Sorry, Manchester. The last high-speed stop will be in Birmingham.
UK’s prime minister, Rishi Sunak, has announced that the country’s highly anticipated high-speed rail project, High Speed 2 (HS2), was to put on the brakes before it reached Manchester.
Pity. The journey from London to Manchester which now takes over two hours by
rail would have taken a little over one hour. London to Birmingham by FS2, now
under construction, will cut a one hour 21 minutes trip to 52 minutes. It was
the goal of FS2 to help “level-up the country” and be the catalyst for growth,
and as fast travel between cities has always done, “open up new employment and
leisure opportunity for millions of people,” as proclaimed on the FS2 website..
Sunak, still in his first year as prime minister, made his announcement in
the worst place imaginable: Manchester, the city most negatively impacted by his
decision. But it was site of the Conservative Party’s annual conference
and Sunak needs to establish himself as a populist rather than a rich
technocrat, according to the New York Times.
The entire northern part and central part of England, regions that had been looking forward to a much-needed economic boost that a fast connection to London would have provided, had
anticipated the decision. Thirty businesses, including Manchester United, the city’s fabled soccer team, had implored the prime minister to not abandon
them and to tie the country together as only a fast train network can
do.
Sunak may well be “canceling the future,” said the Conservative Party’s West Midlands mayor Andy Street.
“The north always gets the s*** end of the stick,” said a resident quoted in the Manchester Evening News.
The anticipation of a bomb falling is nothing compared to its impact. The cancellation
of a mega-project (£36 billion still to be spent on HS2) overshadowed everything
Sunak said in the hopes of ingratiating himself with his political party and the
nation, such as a total ban on cigarettes to those under 14 and denial of gender
fluidity. “A man is a man and a woman is a woman,” said Sunak as he
welcomed his wife on stage.
Sunak mentioned that
money saved by the HS2 cancellation to Manchester would be used “in hundreds of new transport projects in the north and the midlands, across the country,” including roads and existing rail connections, and promised details at a future date.
The HS2 trains would still run to Manchester, albeit slower than between London and Birmingham, because of the lack of a high-speed track.
In canceling HS2 to Manchester, Sunak reacted to HS2 cost overruns, with the total project being estimated to cost £100 billion,,
three times more than originally estimated at the start of the project in 2010.
Canceling additional HS2 construction puts the UK further out of sync with Europe, which is crisscrossed with high-speed rail lines.
