Another £43bn for HS2? How about some austerity instead

There is a big glaring problem for anyone trying to accuse the government of ‘austerity’ – a charge that is continuously laid by virtually all opposition parties. Just where does that charge fit in with HS2? True, the nation’s roads are full of potholes, the bins in some places are being emptied only once every three weeks and the NHS is trying to wriggle out of offering hernia operations – something it seemed to manage perfectly well to perform in 1948. But still it is a little hard to square the charge of austerity with a government planning to spend £56 billion of public money on a single railway line, to be built at a cost, per mile, of more than four times what the French paid for their high speed line from Paris to Strasbourg.

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Druin Burch

Lucy Letby and the killer nurse I worked with

And it won’t be just the £56 billion either.