Relax for a few minutes, sit back and pretend morals and business ethics are redundant. Then imagine an infallible, risk-free business scheme in which you get to create the market, decide the product, manage its regulation, then have the power to confine people to their homes or remove their income until they submit to buying it. And no one can sue you or take you to court if it all goes wrong.
No legitimate government would allow that within its borders (except perhaps a few family-run or completely totalitarian ones), so aim higher and make this international, as it then ceases to be fantasy. All this is being negotiated within the WHO pandemic documents to be agreed by your Government in two months’ time.
So, imagine:
- Your organisation will be a public-private partnership, so using taxpayer money but guided by the private sector.
- You spin a story that a series of plagues are about to engulf humanity, exponentially increasing in frequency and severity (your partners control large swathes of the media, so don’t be troubled by reality).
- Then use public money to set up a surveillance network guaranteed to find virus variants (i.e., go and find nature, you can’t miss it).
- Governments have agreed ahead of time to give you power to control healthcare policy when you decide these variants pose a threat (not harm, just a threat). They have agreed that this includes border closures, restrictions on daily life of their citizens and of course mandated vaccination (in return for them ‘getting freedom back’).
- Then transfer these virus variants to laboratories and pharmaceutical companies of your choice (your friends and supporters, who will in return give your organisation some money).
- The pharmaceutical companies are ready: they have been receiving free billions from taxpayers annually under the same scheme to keep their production lines ready to profit from the market you are about to create.
- Your pharma-investor sponsors also sponsor disease modellers willing to produce the most fantastic death figures to shore up public compliance.
- You then use your powers to impose these lockdowns and insist that a 100-day vaccine must be rushed out to save hapless humanity and allow a return to an “inter-pandemic” period.
- Once your chosen companies rush out the vaccine, you get to control the regulatory bit (more money changes hands), bypassing pesky safety trials and those interminable ethics reviews.
- All the while, you can note any dissenting opinions that may reduce your market size; your governmental partners having already agreed to deal with them.
- Once you have the profit flowing, you get to decide when the profiteering can stop (think ‘respiratory virus vaccine’ and more sponsored modelling – rapid waning of efficacy so lots of boosters to keep humanity safe).
- All the while, you have ensured freedom from liability for your pharma partners and your own regulatory process.
- You, of course, have no liability either – you are above any national jurisdiction. You don’t even have to pay tax to anyone!
Dream on. You only get to do this if you are in the WHO or the international pandemic set, and member states pass the proposed amendments to the International Health Regulations (IHR) and the new Pandemic Agreement at the World Health Assembly this May. For this is exactly what they are proposing.
It amounts to perhaps the most infallible wealth concentration scheme in history. The general model proved itself during COVID-19, orchestrating the largest wealth transfer on a global scale from poor to rich the world has seen. Rather than fiddling around with sanitation, nutrition and the endemic infections that kill people, international public health is now concentrated on hypothetical but far more profitable stuff like Disease X (the next pandemic), amply guided by the corporatists it will benefit.
The last big natural pandemic, the Spanish Flu, occurred over a century ago in the pre-antibiotic era. The recent COVID-19 pandemic is widely thought to have arisen from just the sort of research being promoted within these WHO pandemic initiatives; the WHO now proposes to increase sharing of viruses considered to be high-risk among laboratories that it oversees.
This is the same WHO that concluded COVID-19 did not transmit from human to human, and may have come from frozen fish rather than the Wuhan Institute of Virology just down the road. It suggested this after sending its team, including a senior scientist involved in funding coronavirus researchers at that same institute, to investigate the problem. Since then, whilst insisting that “misinformation” kills, WHO has been systematically misinforming the public and their governments regarding the future risk from natural outbreaks.
What is the WHO?
The WHO is an organisation that receives roughly a quarter of its funding from the pharmaceutical industry and major pharmaceutical investors. These same sponsors have profited greatly from the COVID-19 response and are strongly aligned with the WHO’s current pandemic preparation and response proposals. The largest country-based funders are the USA and Germany, also heavily invested in Pharma. German public money backed BioNtech, the developer of the Pfizer mRNA Covid vaccine.
Most of the WHO’s funding is ‘specified,’ meaning that it does what the funder specifies. The WHO has now become a tool of vested interests for much of its work. Approximately 75% of its total funding works this way. This is a completely different type of organisation than the WHO of 75 years ago. When originally set up, its budget was based on ‘core’ funding from countries, and the WHO decided its priorities based on disease burden and country requests.
The WHO does not come under any national legal jurisdiction. Senior WHO staff have diplomatic immunity. The organisation is highly hierarchical, with a military-like structure that tightly controls outputs and messaging. Staff have tax-free salaries and benefits such as an education allowance until their children are adults, health insurance, living allowances, and they travel business class on longer trips. After retiring on a generous pension scheme, former staff commonly supplement this through consultancies arranged by their friends still within the organisation. Its largest office is in Geneva, Switzerland, one of the most expensive cities on earth.
How Will the New Outbreak Business be Developed?
The proposed legally binding Pandemic Agreement and IHR amendments are designed to work together. Having two parallel documents has allowed the WHO Director-General to repeatedly claim that the Pandemic Agreement does not hand any power to the WHO, and anyone who says so is a liar and conspiracy theorist. A group of former country leaders and public health people debased themselves recently by publishing a letter saying the same. The clauses that they say don’t exist in the Pandemic Agreement do exist, of course, in the proposed IHR amendments. The Pandemic Agreement says the two documents are compatible (Article 26. 2).
If you think this is all fanciful and such powers would only be used in dire circumstances, recall that the WHO Director-General declared “Mpox” (monkeypox) a Public Health Emergency of International Concern (the future trigger for this process). This was declared after just five deaths, with transmission essentially restricted to a small demographic, against the advice of his own advisory committee.
Remember also that COVID-19 was rarely fatal beyond the elderly and very sick, and the CDC showed the Covid vaccines were less effective than natural immunity. This did not stop the WHO running the COVAX campaign to vaccinate 75% of Africans in the knowledge that 50% of this population was under 20 years of age, less than 1% over 75 years, and the vast majority had immunity to COVID-19. The vaccines were also aimed against variants that were already rare or extinct.
The vaccines that the WHO will mandate are planned to include mRNA vaccines produced within 100 days by CEPI. mRNA vaccines are modified genetic material (the mRNA is changed to persist longer than our own mRNA) in a lipid envelope. Biodistribution studies from Pfizer/BioNTech indicate that they are expected to concentrate in the ovaries, adrenal glands, liver and spleen as well as the injection site, and are also distributed throughout the body including the nervous system. After entering cells, these cells produce the foreign protein coded by the mRNA, which is then expressed on the surface of the cell and circulates within the body. The body then mounts an immune response to this protein, killing the cells that express it and causing local inflammation, also creating a low-level inflammatory response. This is how mRNA vaccines work.
CEPI, a key player running the rushed vaccine effort, is a public-private partnership set up at the World Economic Forum (WEF) in 2017 by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation (a major pharmaceutical investor), the Wellcome Trust and a number of countries. CEPI was specifically set up to make vaccines and similar products for pandemics at a time when the world had gone 100 years without one – the last major pandemic having been the pre-antibiotic era Spanish flu.
Why it Can Work
Money, in large amounts, is really good for helping people to understand that wrong might be better than right. It also helps those who don’t care at all about right or truth to rise to the top despite their obvious unfitness. It allows the media to survive if they please these sponsors, and it can help country delegates to find more important priorities than the good of their own people. During COVID-19, the industry pushing the new WHO initiatives made an unprecedented amount of money, so the pandemic agenda has lots of momentum.
Thousands of well-paid staff are already becoming dependent on this scheme within the WHO, other public-private partnerships and the research and ‘humanitarian’ industries. They have mortgages, healthcare costs, education and travel benefits to maintain. This is largely why, despite being able to work out that this massive resource diversion will increase poverty, reduce life expectancy and abrogate public health ethics, they find themselves able to support it.
For most of the rest of humanity – those not heavily invested in pharma or modelling software and those concerned about human rights – the future does not look so rosy. We are supposed to provide the money that ends up in the hands of the people running it all. That is how profiteering works. So we will have to put things right, because they obviously won’t. Now that it is all written out for us in the WHO documents and we are aware of the money transfers of the past few years, we no longer have any excuse to ignore it.
Notes:
- Read the amendments to the IHR here (especially Articles 12, 13A, 18, 23, 35, 42, 53)
- An annotated summary can be found here (and don’t take anyone seriously who ignores the proposed IHR amendments when claiming a transfer of authority won’t happen under the Pandemic Agreement, irrespective of his or her credentials)
- Read the Pandemic Agreement here (especially Articles 12,13,15,18; latest version is appended to the bottom of the article)
Dr. David Bell is a clinical and public health physician with a PhD in population health and background in internal medicine, modelling and epidemiology of infectious disease. Previously, he was Director of the Global Health Technologies at Intellectual Ventures Global Good Fund in the USA, Programme Head for Malaria and Acute Febrile Disease at FIND in Geneva, and coordinating malaria diagnostics strategy with the World Health Organisation. He is a Senior Scholar at the Brownstone Institute, where this article first appeared.
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The real intention behind HS2 is to gouge the British taxpayers for years to come and in this regard it will clearly be a great success. Useless for anything else but impoverishment – it’s a winner.
One wonders how the contractors may have expressed their gratitude for the approval of the project.
I may have skimmed the article, but I didn’t note any reference to the fact that laying track in England is eight times the cost per mile of similar track on the continent. Pretty fundamental consideration I’d have thought.
High speed rail in England may or may not be stupid. But this article sure doesn’t shed any light on the matter.
All the author says is: England is a small country, gives a few distances so we can be thoroughly persuaded that it’s a small country (thanks, we got it the first time) and high speed rail is very expensive. Oh and the country is small, in case you didn’t catch it the first 5 times.
The difficult thing to measure is the benefits, which is what you really need to be clear about and compare to the cost to know whether it’s stupid or not.
Without assessing those two things you just can’t know whether it makes sense or not (on paper and from an economic stand point).
The road network and conventional vehicles can do the job better.
Maybe. I’m not a central planner nor do I pretend to be. I don’t pretend to know what’s best for everyone.
Indeed. Hard to fathom how a cost benefit analysis could really be accurate for such a large project with so many variables. Might be better to look at whether in other countries people are prepared to pay a premium for slightly faster journeys over similar distances.
The premium will be a subsidy from the taxpayer of £5000 per ticket for 1 million passengers per year and £500 per ticket when they get 10 million per year. That is just the interest on the borrowed money btw, add the operating costs and it will probably end up twice both figures. Hmmm…
The main gainer will be the BBC having spread themselves between London and Manchester. TV tax now £10,000 per viewer!
I think that’s a very unfair assessment of the article. The author also makes several other very good points about geographical hindrances, the requirement for the track to be much straighter than conventional lines, the higher specification requirements of high-speed rail, the fact it will cut off a mere few minutes from journey times, and a debunking of the freight/environmental argument. You might want to have a re-read.
England is a far flatter country than France or Spain and even Germany. There is nothing of the geography of England that would suggest it is especially difficult for high speed rail.
That said England is a strange country when it comes to trains. It’s the only place in the world that I am aware of whose train system gets crippled by leaves.
It Is more densely populated. That means in France and Germany they have lots of wide open countryside without buildings, towns, cities, roads, railways, rivers. (or leaves)
It is easier therefore to chose straight routes that stay away from such obstacles and so cheaper to build.
HS2 was planned to go even faster than those Johnny foreigners, pure hubris from the virtue signalling Bliar government. That is why the very straight lines were necessary
That would knock another 2 minutes off the journey. But from Old Oak Common to Parliament is 40 minutes on a good day, and into Birmingham or Manchester a 20 minute cab ride. Do you see how stupid this is?
My thoughts exactly. I’m not going to profess to knowing a great deal about the pros/cons of HSR, and I don’t feel I’ve learnt anything more by reading this article. If, for example, enough journey time could be saved that we could connect the North to the South and redistribute/better share some of London’s economic advantages, then surely that’s worthy of consideration. What I don’t know is if HSR achieves that goal. I still don’t know. What I do know, is that Northern land that Government purchased is still owned by Government, but it’s not now going to be used for its supposed intention. Wonder what they’ll do with that? Government-owned farmland maybe? Giant windfarms? Mass training camps for men that dress as women while reading stories to young children? Perhaps concentration camps? The possibilities are endless!
Gulags for the “climate dissenters”?
Well, if I’m capturing the sentiment of the DS community correctly, it seems that any of those might be preferable to high speed rail.
The aversion to HSR seems almost visceral.
It’s odd because my experience of state run rail systems is basically good.
Back when I was a child British Rail was excellent. The trains ran on time, they were plentiful and inexpensive. What we have now is far far worse inalmost every respect.
In other countries, France, Spain, Germany, China state run train services are pretty damned good.
I am a strong proponent of the free market and minimal government but I’ll openly admit that there are some things that, at least based on experience, seem to work better under.public ownership and management.
My guess is that a publicly run HS rail network would be one. And of all the things the state makes losses on, that would definitely not be the worst.
I’d definitely like to hear good arguments against it though (as opposed to just downticks).
State-run rail systems are subsidised by taxpayers and regulation and taxation is used to eliminate competition.
If railways were so good and what people wanted, the State wouldn’t have to run them.
Surely, because of the infrastructure requirements, a train service is almost by definition a monopoly. The notion of competition is therefore redundant. We therefore have a choice between regulated private provision or public provision.
One big flaw in Thatcher’s rail privatisation, IMO, was the separation of infrastructure from service provision, precisely in order to allow some sort of competitive bidding process. But the result has been a lack of accountability when things go wrong.
My view is that monopoly public goods (such as rail) should be provided by and run by the state. This is the model used across most of Europe, where the service, both in terms of price and quality, is better than in the UK.
They have destroyed a dozen Ancient Woodlands in the London- Birmingham stretch alone. Totally irreplaceable natural phenomenon. The fuss that was made over one sycamore (non native) in Northumberland last week and nothing at all about the Ancient Woodlands which are far far older and likely remnants of the primeval forest which covered this land. Thousands of trees! No media coverage so it didn’t happen. Nobody cares.
I care …. and it was one of the reasons I opposed the White Elephant from the start.
You downtickers are such a-holes. I can’t imagine what the benefits of shaving a few minutes off the journey between any parts of the UK might be (other than the asinine belief that doing things quickly is always ‘better’), but stewart’s reflection on the question of state vs private is exactly mine. I too say this as someone who on general principle objects to unnecessary, busy-body state involvement in virtually every area of public life. ‘stewart’ has made some perfectly reasonable points – and with your baffling resistance to reasoned discussion you invite the characterisation of the Daily Sceptic as a whole as nothing more than an extremist echo chamber. It isn’t that, but you’re not helping.
I don’t know when you were a child, but I’m a late Baby Boomer and during my childhood in the 60s, teenage years in the 70s and commuting to London years in the 80s British Rail was never “excellent.”
It was appalling.
Are you Peter Hitchens in disguise?
I agree with a lot of what you say.
I don’t remember BR being “excellent”, but equally it doesn’t seem like what we have now is significantly better. We have better trains, I think, but that’s simply because they are newer. It’s a natural monopoly and I don’t think the franchise system really works all that well. Perhaps on some lines like the ECML which has a few open access operators like Hull Trains, Grand Central and Lumo there could be some benefits from competition but most lines are single operator and it’s all underwritten by the state.
My experience of trains in continental Europe is that they seem fine – not significantly better or worse than ours, but certainly cheaper. Of course they might be subsidized, but I think ours are too, perhaps a bit less. The problem with big infrastructure projects and state run services is that it’s hard to decide how much money to spend on them. HS2 seems very expensive to me and I struggle to believe the money could not have been better spent on improving existing lines but I don’t have the figures to back that up.
I used to love trains but have grown to prefer driving because of the constant strikes, and because of what happened on trains during “covid”. But I think having a state-run railway service is in the scheme of things not an ideological hill worth dying on. There’s a better case for dismantling the NHS.
Well clearly you missed the point about distances so I’ll have a go at explaining.
The distances are too short to reach the purported high speeds and maintain them, without ending up in Sweden.
So it is going to be ‘high speed’ in name only. The same result could be achieved by upgrading present track and signalling, straightening out curves for example, and at a small fraction of the cost.
What distance is requires for a high speed train to get up to speed?
I’m not really interested as to whether these trains hit the definition of “high speed” or not (whatever that is). What I want to know is whatever speed these trains can hit, how much faster is that than ‘normal’ trains, and how much time will that reduce, say, a Manchester-London journey by? Like I said, I don’t know the answer, but it seems to me to be a far more pertinent question than whether or not these trains can reach the definition of “high speed”.
It was 15 minutes for the cost of demolishing a dozen Ancient Woodlands. And that was if it went from Euston, which it now isn’t. This was warned about 10 years ago – that it would never be able to be connected to Euston. Those of you just waking up to the issue, please note – the government knew this a decade ago. They carried on. It’s totally corrupt.
Government, corrupt?!
It would be much better to address poor rail links to other parts of the UK. It takes a little over five hours to get from London to Penzance on the train. That’s about 300 miles of track. It takes about two hours to get along a little under 200 miles of track to Exeter in a modern ‘express’ train (what we used to call ‘InterCity.) Then it takes an hour to travel the roughly 40-45 miles to Plymouth, crawling on branch lines along the coast – the other line was closed by Beeching and Marples – and two hours to go through Cornwall to Penzance.
I can easily talk about the issues in my home city of Plymouth in Devon from having thoroughly looked into it. There’s no direct rail link to Newquay Airport from Plymouth or Exeter. It’s two hours on the train from Plymouth to Newquay, travelling an hour into the south of Cornwall in order to change and double back on yourself, taking what is effectively a single decker bus on rails to Newquay in north Cornwall. A car journey is about an hour, if you put your foot down.
A decent rail track from Exeter to Plymouth would mean something like a 20-minute journey instead of one hour. To have a train capable of 150mph travelling at about 40mph is absurd.
And on a simple branch line level, Plymouth has horrific road traffic problems every day due to very poor arterial roads going into the city centre. The Park & Ride services closed down when Stagecoach (distantly owned, via a number of shell companies, by Deutsche Bank) handed in the keys.
Many years ago, the Tavistock-to-Plymouth rail branch line was shut down, although much of the infrastructure still exists. It meant that towns on the moors could get into the city centre easily. For my whole life, there have been terrible road traffic jams every morning and evening, because commuters have to jam up narrow moorland roads, especially as they move into or out of the city limits. There’s yet more ‘renewed talk’ of restoring the as a result of the HS2 abolition, but I’m not getting my hopes up. If a new station was opened in north Plymouth as part of that line, the arterial roads into the city centre could swiftly be cleared.
We need better rail services in the UK, but we also need branch lines and regular train lines, not a couple of vanity projects that serve the usual London-obsessed Westminster crowd who only care about what they see outside the windows of the Houses of Parliament.
Bennetts Insurance recently did a super YT video of a race from Aberdeen to Penzance. The motorcycle got there 30 mins before the train. The train had no delays.
Well said Dom. I live in the west country but use the Waterloo – Exeter St Davids line (I don’t go as far as Exeter).
The trains speed along quite nicely to Salisbury (stopping about 4 times). Then you pull out of Salisbury and after about 2 minutes, the train grinds to a halt for anything up to 20 minutes waiting for a train which is coming the other way to clear a few miles of SINGLE TRACK. This is repeated further down the line.
It would have cost a tiny fraction of the £billions they have and are squandering on another rail line from London to Birmingham to provide two tracks on the whole of the Waterloo – Exeter line.
Beautifully put D I couldn’t agree more. I too live in the West Country.
It was authorised when we were in the EU and it was to form part of the EU transport policy. The main protagonist, as I recall, was George Osborne. He fully anticipated we would stay in the EU.
of course it had nothing to do with increased capacity or the economic prosperity of the north.
Yes, it was based on the utopian fantasies of the Junckers of this world, not in economic reality!
I think it’s a typo but although Paris to Lyon is about 190 miles, Lyon to Marseilles is not 488 miles. It’s only 195 miles.
Paris to Marseilles is 488 miles.
I do agree with what the author says though
We are 52 years on from when the Paris – Lyon high speed line was opened. Many more have been built since then, including the southern section down towards Marseille. One the long term benefits was the capacity of the traditional Paris – Lyon – Mediteranée (PLM) route for freight. So it is with most of the others. Another market effect of it was to virtually wipe out short haul aviation.
Not much in the article about the aim of increasing mixed traffic capacity on the railways – but that does not appear to be aim of it, unfortunately.
Paris to Lyon is about 290, not 190…
Look, it was/is all about shifting tax payers money into private hands..
Just like Afghanistan, Iraq, Ukraine….
Corruption is ubiquitous
‘Why the political, bureaucratic and engineering geniuses who planned the whole thing couldn’t see this more-than-minor geographical problem defeats me.’
It doesn’t defeat me.
Politicians want to feed taxpayer cash into the large corporations. Think immigrant hospitality here too, and many other projects.
Where that cash goes eventually, who knows?
Trains only make sense where they are faster than planes, including time getting to the terminal and through security, or cars/busses.
If for argument’s sake a plane is four times as fast as a train (which implies that the train is just a normal express train, not a super train), but you have two hours more spent on getting to/from the airport and security, and a train is twice as fast as a car, but it takes an hour to get to/from the train stations to where you are going, then trains are only preferable to cars for a journey time under 2 hours, and only preferable to a plane ride for a journey time of up to 3-4 hours.
I’ve rounded those numbers but it sounds about right. In UK terms what that could mean is that for example, you might currently prefer to take the train to Newcastle from London, but would prefer to take the plane to Edinburgh from London. If you increased the train speed by 50% or so say, then maybe you would prefer to take the train also to Edinburgh. However, it still wouldn’t be fast enough to make you prefer the train to Aberdeen.
High speed rail only makes sense in this sweet spot, and furthermore, only makes sense when it is for travel between two major destinations. Eurostar is of course very popular and much more convenient than flying. In the UK, there aren’t really any cities that come even close to London for population density.
What the UK really needs is lots more road capacity for busses and cars, and for the cost of private travel (e.g. taxis for the elderly) to come down.
If I remember correctly, as I used to work with somebody whose Dad worked in the rail industry, the British railway signalling infrasture is/was appalling. And having travelled to work for several years on railways, that often the delays are due to signal failure. (Once it was a broken down steam train). Better to spend the money on that, and some more hospitals i would have thought.
Much like the Ukraine ‘war’ HS2 is an exercise in money laundering. The excessive costs are easy to slip into the Exchequer’s debit column which can then be used to justify higher taxes, high inflation and poor public service.
“… we now live in an age of unreason where opinions matter much more than facts.”
Spot on. We have non-evidence based conclusions which we must accept at face value, because reasons…
The Intercity 125 service when introduced, reduced travel times not because of higher speeds, but it had better acceleration and braking, so could achieve cruising speed quicker and hold that speed longer.
The French TGV network is only high speed for part of the route to the main destination, then reduces to normal track and speeds for onward destination.
In fact with passenger numbers dwindling on TGV and normal SNCF, and service levels falling, there has increasingly been resistance to spending huge amounts on extending TGV, with some arguing the money would be better spent on upgrading the regular network and service.
Laptops, tablets, smart phones WiFi internet connexion have all made the supposed purpose of H2S to save lost time out of the workplace, and thus boost productivity, moot.
A lot of people do their work over the internet these days. If there were just decent WiFi on trains, it wouldn’t matter (in a lot of cases) if it took 10m longer. The train companies could charge an extra fee for proper WiFi, and I’d pay it for those few occasions I have to spend hours on a train.
From the outset opposed this from knowing the devastation it would cause in the Chilterns as well as where I live in London so petitioned against it before both Houses of Parliaments special committees. Regarded it as an excuse to get hold of land on the cheap especially at Euston, so as to build a new Canary Wharf. If it was a sensible scheme the terminus would be at Kings Cross or at the expensively built Stratford Intecontinental so as to join Eurostar. The new station in Birmingham is not the existing central stations so need to walk between them so even the 20 minute saving is illusory.
If the UK government wanted to help business travel outside London they should have built the Leeds – Birmingham – Manchester bit first. As it is the remaining dregs of HS2 will serve London – Birmingham which already has the M40 and bits-n-pieces to serve the route.
They definitely should have started at the northern end and worked south. The point about obtaining land around Euston station on the cheap is a good one. Private Eye has been reporting for years on the project and said a long time ago that a terminus in Euston wasn’t feasible and that it would be at Oak/Royal Oak (?) common.
I live near Stonehenge and we are seeing the same sort of mega project costing billions being pushed (to currently give a benefit of 15p per £1 spent but that will surely disappear with overruns) and the delays and environmental damage to the surrounding countryside will be awful.
A main point about the Stonehenge bottleneck is that it could easily be avoided if the coaches with visitors turned right before the stones and went along a parallel road through Larkhill to then arrive at the visitors centre i.e.3 sides of the square.
Most visitors come from London so at present they can at least see the stones as they go past to then turn up to the visitors centre, once the tunnel is built why take them underground past the stones to then surface at a roundabout and go north to the visitors centre?
I accept that the army don’t want coach and visitor traffic through Larkhill but allowing that would at least take some tourist traffic off the A303. Larkhill is increasingly being used as a rat run anyway and then once the tunnel is built (with no service road) and there is any type of problem (think fire in Mont Blanc tunnel) the system will be completely snarled up.
Well said
Wasn’t it obvious from the beginning that even the claimed benefits couldn’t justify the projected costs?
Vanity of vanities: All is vanity!
We need a one-off very high wealth tax to reclaim the astonishing amounts of money all governments have transferred from ordinary people to their owners/ mates/themselves over the last few decades.
And a fair few executions.
As far as I know, HS2 has never met a test of successful economic operation. If it’s just going to bleed cash then it is of little more economic benefit than statue building. I don’t know what percentage of the cost is related to the ‘hs’ part of the project but I could easily imagine it is greater than 50%. And I believe the load capacity of an HS2 line is lower than a conventional line because of the extra spacing needed between trains.
High speed trains are great, except they tear huge scars across the countryside. High speed trains can travel at speeds that are slower that jet airliners and they need a ‘runway’ and related infrastructure for their entire journey, as well as another ‘runway’ etc. for the return. Jet airliners only need about 1 mile of tarmac at each end of their journey’s irrespective of the distance travelled. The runways at Heathrow are each about 2 miles long and yet these are all that is needed to reach just about anywhere within 15 hours.
There’s a simple reason why France and Germany have built high speed rail networks.
The Germans want to move their troops to the border as fast as possible and the French want to be able to retreat even faster than they did in 1940.
You jest but I think that is part of the EU thinking behind Eurostar and as a comment above mentioned George Osborne’s part in this is to move EU troops around the EU and up to the north of the UK as and when.
There is an argument about the mobilisation of troops in the Summer of 1914 (all by train) which tipped the conflict into being i.e. all general staffs had mobilisation plans and once started they could not be halted or reversed, it became a race to the start ()but maybe that angle to the history of WWI is a convenient myth, so difficult to know nowadays if what we accepted as a historical truth is even true).
Brilliant
As my ‘Stop HS2’ car sticker used to say TEN YEARS AGO: No business case for it, no environmental case for it, no money to pay for it.
Politics – the profession where you get rewarded for failure.
All the politicians behind massive theft this are far richer now they then they were before they took office.
Maybe it should the called the Greatest Train Robbery of all time
Good article. Why can’t politicians understand and apply basic “what if” questions to evaluate investment and spending decisions? I feel electrifying the existing network and updating the control system to automate driving would have been far cheaper and would have yielded much more environmental and economic benefit. Trains with no steering requirements and a relatively technically simple anti-collision problem to overcome compared to road transport like with automated cars is easily achievable with inexpensive current technology.
In addition to have done what you suggested should have won many votes/been an obvious vote winner among the populace so why not try to win votes? Did they not care about popular sentiment? Obviously not.
Unfortunately, David Craig’s thesis in this (much supported) article is wrong.
If England is too small and geographically restricted for high speed rail, he needs to explain how Belgium, Denmark, Austria, Switzerland, Japanese Kyushu and many other small and “difficult” places successfully run high speed rail.
Of course, the definition of a “successful” system is key. The fact that trains carry passengers from A to B, at high speed, is clearly inadequate. At what cost? Providing what benefit?
And that leads directly to perhaps the most egregious failure of HS2, which has not been discussed, even now.
In a nutshell, it is an absolutely rubbish scheme which has also been pathetically planned and managed.
Starting as a vanity, legacy scheme for the two genii Cameron and Osborne, (both of whom should now be languishing in jail), I have never seen a concise statement of what the plan must achieve, for what purpose (beyond being “fast”) and how “success” might be measured. Let alone listing a realistic cost or avoiding the most obvious disbenefits.
As always, HMG demonstrated its ineptitude in picking winners, declaring their choice of a “solution” to an ill defined “problem” and standing steadfast in preventing alternatives from being mentioned, let alone properly considered and discussed.
In fact, there is at least one well developed “rival” scheme, see highspeedrailuk.co.uk. (or HSUK)
This alternative was developed mainly by two ex BR Chartered Engineers, with no HMG and very little funding from elsewhere (unsurprising as HMG had “made up their mind”)
It includes reasonably large scale drawings of (for example) all major crossings of major roads and motorways. So far as I am aware, the only time this was considered was in a House of Lords committee, assured by Lord Adonis that it was “impossible to construct” (notwithstanding the detailed drawings and the fact that Adonis is clueless) because the main North South leg ran parallel to the M1.
No doubt there are problems with HSUK, but the scheme at least clearly demonstrated, in numerous respects, how inferior the adopted HS2 scheme really is.
As for the way the project has been managed, hopefully there will be a thorough investigation and people jailed for gross incompetence. Don’t hold your breath.
So do we need High Speed Rail? Maybe.
There would be a much better case if we hadn’t already wasted Trillions on other disastrously inept “bright ideas”, Renewable Energy and “Non Pharmaceutical Interventions” for a bad flu type virus; being the most blatant.
highspeedrailuk.co.uk can’t be reached. It may be that with smart signalling trains could carry EVs for part of their journeys.
Just search for HSUK.
The correct full address is;-
Highspeeduk.co.uk
Sorry.
Loads to look through.
Based on the above, there’s absolutely no justification for squandering £70 billion on the Old Oak Common to Not Quite Birmingham section either.
Sunak got one cheer for scrapping the Not-Quite-Birmingham to Manchester leg. He’d have got two if he’d scrapped the entire White Elephant. And three if he’d put Adonis in one of the tunnels and sealed both ends.
The article starts with an argument based on surface area: “It doesn’t make sense to have high-speed trains in a small country”. Small is defined as less than other countries. But countries smaller than England (130,000 km^2) do have high-speed rail: Denmark (43,000 km^2), Netherlands (42,000 km^2) and Belgium (31,000 km^2). One could make the case that they are part of a larger European High Speed Network, but the same could be true of England q.v. HS1.
It moves on to distance, comparing the London Birmingham Manchester route to the Paris Lyon Marseilles route. But why not compare it to any of the high-speed routes in, say, Belgium which are all shorter (longest 59 miles) than HS2’s shortest Birmingham Manchester route (86 miles)? Or the stops on HS1 which are even shorter? The author is silent on HS1, not commonly described these days as utterly stupid.
Again, one could make an argument that the individual segments matter less than their part in a larger network. But that would lead us to ask what a larger domestic UK network could look like. Sticking to the distance metric, just routes out of London, for example to Liverpool (195miles) or Plymouth (237 miles) or Newcastle upon Tyne (248 miles) are all longer than the Lyon Marseilles segment. There are much longer routes just within England: Plymouth to Berwick is 472miles, 97% of the author’s benchmark Paris Lyon route. Removing the artificial restriction of England’s borders, the routes into Scotland such as Plymouth Aberdeen (618 miles) are more than double the Frankfurt Munich route, also approved by the author.
There many criticisms of high-speed rail in the UK, but surface area and distance are not the most convincing.