For the sake of the English countryside, Boris Johnson should cancel HS2
HS2, Great Missenden (Shutterstock)
The trouble with HS2 is not just that it is pointless, although nobody has provided a proper explanation for why it is necessary. Nor is it the fact that this troubled project is already running late and its costs are out of control, although this also true. No, the decisive objection to HS2 is that it will do irreparable damage to the English countryside.
This environmental objection is set out today in a letter to the Editor of the Times by a formidable array of scientists and conservationists, including the heads of the National Trust, the Wildlife Trusts and the RSPB. They point out that huge rural areas, including ancient woods, wetlands and sites of special scientific interest, will be destroyed by HS2. These places “are supposed to be protected under law”. What are legal safeguards for these unique habitats worth if they can be overridden merely because the gentleman in Whitehall thinks he knows best?
The gentleman in question this time is, of course, Boris Johnson. He is due to make a decision on HS2 in the coming days and the noises emerging from Downing Street indicate that he has capitulated to the intense lobbying of those who stand to lose from cancellation. They include some of his new intake of backbench MPs, whose constituents either have or hope to get HS2 jobs. Land has been purchased, work has begun and prestige is at stake. Quite a few politicians and officials would have egg on their faces.
Yet it is not too late to call a halt to this madness. Some have compared HS2 to the building of the Victorian railways, which also caused huge disruption. Yet those lines were, without exception, built by private investors. These pioneering venture capitalists risked their own money — and frequently lost it.
Not so with HS2, the greatest boondoggle in British history. The taxpayer has shouldered the entire risk. So it is no surprise that the costs have doubled in five years and they continue to spiral out of control. The word from Whitehall is that the Prime Minister will get a grip on these costs. But he has many other things to do. It is a safe bet that if HS2 gets the green light, by the time it is completed, the costs will have doubled again.
Why, in that case, does Boris Johnson propose to go ahead with a project that his own consigliere Dominic Cummings is known to consider ripe for the chop? The answer is politics — and, ironically, green politics at that. HS2 is driven by the global obsession with climate change at the expense of other environmental considerations. For the sake of a notional and probably insignificant quantity of CO2 which would be saved by high-speed rail travel instead of domestic flights, the Government is trashing the English landscape.
Yet as the Times letter states, “the climate emergency will not be solved by making the nature crisis worse”. The arbitrary target of zero CO2 emissions by 2050 will never satisfy the zealots of Extinction Rebellion, who demand that the same goal be achieved by 2025. On the other side of the argument are those whose lives would actually be most affected by HS2: the local people who will forever lose the trees and animals, the walks and vistas that are dear to them.
It is unclear whether this unprecedented assault on the countryside is actually within the law. If HS2 gets the go-ahead, a judicial review is indicated. The least that can be done is to test its legality in the courts, before the bulldozers erase from the map places that were recorded in Domesday Book but are now pages to be torn from the book of nature. Now is the time for a Prime Minister who claims to care about wildlife to speak for England. If Boris Johnson were to cancel HS2, we would hear a collective sigh of relief across the country.
