This article is taken from the November 2025 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Get five issues for just £25.
The opening chapter of Sally Gimson’s new book, Off The Rails: The Inside Story of HS2, gives an account of what could have been: the first new railway built north of London since 1900, a rare exercise in long-termist “Cathedral thinking”, a country united and enriched by a gleaming high-speed railway line.
Does that not sound dreamy? Well dream on, because in 2023 then Prime Minister Rishi Sunak announced that High Speed 2 (HS2), initially planned to run from Manchester to London Euston via Birmingham and the wider Midlands, would be scaled down. With everything north of Birmingham excised, the line will terminate at Old Oak Common, where a station is being built about an hour from central London.
Sunak’s announcement was a disaster, with costly implications. In place of a rail system once promised to join the North and South by the fastest trains in Europe, we are set to have an unnecessarily sophisticated high-speed link adding to traffic on an already busy route, ending in a poorly connected part of London, which will probably be run at a loss to the taxpayer.
Scrapping the branches to Euston and Manchester meant that hundreds of millions of pounds had been wasted in preparation, consultation and buy-outs, and dealt a crushing blow to forsaken towns like Crewe who, in anticipation of HS2’s socio-economic benefits, spent millions they did not have on regeneration plans.
It was also a betrayal of the North by a party that — in what now sounds like a tragicomic joke — was elected on a “levelling up” mandate in 2019, and a personal betrayal of Andy Street, the Conservative mayor of the West Midlands.
Though its proximate cause was the struggle with post-lockdown inflation, Gimson’s book shows how Sunak’s announcement was actually the culmination of a death-spiral that had begun in 2019, coming at the end of a decade’s worth of cretinous mismanagement, ballooning costs and general confusion.
She identifies a number of obstacles that lay in HS2’s path (such as the systematic neglect of engineering expertise, Britain’s lack of practical experience in large railway infrastructure projects, and the fabrication of numbers to fit political arguments), but the recurring theme of Off The Rails is the absence of any clear, unifying rationale for the whole project.
Like most policies, HS2 depended on the alignment of a vast and complex network of actors — successive ministers, parliamentarians, civil servants, engineers, consultants, architects, surveyors, the media-academic matrix and swathes of the general public — for its implementation. Though this alignment can sometimes be forced at the margins with payouts or coercion, a project of HS2’s size requires that most of the network share an understanding of what the project is and what it is for.
Unfortunately, per Gimson, this was missing from the start, even amongst HS2’s early champions. Whilst its progenitor, Andrew Adonis, focused on how fast, capacious and modern the trains would be, his boss, Gordon Brown, and in turn David Cameron and George Osborne, saw high-speed rail as a way to foster economic growth in the Midlands and the North and as an antidote to the austerity measures imposed after 2008. As for civil servants in the Department of Transport, they saw HS2 as “an act of civilisation”.
This confusion persisted through the 2010s and peaked with (surprise!) Boris Johnson, a terminally indecisive man caught between two stools: his love of grand projects (e.g. Boris Island) and trusted Spads who hated HS2 (e.g. Andrew Gilligan and Munira Mirza).
Into this narrative vacuum poured a multitude of critics and naysayers: Home County NIMBYs and their political representatives, cost-benefit analysis-fetishising treasury wonks, sceptics of big government projects, widely-read transport journalists and academics, etc. Whilst strident opposition to a project like this is inevitable (and even desirable), a clear, sensitively chosen rationale might have brought more people on board and forged a pro-HS2 coalition better equipped to defuse or outplay the opposition.
Of course, a government’s being able to generate mass buy-in through hegemonic narratives is not self-evidently good in a liberal, plural society (think lockdown). However, to the extent that mass buy-in is necessary (albeit not sufficient) to run grand projects like HS2, Off The Rails raises worrying questions about our government’s capacity to build infrastructure.
Gimson has done yeoman work with this book. Often relying on interviews with key players, she manages simultaneously to map out the byzantine mess of social actors, interest groups, laws, policies, back-room deals and major political events, and to deliver a searing, non-partisan indictment of British state performance. Read it, and weep.
