Everybody, supporters and opponents alike, used to agree on one point about HS2: it would be a colossal waste of money to build a fast railway that would run only between Birmingham and London.
Even in the rose-tinted world of 2012, before the project’s projected costs exploded from £33bn, the government’s economic appraisal said the whole Y-shaped design, to Manchester in the west and to Leeds on the eastern leg, would be needed to make the cost-benefit ratios work. The logic was obvious: if the chief beneficiary is supposed to be the north of England, you don’t build only the southern half.
