HS2 is a story of the incompetence of British industry, the corruption in the British political system, and a complete failure to achieve the initial goals of the project (to connect Northern England to London).

It's depressing how much Britain's construction industry has been gutted by decades of neoliberal policy, it's depressing how the land that has already been acquired for use in HS2 is now going to be sold off for pennies on the dollar, and it's depressing how this will only serve to further the wealth gap between the two biggest urban areas and the rest of the country.

China's entire high speed network (42000km) was funded on only $900 billion of debt... Yet HS2 is estimated to cost $130 billion and California HSR $128 billion. For comparison, the Beijing-Shanghai high speed rail cost $38 billion (inflation-adjusted) and the Beijing-Tianjin line (China's first HSR) cost about $3.3 billion (inflation-adjusted).

London-Birmingham is a distance of about 160km, Los Angeles-San Francisco is a distance of about 560km, Beijing-Shanghai is a distance of about 1060km, and Beijing-Tianjin is a distance of about 110km (all straight-line).

Edit: another comparison, Japan's Chuo Shinkansen, which is pioneering high-speed maglev technology at scale and involves an absolutely astronomical amount of tunneling, is estimated to cost only $60 billion for 266km.

This is the best summary I could come up with:

A future Labour government would not be able to easily reverse Rishi Sunak’s decision to scrap the northern leg of HS2 as he has “spitefully” authorised the sale of properties that were subject to compulsory purchase orders on part of the route.

Steve Rotheram, the mayor of the Liverpool city region, said the move killed HS2 “stone dead” and would “tie any future government’s hands and make the delivery of HS2 for the north all but impossible”.

Keir Starmer, the Labour leader, on Thursday refused to commit to building HS2, telling ITV News Meridian: “What I can’t do is stand here now they have taken a wrecking ball to this project, and say that we will simply reverse it.

Mark Harper, the transport secretary, also conceded on Thursday that paying off contracts previously awarded for the cancelled HS2 sections would cost hundreds of millions of pounds.

Gareth Dennis, a railway engineer and writer, said the decision to sell off the land was motivated by “spite” and was, in effect, “salting the earth” to make it extremely difficult for Labour to restart the project.

He denied that the line would be reduced to a mere “shuttle service” between London and Birmingham, insisting that many more people would be helped by paring back plans for the project and boosting other transport schemes instead.

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