Here’s why HS2 won’t bridge the North-South divide

So Boris Johnson has decided to put connectivity above conservation. HS2 is going ahead regardless of the cost, financial and environmental. “It’s a fantastic project,” he raves, as he dashes about for the cameras in his hard hat and his high-vis jacket. Somehow or other, high speed trains are supposed to bridge the North-South divide that has bedevilled Britain for the last century. What’s next on the agenda? Oh, haven’t you heard about FP55? (That’s flying pigs to you and me — and Boris is 55 years old.)

Four decades ago, when Margaret Thatcher came to office, her adviser Alfred Sherman wanted to tear up all the railways and replace them with roads and buses: much cheaper, more efficient and above all privately run. Sherman convinced Nicholas Ridley, later Transport Secretary, but Mrs Thatcher was wary of grands projects. High speed railways were then seen as a French obsession, all about job creation and prestige. Francois Mitterrand, the first Socialist President of the Fourth Republic, opened the first TGV line in 1981. It was, of course, a proud legacy of the great General de Gaulle, but still seemed slightly old-fashioned in an era of ever cheaper air travel. 

Elsewhere in Europe, the Germans and Italians later followed France, hoping to overcome respectively East-West and North-South economic disparities. But the British took a different route, privatising their railways in order to upgrade the system. None of the (largely Continental) owners thought high speed train technology was a good investment.

Forty years on, how do the supposed economic and social benefits of high speed rail stack up today? Climate change has altered the calculus, tilting the balance against airliners and cars. Trains are a more popular form of transport than ever before, although still much less so than buses. (That’s why at the same time as giving the green light for HS2, Boris Johnson simultaneously announced more subsidies for local bus routes.)

But the argument that high speed trains are any kind of solution to the divisions between metropolitan and provincial societies has been tested to destruction. La France profonde is easier to reach from Paris by TGV, but the great majority of passengers are only going from one city to another. What do the provincial French think of the elites who subsidise their own travel with the taxes of the rest? The gilets jaunes go to Paris only to protest.

The same is true in Germany and Italy. In all three countries, the rural areas and small towns are ever more depopulated, while a populist revolt of the masses against the urban elites is gaining ground. As Roger Boyes explains in a powerful piece for The Times today (behind a paywall), innumerable infrastructure projects, including fast railways, have failed to prevent the former East Germany drifting off into far-Left and far-Right politics. The same has happened in Italy, except that there populism has a grip on both North and South. Connectivity has only fed the politics of envy: now the poor can see how the other half lives.

The lesson is that different means of transport are largely irrelevant to socio-economic divides. In the US, the flyover states would still be neglected even if they still had fast trains travelling through them. Here, it isn’t Manchester that would struggle without HS2 and “High Speed North”, however much Mayor Burnham may protest otherwise. The places that really need attention will still be on the wrong side of the tracks.

What really makes a difference to the regions is not state-subsidised rail links but large-scale private venture capital. Boris is gambling that HS2 and its associated northern networks will encourage big corporate investment from London-based companies. He seems less interested in creating the right tax and regulatory conditions for home-grown Northern entrepreneurship. Yet in the early days of the industrial revolution two centuries ago, it was mainly local firms that made the great cities of the North, such as Manchester, and those of the Midlands, such as Birmingham, the wonders of the world. 

Tomorrow’s Cabinet reshuffle and next month’s Budget will show the political direction of travel. Boris Johnson seems to have been seduced by the glamour of grand designs, but it is not too late to shift the focus onto the microeconomics of regional growth. 

Low taxes and light-touch regulation will do more for the first-time Tory voters than any number of expensive projects that destroy irreplaceable natural habitats and ride roughshod over communities. If Boris wants post-Brexit UK to pull itself up by the bootstraps, he should follow in the footsteps not of Mitterrand, but of Thatcher.