from actual statistics and research (the stuff Elliott doesn’t do) that this is nonsense. For example, the amount of woodland affected by HS2 has decreased from the original estimates (see this report). Oh, and that’s without taking into account the amount of new planting/habitat creation.

Still, who needs facts and research eh?

Right, what’s next? Oh, yes…

“There are still those who insist that HS2 is needed to boost capacity on the rail network, which even if true misses the point: that every pound spent on HS2 is a pound that can’t be spent on other rail projects”.

Nope, there’s no point to miss there – because this simply isn’t true, it’s just another allegation that fails to understand how HS2 is funded, which is not from the existing railway budget but by borrowing specifically to fund HS2. That an Economic Editor doesn’t understand this is bizarre. There is no pot of money sat in the Treasury labelled ‘for HS2’ that’s waiting to be rebadged and spent elsewhere. Of course, there’s another irony here. The OECD recommends that baseline infrastructure investment is 5.5% of GDP annually for an economy with aspirations to growth. We’ve only spent this amount twice since WW2. HS2 is not only investment in infra, it’s investment in green infrastructure, exactly the sort of thing we need to be investing in – not more roads. You’d think the Economics Editor of a national newspaper would understand that, wouldn’t you?

Let’s plough on…

“The pandemic and its inflationary aftermath have massively increased pressures on public spending while at the same time encouraging more people to work remotely”.

Eh? Just a few minutes of research would have shown Elliott that WFH is a strawman argument on several fronts. Firstly, rail passenger numbers have already recovered to near pre-Covid levels and in some cases (especially leisure) have surpassed 2019 figures – as DfT figures show. Remember this is at a time when the industry’s plagued with strikes and cancellations too – so there’s suppressed demand. My RAIL colleague Phil Haigh quoted the figures yesterday.

There’s another thing the graph highlights, road traffic has bounced back too. Quite how people can drive whilst they’re all supposedly working from home is a mystery, but there you go. We need to cut road travel to tackle climate change. There’s also the fact road congestion costs the economy billions (£10bn a year according to the Economist magazine). To do that we need HS2’s rail capacity as the existing network can’t cope and compared to the annual cost of congestion the annual (and finite) cost of building HS2 is peanuts. You’d think those facts might have occurred to an Economics Editor, wouldn’t you?

The second flaw in the WFH argument is that long-distance rail travel has sod all to do with working (from home or anywhere else) as it’s not about commuting or business travel and never has been.

The third flaw is the fact HS2 is also about freight – even though it’ll never carry it. HS2 frees up capacity on the existing network for more freight services (which ties in with green investment, getting lorries off roads – see my point later).

Now, you’d think an Economics Editor might have bothered checking these things, wouldn’t you? But no…

Next up Elliott quotes Tony Berkeley, a man who’s damaged his reputation with his obsessive opposition to HS2 and use of dubious figures and frankly daft statements and assertions such as these “There is no safe and buildable station design for it at Euston, no forecasts for demand post-pandemic and no easy connection to other rail lines“. This is complete cobblers of course. HS2 was taken to the High Court by a local Euston resident claiming the HS2 tunnel design was unsafe and the case was thrown out. The court judgement is here.

Elliott then goes on to say “a future Labour government should (cancel HS2) …Although the opposition has given no hint that it intends to take such a radical step”

Err, Labour’s given no such ‘hint’ because it’s categorically and continually stated the opposite and has been doing for years! At last years Labour Conference Shadow Transport Minister Louise Haigh said in her speech that:

“We will build an Elizabeth Line for the North and deliver Northern Powerhouse Rail and HS2 in full“.

This brings me on to another of Elliott’s ignorant claims, that cancelling HS2 would “give an incoming Labour government money to spend on other – more worthwhile – projects. These would inevitably include improvements to rail infrastructure in the north”

I’ve already pointed out the pot of money fallacy but there’s another thing Elliott fails to understand and has never researched. 50% of the new Northern Powerhouse Rail tracks would be tracks laid for HS2 that NPR would run over! It’s a point not lost on all the Northern leaders – which is why they to a man (and woman) support building HS2. Still, what do they know compared to a journalist based within the M25?

What message would cancelling Hs2 in 2025 after an election when the majority of phase 1 civil engineering will be completed with stations well on their way send to the markets? It wouldn’t be one of economic competence, it would be one of failure and a stifling lack of nerve and vision. Cancelling the largest civil engineering project in Europe would be pure madness. It would leave a massive monument to failure, and the UK a laughing stock on the world stage. Brexit has already diminished our credibility, this would be another nail in that coffin. I cannot believe any credible economist would suggest such a thing, although a blinkered political dogmatist might.

This next one’s an absolute stunner and I couldn’t help laughing when I read it.

“When I asked an old friend who lives on Merseyside what he thought of HS2, he said: “It is mainly about cutting journey times between Birmingham and London. We aren’t bothered at all about it. However, the rail connections between Liverpool, Manchester and Leeds are an absolute disgrace and that is much more important to all of us up here”.

Oh, God. Where to start? Research is now reduced to asking someone who lives outside the M25 (for the sake of some sort of credibility) and asking their uninformed opinion to bolster your own weak arguments. This is like saying “well, a bloke in the pub told me” it’s cringeworthy.

1. HS2 has never been “mainly” about reducing journey times (ever) it’s always been about capacity as a few minutes fact-finding by reading actual reports rather than cribbing from other journos copy or asking some random bloke would have told Elliott. 2. We’re already spending £bns rebuilding the railway lines between Liverpool, Manchester and Leeds (and beyond) as part of the Trans-Pennine Route Upgrade. You’d have thought an Economics Editor might have heard of such a major investment in the rail network, but apparently not…

The final argument in Elliott’s piece is just as ignorant and uninformed. According to him, scrapping HS2 “should make it cheaper for Labour to borrow the money it needs to fund the decarbonisation of the economy”

Wait? What? This is meant to be a particular interest of Elliott’s so how can he possibly not know that the biggest source of the UKs carbon emissions is transport? Or that without HS2 we won’t have the rail capacity we need to get modal shift from road/air to rail to cut those emissions to tackle climate change?

Instead, Elliott is proposing to scrap the one real thing we are doing (that has cross-party support) to invest in green technology and clean up our biggest source of Co2 emissions! Madness.

Having researched Elliott I find he’s also a Brexit supporter. Having observed his lack of research and belief in the man in the pub arguments instead that doesn’t surprise me.

What does surprise (and depress me) is that these people become Economics Editors on national newspapers. This country and its people deserve better from its media than this. If I can do this research, why can’t highly paid national journalists do it – or is it because it doesn’t fit the narrative?

PS, Guardian – I’m open to offers!

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