TRASHFUTURE - High Speed 2: Cruise Control ft. Gareth Dennis

Episode Date: October 8, 2023

Gareth Dennis from Rail Natter returns to the fold to discuss the debacle around the cancellation, uncancellation, rerouting, and re-rerouting of Britain's much maligned High Speed Two line. We posit that the purpose of the line itself is to generate consultation papers, and everyone would rather have just not put a spade in the ground. If you want access to our Patreon bonus episodes, early releases of free episodes, and powerful Discord server, sign up here: https://www.patreon.com/trashfuture  *STREAM ALERT* Check out our Twitch stream, which airs 9-11 pm UK time every Monday and Thursday, at the following link: https://www.twitch.tv/trashfuturepodcast *WEB DESIGN ALERT* Tom Allen is a friend of the show (and the designer behind our website). If you need web design help, reach out to him here: https://www.tomallen.media/ *MILO ALERT* Check out Milo’s upcoming live shows here: https://www.miloedwards.co.uk/live-shows Trashfuture are: Riley (@raaleh), Milo (@Milo_Edwards), Hussein (@HKesvani), Nate (@inthesedeserts), and Alice (@AliceAvizandum)

It is with no joy that I bring you this announcement today. The Captain Gatso appears to have fallen. That's right. Captain Gatso is now has been made a martyr for the South Essex Revolutionary Cuts Brigade. Yeah, the government, the regime forces, the blockade was gathered, has captured and compromised to a permanent end. The heroic revolutionary insurgent known only as Captain Gatson. Wait, wait, so I've got some questions on the mess. Because when he was arrested, the message that came up in the group chat,

which is now where I get all my news from, was that Captain Gatson had been taken down. But where did the idea that he is Captain Gatson? Because I'm not convinced that he's Captain Gatson. You're saying I can tell you exactly what happened, which is Captain Gatson is very dangerous, much like Jerry Adams. And so the BBC had to get the guy

who played young inspector Morse to play him with the arrest of the video. Oh yeah, yeah. So the words of Captain Gatson have been read by an actor. But in this case, the actor was Laurence Oh, that's right. And like four Van loads of carbs have just showed up. I love that he shaved his own head in preparation for going to prison, something that I don't think you have to do if you go to a British prison. Yeah, yeah. So if you're just joining us on this one, Lawrence Fox, right wing crank, one time actor,

one time like bag fumble of Billy Piper, and now sort of all around right wing crank and sort of, I think you ran from there of London and got like 2% of the vote. Yeah, like anti everything guy has been arrested by the woke met police at the urging of Saddett Khan in order to For the simple crime, for the simple crime of telling other people to deface public property, which I guess allegedly because again like you just forget that the world isn't post Yeah, yeah, I was happen to the best of us. So this is something that you can only really get on the right.

Like, you know, when I'll beloved left wing crank is get arrested, it generally doesn't come as a surprise to them slash us. Whereas if you're on the right, you think, well, you know, there's, I don't need to learn anything about sort of protesting or being a tour clandestine. I'm just gonna get in the group chat with my boys and go who are destroying you less cameras

and then act surprised that anyone else is reading that. So anyway, we want to introduce our guest for this episode. It is Captain Gatson. It's Gatson. Yeah, and he's here tonight. It's Gareth, quote unquote, Captain Gatsatto, Dennis.

What, how did it feel to be played by Lawrence Fox? I, for years, I've been hoping that Lawrence Fox would play me in my biopic. Yes, no, hello everyone. It's a pleasure to be on for the second time in two weeks, of course, because I was on two weeks ago, talking about Tharrett Cancel.

So, yeah, it's a pleasure to be on. Yeah, we're moving, we're transitioning towards an all-gareth model. That's right. And we are going, of course, going to be talking about the cancellation of the one of the only British infrastructure projects of the last sort of couple decades. What would it do, Miss gender someone? See now that now that he's in like in jail forever See now that he's in jail forever, now that he's in Settacan's gulag,

I feel obliged to do some of Lawrence Fox's worst bits. You know? You just like scramble up stained bit of paper that you've got. There's got a couple of his scribbled sort of gags on it that he chooses. Yeah, it just says like, gender, this is all on there.

It's quite hard for me to hand-rising. But before we do any of that, I'm just going to open my door to reduce the echo one sec. Oh, you're introducing, I thought you're introducing a new segment there. Yeah. The segment where I open my door to reduce the echo. So, I'm back. Beautiful segue, Riley.

Yeah. But before we talk about HS2, I, I, the Tory conference has continued and ordinarily I wouldn't go back to a, a, well, a twice in a week. However, we simply must discuss some of the developments of what I am beginning to see is the single most internet political party in the entire, uh, developer. Yeah. You know how Ron DeSantis is kind of like all of his stuff is like two online groipers who keep putting like son and rads and stuff.

And you know, he's eating shit at the polls, but he can't stop being like, sort of adhered to that very online kind of fascism. Hmm. Well, I mean, what if that was British? What if it was the same thing, but like even more dismal somehow? And also governing. Yes, also that. So that.

So yeah, we've had Tory conference at Manchester, which I think we can say is a new low. I mean, the bit that I want to talk about, obviously, is the transphobia stuff, which has been unusually rancid this year. We've had, I mean, the thing is, right, knowing that this is, you know, a year maximum before new elections, there is no time to do any new policy. There is no risk that, like, any of this stuff actually happens, it's purely red meat, but it's not nice being red meat. And so the red meat this time is we're going to do single sex wards and hospitals, we're going to make the like most overworked nurses and doctors in Europe like inspect everybody's genitals in order to decide which chair and a corridor you're allowed to, you know, die in

that's going to be cool. We're going to we're going to like, wokery out of science, not sure what that one means. And then, this sort of the real nadir of this was, Rishi Sunei, doing a sort of like, there's only two genders thing for cheap heat in his, like, set piece conference speech, which got, like, by far the biggest sort of like cheer and applause from Tory members all of whom are scum I cannot stress that enough you know absolutely sort of subhuman skill via all detestable people and yeah I look forward to that sort of stall being set out as a sort of like opposition insurgent party and I look forward to

the Labour party doing absolutely fuck all different. It's just, it's just very grim. It's very dispiriting, you know? Hmm. It's just playing into, well, playing into I think that as well going back to the point you made about like, this is just a view of what a dissentist presidency would look like. But sort of, it's like Britain got hit by the American culture war, AOE. Well, it's more participatory than that because they're casting around for what the culture war should be and they're trying different things.

And it's not great that the trans stuff was what seemed to get it. Well, the other things as well that I sort of are worth talking about in terms of like this is the most sort of grouper political party right now in the sort of most of the angles. Yeah. It's like, you know, the rage against the machine thing. Some of those workforces are the same that burn crosses. It's like a version of that, but it's like some of those that wear lanyards are the same that post frogs, you know? Well, it's, it's suella braver than being like, hey, we will not allow British cities to turn into San Francisco, which they had

no risk of turning into. That's an American city. It's an American paranoia. San Francisco's functional company is based in it. Yeah, we can't have any of those people. People want to visit San Francisco. San Francisco has like a burgeoning culture. Yeah.

They didn't use to care about San Francisco. They used to talk about Rothera, right? They had their crazy bug bears about Rothera. And now because they're so disconnected from the world around them, because most of this is just people reacting to stuff from the internet and just trying to do politics that posts well, basically.

You know, Braveerman has gone so far into the internet that she is like, she's basically, it's like, Britain has just, they have become E and Miles Chong. Yeah, why essentially? Yeah. Yeah, I mean, you talk about Rotherham because you want to win seats in or near Rotherham and they've given up on winning seats. They've given up on being sort of like a going electoral concern. They want to like rest on their laurels of like 50 seats or whatever. And then I sort of distributed minority everywhere else that is just getting angrier and angrier about San Francisco for some reason. You know, surprise Andy? No, didn't show up. I think this gives them a bit too much credit, though, because it's

kind of like, I think with the dissantist thing, I didn't pay much attention to like the primary, so I'm not sure how accurate this is like in its entirety. But it kind of felt that like with the dissantist thing, there was this kind of concerted understanding that they could take sort of online, like right wing online reactionary content and sort of try filter it into like a political movement. And that was sort of influenced by people like,

what's his name, not Christopher, but like something. Christopher, Christopher, Christopher, who basically had said, but like, well, here's an example of how I have taken like right-wing reactionary content and turned it into this like local political movement via school boards to kind of create like a trans panic around that. And clearly like the British have like, you know, the sort of like conservatives have sort of seen this and been like, could we sort of do the same here? But in order for that to work, you kind of need a state that functions, right? And this is kind of where it sort of feels like they're saying, they're saying the stuff, but the stuff has this kind of, you know, they're saying the stuff in an attempt to sort

of capture a feeling that they don't quite understand because if they were very serious about these things, I think Alice, as you pointed out, like, you know, it's absurd to sort of kind of see doctors and nurses being the sort of, you know, genital border guards for lack of a better term. Yeah. But the reality is, is like, well, they're not choose, like the single sex wards thing is bizarre

because it's like, well, that implies that there are wards open for that in the first place, right? And that like, it's not gonna be, that implies that there are wards open for that in the first place, right? And that like, it's not going to be the case of, you know, men and women get to sort of sit on different parts of the floor or the elevator to like, like in primary school to give, but yeah, we're fucking, oh, yeah, basically that. I'm, I go to A&E with like an arm hanging off and I get to sit on the one bench from like a P class.

Yeah. Or like, you know, teachers kind of, you know, all the whole teachers thing, and like teachers are also gonna have to do a similar type of board of guarding, but that implies that they have the capacity and resources to even do that. Or that there's even enough teachers to do that anyway. And so it kind of feels like they're looking at

the American part of it as sort of being, you know, we're looking at the American part of it as being like, okay, this is really the only viable option left for a right-wing party at this stage, but they don't really have any of the kind of infrastructure to really make that land or be convincing. And the other part of it, and this is based on a video that I think I'm in Jones posted today where he basically interviewed like an Anglo-Groiper who pretty much said the line Enoch was right, is the idea that, well, actually,

this stuff has happened independent of the Tory party actually making efforts to do it, right? Like, and so the Tory party really had no choice but to engage with these insurgents because that's what their party is right now. Like, and nothing else really works, except to really indulge in that. And so even when Rishi Sunak is saying,

but like, men and men, women and women, whatever, like, he's never sound convinced, but in this instance, it's like, oh, like, you really have no control over your party at this point. And like, just like everyone else, you're looking for an exit plan, but like, for the people who are staying,

it is very much like, this is it. Like, there is no other way to go except for this. It's Farage's party now and he's doing stuff like y'all ain't ready for that conversation about like, you know, people being snide about Suela Braver. The Farage thing is interesting too, because I think there's a distinction between sort of casting around for these grievances to throw at people and someone like a Trump, right, who can create those grievances day and over. Trump can like get people pissed off at something, you know, basically whenever he wants, right? He can mobilize a sort of like a horde of based groipers against

like Vanity Fair magazine, right, or whatever arcane grudge she has from like 1980s Manhattan. And the only person who's source of capable of doing that in the UK is Nigel Farage, which is why he's in conference, ostensibly as a journalist, sitting in the third row, sort of whaddling his eyebrows being like, well, you know, it'll take me back. Maybe I can do this for you. And all it took was me getting the Brexit votes I wanted, and then the entire country eating shit to get me out of the room and now I'm back, you know. And, you know, you can, I want to sort of bring Garrett in on this as well.

So I realized I wasn't saying much during that. It's mostly because I think, you know, Alice, I just wanted it's, it's, it's, your, your voice is the most important one here on the discussion, but yeah, it's, it leaves a sickness in the pit of your stomach. I mean, there's quite a large, you know, the railway community, as it were, particularly railway, again, enthusiasm when people interested in transport. That's quite a high percentage of trans people. Alice, I don't know whether that's anything to do with, you know, uh,

autism is a development. I can't possibly, yeah, yeah. But as a result of that, you know, I'm seeing a lot of people with just genuine fear about their livelihoods. There's discomfort, there's horror, there's every emotion on the spectrum and it's absolutely appalling. Every single, every single, every single, major political part at the moment is essentially holds a consensus on throwing trans people under the bus.

And it's just, and again, we come back to that like to what actual political end. And then all this other stuff. So whilst you've got the kind of your stomach is empty and feeling twisted and uncomfortable with this horror, then this sort of, this stuff comes in, it's a shame, because in a way you can't enjoy all this other kind of a mousse-a-boosh nonsense that they're

coming up with about shoplifting. But anyway, Riley, tell us about the shoplifting. I wanted to go into the last thing I noticed here, which was the Chris Phillips, the policing minister, his suggestion that, look, we would like to deputize every UK citizen. It finally, it came to me. You don't have to become a cop if they just make everyone cop. Everyone, everyone in the UK has been issued a stab vest. You know, we're all hooking our collective thumbs into it. And we're just sort of like, gambling up to, gambling up to the test going going. What's all this?

A-bap, all brits are bastards. It's just, you know, it's an empty ability here. So what has happened is, and this again, this is off the back of a video of some guys, you know, ripping a shoplifter out of a car at Tesco, you know, fucking with someone that they live near, right, in the honor of Tesco.

And then Chris Phillips saw that video, saw that it popped, and he was like, that's policy now. I love that. Yeah, I love that. He watches a video of someone getting mad, with like, you know, some like, baby formula, and like a couple of packets of potatoes, and like, desperately on their way back to feed their family. And they've got him. They've punched him through the play glass window, they're dragging out, they're beating up on the street and the Tory response is obviously, well, this is brilliant.

Yeah, just do a sentence or a free. Just do a sentence or a free. And the thing is, right, like the rationale for this ostensibly is, well, the police can't be everywhere. But part of the problem with the police not being able to be everywhere is that they don't show up, even if you do successfully grab a shoplifter

and defend Tesco's on it. As you routinely see with security guards who are at least nominally trained, nominally trained to deal with the stuff and paid to do it and so on and show them stuff. If they'd grab somebody for stealing a Twix and like, sit on them for 45 minutes while they're slowly getting positional as Fixie

or whatever. As the end of that, if the police then go, yeah, turns out we still haven't been able to work out like cellular reproduction of police officers. We haven't like my own another cop off of us. So we still can't show up because there aren't any. Then you have to let the guy go. You have to get up off of him and let him go. And the whole thing was a sort of a futile exercise at the end of which both of you are injured and nothing has changed except for a sort of abject sense of humiliation. That's one of the ways it could go. The other

vastly more dangerous way this can go, is if we're making policy off of this video of a sort of like, cry laughing mob of kevans pulling you out of your car, right? And we're going, okay, but at the end of that, the cops still don't show up. What we're moving towards then is a very real possibility of someone getting lynched by these people over fucking groceries, which is not ideal. Yeah. This is like a microcosm of, it's like a microcosm of everything. And it's actually, this is going to loop into the HS2 stuff because it just perfectly encapsulates the trajectory

of kind of things. So you start off with, you know, the police officer, they're too expensive. So you kind of downgrade them so you get the PCSO, which was like a new labor thing, right? And then that was picked up and then we moved, and this was kind of during new labor, but certainly massively started happening at scale in the kind of the coalition years and beyond, was that then the whole of like we just started seeing non-cops who have absolutely nothing to do with the police appearing in terms of their much cheaper,

their either security guards, or they're like the weird, not-cop people that you see going around paid for by businesses or like central business district groups that are kind of dress like cops, but again, are somehow free. And then we, that's too expensive, that's even too expensive.

So we're gonna get rid of that and then just have a guy, just us all of us are the cops now. It's a good thing that there hasn't been a recent scandal about how security training, like routinely skips all of the sort of mandatory first aid bit if you bung them an extra 50 quid. Yeah. Because that would be, that would be really bad in combination with this. But yeah, no, we can't even afford those guys anymore.

We were, we were sort of one of the things we were right about is volunteer border guards, but you're also now, you're enlisted as volunteer Tesco security. So, so what Chris Phillips said was, if you do just let people walk in and take stuff and walk out without proper challenge, potentially a physical one, then it will just escalate. Again, basically saying what a lot of the San Francisco

tech guys dream of, which is I should be allowed to use a Gundam to defend the Kroger. Yeah, bring us now PVP enabled. Yeah, you should be allowed to use a Gundam to defend the Croger. Yeah, Brick has now PVP enabled. Yeah. You should be, and basically, you can go get a quest from Sainsbury's to go and die, fight and die for them. This, and the fighter's guild is always looking for work if you've got the stones for it. And this is the work, you know?

Yeah. And you don't even get the siren for your car. Because now you can't just be aware. You can't get anywhere. Buy your own shit off of Amazon, buy a cheap airsoft vest, and just walk around Tesco patrolling on your own time. Just a load of people with aftermarket horns acting as sirens driving around. They're like, oh my god, you're a lot of Mazda with aftermarket weird.

Every siren is on all the time. The only way that this makes sense, I suppose, is if a subgroup of citizens decides that they're going to police the other citizens, like some kind of a big deal on. We could give them some kind of like standardized uniform, maybe, I don't know. Well, I was thinking more of like a vigilante

accountability office. Yeah. Like internal affairs, but internal to everything. Yeah, I mean, I kind of, this is the thing that gets people very mad at me. But as we continue with our sort of endless right wing project of defunding the police, the alternative is these guys, right?

It is, it is 50 kebs in like next jumpers pulling you out of your car and kicking the absolute shit out of you. Yeah, because they think they thought you looked shifty. Yes, they thought maybe you took something. Even less pretext than the Met might require, you know? It's a good job, it's a good job that we don't have loads of research showing that the average Britain's perception of people who look shifty is absolutely kind of colorblind.

It doesn't have any, it's unrelated to poverty or ethnic background. It's a good job that we know that that is in the case. Essentially, this is just a kind of, the way I see this whole, the whole conference, just we won't be talking about it again, obviously. The way I sort of see this whole car. You know what you're the bad rider. The way I have seen it, what I've seen what's come out of it, is a kind of, we talk a lot about the right-wing restoration. And I think this will prove to have been an important moment in it when the British right decides what it's all about. And it seems like it's living to serve a guy called like a based kekastani 1498, you know?

Yeah, because you've, those were the guys that were mobilized by the guys with the sauce. And now it's the sauceless who have come in to try to keep them mobilized. They're saying, here, what you like, have more of it. In the land of the sauceless, the one source have or is king. And that's like a pharash. Yeah.

So, and so what we're seeing, I think, is the Tory party sort of deciding where its energy is, which is in saying, the state no longer has the power to effectively inflict cruelty. What we can do is continue to roll back and allow the private sector, whether that's individuals or whether that's, let's say, I don't know, the security forces of the Houston redevelopment project to come in and inflict cruelty privately. Yeah, we'll talk about those guys some more. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And before we finish off as well, I mean, this is related to the discussion of the ID

cards, but Philip also said, hey, what if we link all of the passport data in with the police national computer so that CCTV can use AI to auto recognize faces? Which again, it's never, well, you know, so then they can be known. And then they can put up a fucking photo outside the test code. It'd be like, do not admit this guy guy and then they just walk in anyway like what he

um a devon can just basically pick up my audio from the previous bit about evidence that we understand that there's definitely never a bias about selection of of just basically applied to AI technology it's the same thing right you know and so you know this you're not put when Bair writes in the Guardian, a column called, mad, bad, and dangerous to know. We're witnessing the Tories final descended to absurdity. This spectacle shows how politics has degraded when power is wielded by a party that is no longer serious about government.

You can be like, yeah, you know, if you didn't see this, I remember you didn't, you liked this coming. You had a heart attack about the alternative coming. And you know, now you're saying, oh, no, I can't believe that these unseurious clowns have started just throwing out internet stuff as policy. And the thing is, the actual policy has barely changed. What's changed is the semi-osix, that it doesn't have the kind of more serious brand of Tory think tank. It doesn't have like, you know, the Institute for Policy Studies, the Institute for

Physical Studies, any of the kind of like professional thinky people orbiting around the outside of the fucking Groyper culture meme, sort of stroking their chins and going, hmm, interesting, but, you know, how do you make it sort of like governable? Now that you've lost those guys, now that those guys have unfolded their folding bikes and fucked off back to zone three, you've just got like, government purely buy-in for Krylar Fimoji. And in actual material terms, it turns out that the only thing that mattered

to guys like Raffa was, the thinky guys, which were like, totally dead weight on the project. Yeah, it turns out they're, they're gonna be depending on ADWP that they have asked to become crueler. Yeah, I mean, the thing is like, it's sort of like being on the Titanic

at like as it sort of like tilting and being like, oh no, I really like those deck chairs. They let sort of a semblance of like serious cruise ship atmosphere to this whole thing that I'm really kind of sad that we're not having anymore. You know, this has become a fundamentally unsearious cruise ship now. So let's talk about the damn train or lack thereof, indeed.

High speed to the rail link that was going to connect London to some other cities in the UK as opposed to London and Paris was sort of, Bandy, it's been on the verge of cancellation for a while. One of the big red meat policies was that the Tories were going to enact as we've sort of alluded to in past test episodes of the show was we're going to have it stop outside of London making it useless, or we're going to cancel the whole thing, or we're going to cancel different legs of it, so it doesn't

connect any more U.K. cities than are absolutely necessary. But the one I want to start off with is this. David Frost, former Brexit negotiator, said this about Jeremy Hunt flying 30 minutes from London to Manchester. Says, I don't often say this, but well done to Jeremy Hunt. We can already get from London to Manchester in 30 minutes, even without HS2. A modern society needs more flights, not fewer. Gareth, how excited are you about the being in the only country in the Anglo-Sphere, engaging in a modal shift towards cars and planes. Yeah, all of our planning whenever we get you on the earth and whenever the train related,

the planning for that segment is just like, ask a gar if he knows. So with that in mind, what the fuck's going on? Yeah, pretty much, right. Okay, good God. Where to start? I want to shout very loudly at David Frost. I want to grip the conservative party leadership, which actually apparently a very small number of people are kind of this, essentially creating these policies in like a bedroom, a hotel bedroom off the cuff. It's just a mess. Where do I start? I want to throttle people, but I'm happy to control myself. Yes, for years, so for years, if people want to know, why do I talk about it just to? Because occasionally people go, well, you know, because you get paid to design railways. And I was like, well, I mean, no, that's not why.

I've dedicated thousands of hours of my own time trying to explain this project to people, partly because a lot of people on the left didn't get it. They saw that it fitted into a lot of there, ironically fitted into a lot of the kind of the standard left tropes of like, oh, it's just corruption, oh, it's just money for Tories, corruption. But all the standard tropes were saying, it's just, you know, it's not doing anything, it's faster trains for no reason.

No, the whole point is that, well, I'll tell you what, I'll tell you what, H is to his later, but the whole point is I was trying to explain this over and over again, it's deeply frustrating. So obviously, I'm, you know, somewhat broken from like the fact that I knew it would get cancelled based on, you know, five years ago, from the fact that I knew it would get cancelled

based on, you know, five years ago, I wrote a piece explaining why it would get cancelled, and it's now being cancelled, and I once again hate being right. It's not a comfortable condition. Just anyway, very frustrating. So, we had, within Richie's inner speech, obviously he was going to cancel it. That was just table stakes, since, in fact, since I think my first or second appearance with you guys talking about, you know, a previous discussion of what was changing in HS2. So it was obviously that it was going to get canceled. But the way that it's been canceled is, I think, the really painful thing, which was talked about within the Rishi Siena X speech, he's not just canceling it, but maybe preserving the land that's been purchased so that someone in the future can decide to build it, to build it.

Just do, no, no, no. They are going to get rid of all what's called the safeguarding, which makes sure that you don't get any development on the space of the infrastructure and sell the land, and they said within weeks. So it's like, it's, so Alice, you talked about the fact that these policies can be reversed. Well, actually, if Sunak et al get their way, this will be, essentially, will be irreversible, which of course, the moment to speak and for the Labour Party was to say, no, actually, we still fully intend to go ahead with HS2 developers. So buy this land at your peril, because we'll just buy off you again, although I suppose

they'd still buy it and get it at a high rate. But anyway, but of course, no, Starmer's response was, I welcome. And of course, he decided he wanted them to go further. So it's non-union myelos here, everyone again. Yeah, so. Yeah, it just seemed like, again, the sort of broader theme of this conference, right, was not to be like, are the Tories of the nasty party again?

Because they always have been. But I think the sort of the deal, the sort of the Nasty party again, because they always have been. But I think the deal, the one union Tory stuff, the realization was, if you kept the sort of like spite to acceptable minority groups, you could be an electrically viable party. If you kept it to migrants, if you kept it to trans people, then whatever, you could be as nasty as you want and you could sort of like get it out of your system, your little nasty Tory system that way, and then sort of like govern in a sort of like polite, wibbly sort of ham faced way in general. And we've sort of witnessed the retreat from that. Now the Tories are on the cusp of becoming this insurgent party. This has managed to be the sort of like this turn to spite of not just like train users, right?

But like the North, yeah, London, London, yeah, London, yeah, London, yeah, London,

yeah, London, yeah, London, yeah, London, yeah, London, yeah, London, yeah, London, yeah, London, yeah,

London, yeah, London, yeah, London, yeah, London, yeah, London, yeah, London, yeah, London, yeah, London, yeah, London, yeah, London, yeah, London, yeah, London, yeah, London, yeah, London, yeah, London, yeah, London, yeah, London, yeah, London, yeah, London, yeah, London, yeah, London, yeah, London, yeah, London, yeah, London, yeah, London, yeah, London, yeah, London, yeah, London, yeah, London, yeah, London, yeah, London, yeah, London, yeah, London, yeah, London, yeah, London, yeah, London, yeah, London, yeah, London, yeah, London, yeah, London, yeah, London, yeah, London, yeah, London, yeah, London, yeah, London, London, yeah, London, yeah, London, yeah, London, yeah, London, yeah, London, London materially changed. So, HS2, 530 kilometers of rail, of dedicated high speed railway, the trains were run further, but they were supposed to be 530 kilometers of new infrastructure, two track infrastructure. So, two years ago, 200 kilometers of that got cancelled. Then, then they've kind of, now what they've done is cancel even more of it. So they've just left a spur that just basically have rump from London up to Birmingham, which is, so they've got rid of 60% of the project.

There's only 40% remaining. Admittedly, it's the most expensive 40% because it's because of all the tunnels that has been installed for Chilton and been MPs, but that's only 40%. So 60% of the project has gone, has been canceled. And as I say, not just canceled on left for the future, but like fire sale, getting a land sold, so on. They're also altering Houston station. This is a, so Houston station,

they're gonna sell some of the land that they previously purchased to make the full size station, again, to make it impossible to, in the future, expand that station as it needs to be, to accommodate all the services. The broad-based spite, as opposed to the sort of like focused spite, where it's just like, no, you can't have used in station, you can't have trains anymore, fuck you, piss off London,

piss off the North, piss off like everything in between, fantastic. Great work. Yeah, yeah. So for sure. I'll sort of go through this sort of systematically, but that's the broad brush of what's happening is one of the two major transport infrastructure projects in the in the UK. The other one was Crossrail, which was delivered. Some others that sort of never

get off the ground might be airport expansions, which probably fine. I mean, fucking Corbin have been elected. I'd be able to take HS 10 from Glasgow directly to the studio. I'd be able to like to leap from a train in motion through the window perfectly. It's my podcasting chair. You know, this is one of the infrastructure projects, as you say, canceled. And the whole point and then they said, okay, well, look, this is too London centric. We're gonna cancel that and reallocate it to a bunch of, quote, people's transport priorities. We're also stressed though, before we go into that. Seven-chip road projects. Yeah.

The HS2 was not sort of like, and this is my understanding, Gareth, please feel free to correct me, was not like a sort of luxury project. As much as we're talking about, like, where she's not canceling the future and stuff, right? This was not sort of like, oh, we're going to have this gold-plated envy of the world kind of train system. So much as this was emergency bypass surgery on the West Coast mainline.

Yeah, 100%. Maybe this is a good time for me to explain why he just did it, right? I'm going to do this. This is like, you know, years of explanation. I'm going to compress it. Super, super, compress this. So, but unfortunately, we have to jump back to the 90s because in the post-privatization world, the West Coast mainline, so the line going from London, you start up to, you know, Birmingham Manchester Glasgow. Yeah. It's essentially the main into city, North-South into city railway in the UK, even though these coast mainlines nicer, but the West Coast main line is the main one.

BR had been planning to upgrade it over decades with various plans, advanced passenger training this and the other. It was electrified in the, between the late 50s through to the 70s, and it was kind of the flagship, but it was creaking up the seams by the 90s. It was rammed, even though the trains were cramped. Virgin were coming in and Branson was like, we're going to make everything 170 miles an hour and we're going to ensues these tilting trains. And so there's all this discussion and all this mixture of all plans that BR had cancelled after privatization became this thing called the West Coast Route Modernization. And it was the thing that

Railtrack, which was the private company before Network Rail was created, that owned the infrastructure after the aftermath of a privatization. This project sank rail track. It was such an enormous calamity. Why was it a calamity? Because, funnily enough, upgrading an existing railway to enormously over-enthusiastic specifications on a mixed traffic railway with fast-trained slow trains, freight trains, etc. is impossible. So, on what was supposed to have like, automatic signals, it was supposed, you know, like automatic trains, it was supposed to have 140 mile an hour trains, 145 mile an hour trains. It was downgraded to 125 mile an hour really

with like the tilting trains, and that was it, and they did a bit, they did a load of four tracking to try and increase capacity. So they increase the capacity the line by like 50 to 60%. It cost in today's money about 25 billion pounds. So that's an enormous amount of money bearing in mind. HS2 is only about 88 to 100. So 25 billion pounds spent on the West Coast group monetization. And before they'd even paid the last contract, all of the extra capacity had been absorbed. So every extra seat was being used. So that project, okay, clearly not pointless because people were using the extra capacity, but it was clear that upgrading the existing rail was just futile. Like, there was just absolutely a case of diminishing returns. And so before that even finished that project,

a new project of a new high speed link was had come up with, this would be bouncing around since the 90s, since, since the late 80s, this project became, it was a new labor initiative at Andrew Donnis, everyone's favorite blareight. Well, the guy said HST was one of his children, that guy. Yeah, that guy, I mean, to be fair, I'm not one to point fingers on that domain. But anyway, at Donnis championed this, and it was called HSTU.

It was a new high speed line, and it was essentially in the aftermath of this West Coast group modernization, it was seen as the only way to provide this uplift in capacity. Right from the off, it was not about the speed of just having the prestige of a high speed railway, although it is a normal thing for modern countries to have nowadays. Let's face it, it was about the fact that our existing railway was absolutely crammed. Decisions would be made in the 60s to prioritize these long distance services versus, you know,

in favor of rather than, you know, suburban services that people actually use. So we had a crammed railway. The point was that you free up the existing railway to run more suburban services. And the main benefit you've got of that was in the north. Because from Birmingham, Northwards, the railway network is mostly to track.

And it's absolutely crammed. There's loads of bottlenecks. So basically, if every single station in England and Wales, north of London and south of York, essentially gained a benefit from HS2 from this release capacity. That's how massively wide ranging the benefits were, particularly in places like Manchester and Leeds, you know, in Nantes, Midlands, actually, they gained huge benefit from this project. So that's where, obviously, if you have a good project. The other thing is, the reason I get so passionate about this, sorry, I'm not on Woffley, but hopefully this is useful stuff.

And I'm hoping some of your listeners aren't maybe familiar with this story. And so it's a useful thing for them to hear. This is also the only glimpse of any sort of long-term strategic planning in any way that the UK has done in a very long time. So for me, I gripped onto it as, oh my god, we're doing this one thing, this one cross party, because it was cross party, right the way across the political spectrum, and this had broad political agreement, that this was a good idea, that this would be a thing that would help sort of break, that stupid rebalance in the economy of stuff. But the reality is the reason why Britain's

economy is so screwed is because we keep desperately trying to pump air into the London balloon. Well you've got all these floppy balloons for all the other cities that we are banking no effort to pump air into, if you like. That's my weird balloon economy analogy. But we know we're pumping all this air into the London balloon hoping that it won't burst. Well what we could do is, in fact, pump some air into some of the other balloons and that might create some growth. Anyway, so that is my explanation for HS2, Riley. So, all of that being said, right, that appears that not doing this is going to not allow any kind of, as you say, bypass relief on those other lines, refusing to expand.

Euston is going to make the station pretty much unusable. We'll talk about that later. And it's back to you. They would have done as well just to have dynamized it. The West Coast mainline on the way out. It appears that the dream for the future UK transport infrastructure is Alberta. How do we help her? And as you say, what it was supposed to do was make the rest of the line

work strategically, and the cost of doing this, as I'm beginning to understand, is not just that there will not be a high speed rail link from London to any other UK city, or in this case, from, out of what what, like West London to just outside Birmingham. Yeah, but that other trains... Other trains also won't run at all. Yeah, so the challenge with what is being proposed, which is essentially that those, the HSU trains, basically they're going to do what the first bit of HSU was supposed to be, which was that temporarily the trains would come off the line at Birmingham, would run on

the West Coast mainline, the current railway, up to Manchester and beyond. That was the temporary plan. The trouble with doing that on a permanent basis is that you don't fix anything. And in fact, if you're wanting those trains to go faster, you actually reduce the number of trains that have run because you have to push more trains out the way to create a bigger gap so that they don't cash the train up

in front. So you actually end up with even fewer trains running on the network. At the point when we need to be, you know, we need much more rail freight running, we need much more, well, the line I use is that we need between 15, 100% more rail capacity. So a doubling of rail capacity by, at least by the middle of this century, if not much earlier.

H2 was the way that we would get a long way towards achieving that. Now it's gone. Little Fiddly projects here and there to upgrade the existing network are simply, you know, it don't get me wrong. We are doing lots of upgrades to the existing network. They happen all the time. There's one happening right now between Manchester and Leeds, it's called Transparen and Ruup Grid. These things do happen, but they are a case of diminishing returns because we have this mixture of traffic because we particularly the fast trains that are the worst ones for eating up capacity. So let's talk about why, so in fact, Riley, I don't know, maybe

we want to talk about the public accountability bit because it's quite a good way to maybe lead us into talking about why the excuse for counseling is. Yeah, indeed. Well, I have a few, a few sort of related questions here, right? From 2012, where it gets the green light, it starts being planned, it starts being built in 2018. By 2020, it's already badly off course because in the public counts committee said it was lacking in transparency low on some kills short and capacity and that their annual accounts don't give any full Account to the programs problems like this is clearly something that more or less started falling over from the starters blocks And it might be worth asking why was it such a shambles to complete? Why did the budget spiral why were we not able to keep up with it? From what I can tell, it's from a combination of the fact

that like everybody who bid for it, basically was like, oh yeah, we can do it for a tenor, knowing that once they were in, they could jack up the price as high as they wanted, and that because the government wasn't able to, we didn't really have any real competition between them, and also that the British railway industry in general, we sort of haven't trained anyone new in what, 50 years.

Yeah, so there's, okay, so there's a few things there. That in terms of cost escalation, actually, H2's cost hasn't escalated quite as much as everyone makes out. So the initial 32 billion from 2013 was just made up numbers by management consultants. So the first real budget was 56 billion in 2016 or whatever. Actually, the 20th, sorry, 56 billion was kind of in the aftermath of the 2013 design. 56 billion then went up to about 88 billion. And so some of that 88 billion was inflation. Some of it was escalation of the costs because actual engineers started looking at the proposals and the design becomes more detailed and you actually start understanding the problems.

And as you say, there was an element of contract to risk added in there that inflated the price. But the idea of the cost having escalated is not overblown. But I mean, for example, a few months ago, a report was submitted to government to the rail minister that highlighted that actually, the HST was currently within its current contingency. So this has been overplayed a bit by government, but it doesn't mean to say that the costs and the escalations don't exist, and there are not serious problems of delivering major civil engineering like this. So I'm going to explain why. Why is HST too expensive?

You know, a lot of people often say, well, it's the most expensive, it's 10 times more expensive than high-speed rail in Europe. So let's pick into the, why is that? Well, there's three reasons. The first is kind of scope. And that is why the hell are we delivering a national high-speed rail project as one project? When it's actually like at least three rail airlines. So they are debunking everything into one scope

and meaning that you've got, so high speed lines in Europe, you don't include, you only pay for, the high speed line project is just the bit just outside the city to the bit just outside the other city. So it's just the bit that runs through the kind of the rural area, it's not the expensive tunnels into the city, it's not the big city centre stations, all that stuff are delivered as their own big projects separately. So already you've got a, you're not really comparing, you know, as a country, we're not really comparing apples and oranges.

It's not, it doesn't make sense to do that. It doesn't make sense to deliver HS2 as HS2. It makes sense to deliver HS2 as probably, you know, 12, 15 different projects as part of a plan for the overall railway. Now, had we done that, that would have simplified the contracts because they'd been smaller, you wouldn't have been talking about contracts, there were multiple billions of pounds to one organization. There'd been lots of much smaller packages. Also, it would have been easier to manage because you'd have had smaller projects that government and civil servants could actually get their heads around. But that long term lack of a

plan and strategy also means that you end up with the public not understanding what HS2 is about because it's not part of a bigger picture. So that's the first one. The scope is the fundamental reason why that price difference. The second one is about construction, the construction industry itself. We have a very fragmented construction industry and this is kind of well within the TF wheelhairs, right? So this construction and fragmentation, we rely, we don't have like three or four big contractors that just do everything. We have like multiple different contractors, most of them not actually UK contractors anymore, you know, they're French, they're Spanish,

because we don't have to know how to do this stuff. But also we rely hugely on subcontractors, sub subcontractors, sub sub subcontractors, and we have this obsession with SMEs, with everything being well-inducing exactly, right? We have all of these SMEs, so that means, as with the rail industry, we have contracts and contracts and interfaces and contracts, and all this wastage and complexity that adds a huge amount of cost. I always like to quote the bad guys to say the thing that I agree with, because much as I like to talk about problems with the industry, PWC, everyone's favourite organisation did a report into this, that's actually quite good, and they say that construction

industry fragmentation accounts for like 15, 20% of extra costs on top of projects in the UK. The third thing is commitment. If you don't have commitment to these projects, you cannot grow the skills. You cannot have the efficiency and the technologies that contractors might buy to do this stuff more cheaply. You have this over-centralization of decision-making

which takes away from that commitment. So the fact that it's Westminster in charge of all this stuff, even more so now than before the conference, means that there is a lack of continuity because everything's becomes about election cycles. If this stuff was more like in Europe where you have regional delivery, so you know, it's not the central government

that delivers this stuff, it's basically funded a bit by them, but this stuff gets delivered in bits by the regional governments. We don't have that in the UK because we're bonkers in terms of where the most centralized economy of our type in the world. So if you could effectively really what we're saying is a kind of fantasy about small to medium enterprises has taken root in Westminster that has caused them

to completely forego economies of scale so they can give projects to guys in Sheds more or less. Absolutely. You have this casket, the fixation with, I mean, we heard in Rich's Stupid Speech, we talked about the fact that he sees Britain as the country of small businesses. It's like, well, small businesses are great. You guys are a small business. The small businesses are fine, but I want to give us a rail line. You guys should be to add it to the list of things.

You're all aware of the debt. And now a contract to deliver what's left of H. So rather than having, you know, most countries would have a big contract that just does everything, it does everything it needs to, but we're fixated on like, I know we're gonna have a subcontractor that you hire, you hire, I mean, it's rent your economy stuff, right? This is absolute TF wheelhouse. Rent your economy, you hire the kit from them, you hire those guys from them.

We don't know how to do that, so we're gonna hire that kit from them. And you just, all this fragmentation, it just means you've got to write loads of contracts, payloads and lawyers, it's much more expensive and it slows everything down, comes up and works. All you, it's you're trying to do it with only managers. I said, yeah, yeah, it adds so many more staff than you need.

You're rather than paying engineering staff, you're paying a load of management consultants to just hold this organization together. I've sought to a second ago about quoting the bad guys, I hate Treasury, but here is a report from 2010 by Treasury into why infrastructure costs too much, and you'll enjoy each of these very quickly, each five points. These are the improvement objectives from 2010. Number one, to create better visibility and continuity of the infrastructure investment pipeline. Ouch. Number two, to implement effective governance of projects and programs. Ouch. Number three, to instill greater discipline in the commissioning of projects and programs, Ouch. Number three, to instill greater discipline in the commissioning of projects and programs, that's a particularly funny one given the list of the things that

they're replacing it just to with were created in a hotel bedroom about three days ago. For to develop smarter ways to use competition, I don't really know what that's a laborite thing, you know, it's what they mean by that. And five, to create an environment that encourages industry to invest in efficiency and reducing direct construction costs. So that's, again, long-term pipeline stuff, which obviously isn't happening when it can just be cancelled at once. So, yeah, that's Treasury, the enemy of the piece there, saying the things that this government has obviously just ripped up. Yeah, very frustrating. So that's sorry, that's a bit of explaining why the costs are. So it's scope, it's construction

injury fragmentation, it's the commitment from government or the land they're off. Well, when you read these sort of points from Treasury, what I find so amusing is that it's the instruction from Treasury is to do these things that Treasury brain forbids being done. Yeah, just canning this thing, canning this thing, having all of these different contractors so all the individual, everything's quite small. That's pure Treasury brain.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So we understand, I think, what it was supposed to do, what will happen now that it's not happening, which is basically no one can get a train sort of at all on the West Coast and the East Coast will take all of its relief traffic, which means no one will be able to get a train all the East Coast. Already being full. Yeah. So everything's, everything's full. And so real, basically, rail travel is kind of ossified from this point onwards. That's basically what this means. And then also we won't be expanding Houston. And the way that Sunack is presenting,

preventing a future government from expanding Houston, I mean, not that Starmer was really ever threatening to at all, is to immediately create a canary-warf-style private company, or give to a canary-warf-style private company, carte blanche to create something five times the size of the King Cross redevelopment in the Houston area, basically meaning that the private security forces of the Houston Development Corporation will be able to waive to the private security forces of the King's

Cross development corporation. Yeah, it's going to be one of those weird, sort of like, extraterritorial, London things where we get our beloved private security force with the like specially colored expensive high vests. And if you want a vision of the future of this country, then it's going to be a bunch of those guys milling around outside a closed station forever. Just the extra. So yeah, Houston, it's worth very briefly talking, like very briefly talking about Houston because it comes back.

So part of the reason Houston stations getting very expensive, well, the two reasons why Houston's getting very expensive, actually, number one is the fact that since since a review that happened a few years back, the treasury has become obsessed by oversight development. And they've given lend lease, everyone's favorite, obviously, kind of like land developer, they're given lend lease's essentially free reign to say to the engineers, no, I want that to change that, make that worse just so that I can make my oversight development bigger. So basically, we've, we've, we've turned the station that was, you know, the supposed

to be the gateway to almost everywhere outside of the south of England in the UK, sorry, Northern Ireland, the station that should be this incredible gem, this gateway to the rest of the UK, it was going to just be buried underneath the little oversight development. So that's number one, so that's made it expensive because the lend leaks have basically been free reign to shit on any of the engineering to just make their oversight development nicer. But the even bigger one is the fact that there is a huge, the undergray, anyone who's traveled at London using an underground station knows that it's hopeless.

Also, the fact that you've got to watch it used in Square for some of the two blinds, it's all a bit of a mess and it's hopeless and it just gets so crammed at peak time, it is overdue, a massive redevelopment anyway, which Crossrail 2 was supposed to do. So HS2's original plans and the costings of Houston originally had Crossrail 2 being paying for the upgrades to the TFL elements, so that the underground elements.

A Crossrail 2 obviously was shickhand, and so HS2 have to pick up the bill for all that work to happen under the underneath. So again, this just talks of the fact that this lack of any kind of long-term strategic planning, any sort of joined up thinking, just has just costs billions of pounds more. Yeah, just really frustrating. So, let's talk about sort of used in in general, right? We, number one, we are going to privatize a big part

of the city kickplots of like, people out of their house. What's the other way around? Now it's the only way that we'll even get to used and instead of old oak common, which is in the middle of fucking nowhere, because if there's private investment to pay for all of this shit. And indeed, and I mean, they, because all of this policy is made by like people on their

ninth beer in a hotel room, they've gone back, it's literally this is kind of what's happening. They've gone back and forth and where it's going to start, where it's going to end, is Manchester cancelled, Is it not? All of this is completely ambiguous at the time of recording. And the only thing that we know is that the offices and flats that lend lease are going to build on top of Houston station and then all around it and then own privately like Canary Wharf or Kings Cross, those are going to make it impossible to improve Houston station

at all ever under any circumstances. Ever. Yeah, so it's supposed to be 11 platforms for the high speed element of Houston station. A huge amount of land purchase there, a huge amount of blight to local people, funnily enough, quite a high kind of a high ethnic population that's been heavily impacted by this in Camden, massive impacts, and the blight is only continuing for them more uncertainty, and it's going to be replaced by an enormous gentrification project that'll just bring in a load of, well, I mean, empty apartments, obviously, we know how London works. But the point is that the development will take what should have been 11 platforms,

and they're just going to build on the space where seven of those platforms should go, and then leave space for five platforms. That's basically the... So, if you ever want like do any of this stuff, you have to, I guess, demolish a bunch of flats. It's an empty. It's an empty, empty flat. Yeah, it's an empty, empty, empty flat. The flats were already demolished for this space.

So we've taken a load of people who are low-income people who lived in flats there, demolish their homes, and we're gonna replace their homes with some new flats that no one's gonna live in. Is there this also quite close to the constituency of an MP by the name of one Kierstama? I mean, yes. Never mind this leader of the opposition stuff. Is the MP for like Hobo and St. Panker are saying anything about this?

He's been an opposite, he is opposed to just who's an MP. Like, there are a few people trying to pull gotchas from 2015 when he was pulling a petition against HS2. I can understand why as an MP you can and should oppose a project in your constituency that has a major impact and that you would have a different stance as you become leader of the opposition. However, he has spoken up about HS2 in the last, like, I think, day. And of course, what did you expect?

What do you think he said? He has said that because of the mess made by this government, he cannot promise to deliver HS2. He's going to review HS2, but he's going to say, we should build more trains, but they should go at a normal speed, rather than a high speed. Well, good news. Good news, because that's kind of what they're doing. By ending it early, there is the very real prospect of these beautiful, expensive, you

know, 200-something mile an hour high-speed trains, just kind of like fucking about that, like somewhere between 70 and 110 miles an hour on regular, like, lines pushing everything else out of the way, which is going to be going to be great. You can get a seat on one of those. You can go to like, Birmingham interchange, which no one even knows what that is at 70 miles an hour. And you can look at all the scene. Oh, wait, it's in a tunnel. So you can't even do that. Okay. Yeah. Pretty much. I want a sensible train. I wanted to be a sensible speed. I want to be able to enjoy the view out of the tunnel.

I don't see why a train should go any faster, then 50 miles now. Having views of fields and stuff to look at is frivolity, which would undermine the business travel case. Well, you might see a bloke. Yeah, exactly. You might be doing that.

So we're doing that. We're doing drinks from the tunnel. But also, we're also going to be, when we talk about usage, bringing're doing that, we're getting drinks from the tunnel. But also, we're also going to be, what do we talk about, sort of, Houston is bringing it back here. By doing all of this, you're creating a whole bunch of flats that are gonna mean, Houston,

I've read this in the independent, that Houston will basically be unusable and constantly unsafe. Like, it will have to close more or less constantly. Yeah, absolutely. I think I was John Stone in the independent Who was it was writing about that? It is Houston is already dangerous in this current situation so chucking maybe 678,000 extra people through there an hour is going to result in them just having to do what they do on other

Like London undergun stations where they just close it and they ship everyone out Which is gonna be great for what as I say again, is supposed to be the main London station to get to everywhere north of London. So it seems to be the future of transport is A, a bunch of private security guards patrolling the outside of a closed station. And B, it's a sort of crapshoot whether or not any number of these things will be the case. You can get a seat in the train, you can get a train, the train is running, the train will be able to get there on time, or the station that you're departing from or going to

is going to be open. Yeah. Yeah. It's absolutely appalling. Just a complete, yeah. I don't have enough surprises. My height finger is hovering over the swear button, basically, for the way that I want to have enough to fail. It's just, my hype finger is hovering over the swear button, basically, for the way that I want to kind of

express myself over this. Yeah, it's hopeless. So, but what will they do instead? Right? Because we've noticed that they're going to, they're going to, um, reallocate some of this money to a bunch of things that when you check their homework have been completed since 2012 or 15, like nodding him trams, Sheffield trams, you might as well just throw in the sea route to sail on in there. Yeah, because they're like, nodding him trams, Sheffield trams. You might as well just throw in the sea root to sail on in there. Yeah, because they're like, all half of the stuff that they want to do already

exists has already been built for years because they've done all of this at the last minute. I know this is like, centrist to be like, oh, we checked the government's homework and they spelled potato with like five E's somehow, right? But like genuinely, it's absolutely shambles. I like. Well, I said this about the integrated rail plan two years ago. This is even worse than that document was widely pandas being just error written and wrong. This is even worse, because this is a web page

that they've subsequently deleted because it was that they've deleted the web page where all these announcements are on. And thankfully, everyone has obviously got the web archive, got their PDFs have been made, so on and so forth. This thing, as you say, spelling errors, loads of projects that already exist, they've already reneged on one of the projects that's on the list. So there are a load of local politicians up in the north of England going, they can open the lean sideline, fantastic.

And then obviously that was an announcement saying, oh yeah, unfortunately no, we'll review, we'll undertake a review and a feasibility study into whether we might open that. So that's obviously been completely lost. I'm just going to reiterate, this was a list of projects, they've called it Network North, half the projects are in the south of England, including like the M5 famously and northern motorway. Just drive, just drive, just drive, just fucking drive everywhere, get into police car that

we gave you and drive to like Manchester if you want to get there. I refer listeners to, I refer listeners to the last time I was on and Milo's rant about what you can and cannot do. Yeah, no, this is a list of projects of which 70 are road projects and there may be a scattering of public transport projects, of which every single one is either already built, has already been announced, is something they previously cancelled and are now re-announcing, or it's actually a contraction of a previous project that's currently being worked on. For example, I alluded to earlier happening between Manchester Leeds, the Transpennan route upgrades, long delayage of supposed to be electrification that was finished

years and years ago, they're basically now changing the name of that to say that it's a new high speed line, which obviously then gives the excuse to then cancel that thing, which is a project that's actually happening. So it's just a problem. What are the things we talk about when we talk about UK

investment, we talked about this with RIS and Liam on the reinforced autoclave-dirated concrete thing, is it so much of the UK's building projects tend to just be re-batching the same pot of money depending on who's looking at it? 100%. And you know, you wonder why things rarely get done. It's because the whole point is to just kind of make sure you can keep re-badging the same part of money for another sort of few days. And then you can make it seem like you're doing something. So many management consultants, like business leaders, all these stuff to go on and on about on, why do we struggle to deliver civil engineering infrastructure in this country?

Why do we do this? I've been in the transfer site for country? Why do I've been on the transfer cycle? I've been in the UK, the UK 2070 Commission in Parliament talking about this and all the waffle. And there's a fairly straightforward answer to this, which is, and this is, again, this is stuff you guys have been saying for years, all of the UK's institutions are designed around ensuring nothing happens. It's not that they're designed to, you know, ideally you would have some level of institutional infrastructure

based around trying to make something happen. But everything is designed to make sure that nothing happens. And I'm not just being kind of flipping on this, you know, when it comes down to like something as simple as, oh, we've done a bit of work to the track, we need to adjust the platform to make sure that it's still accessible again for people to get on off trains. And I have been in meetings where tens of thousands

of pounds have been spent with the expensive people, you know, 30 people sat around in a meeting room in wet, you know, waterloo general offices discussing how little of the platform they're going to adjust and how we can all, we can just tweak, you know, just a dear to that bit of standard by the letter to avoid having to do that, didn't you know, make the train more accessible. The effort, the institutional energy that goes into making sure we don't do anything is staggering.

It does like really reflect, and it does really affect like building, I think, at every level as well. And I don't know, obviously with the kind of caveat that I may be projecting, but I've heard enough anecdotes to sort of suggest that this actually might be a broader phenomenon, but even when you're sort of talking to a lot of building,

like a builder's landlords in particular and stuff, the kind of culture of doing as little as possible to not really address the problem. And then expecting to be thanked for that seems to kind of be endemic into the much broader, into the culture more broadly. And I do wonder whether like they sort of inform me other like the idea that like, well,

you know, you shouldn't expect like your home to be livable, right? You should expect the materials to just like not set on fire. And then like that kind of having impact on these, like a broader expectations of like, well, you shouldn't expect to be able to like travel to other cities, even if it is sort of fundamental

to like the economy. Like the most insane stuff about this is kind of, it feels like there are these sort of like internal all these sort of inherent contradictions, right? The idea that like, you should be able to get to work on time but also nothing's gonna work and everything's gonna be really expensive. And if you don't get to work on time and like,

your livelihood is going to be at risk, but also these are all because of forces that you can't control. And also you should be able to handle everything in your household and be carers at points, but everything, all the infrastructure around you is gonna prevent you from doing that. I guess it is an extension of the Milo guy

who tells you to drive everywhere, but also nothing is capable to be driven on. But it does, it doesn't feel like- Don't drive anywhere, don't drive it in the town. I just feel like, I don't know, I think about it as a lot, and I'm just like, when I'm sort of trying to figure out why is it feel that people are sort of going more insane,

more recently, I do kind of wonder, whoever is because of these contradictions are becoming a lot more apparent in a way that as everything falls apart, like, you know, the best example of this being like the guy who like just insists on all like has to drive everywhere because there are no other options for him, but where that drive used to only take like an hour and a half, but there wouldn't be any traffic. Now takes three hours because like so much infrastructure, like so much of like the derelict infrastructure means that you can't actually do this thing

that you're being told to do while also being told never to expect anything better. So super super super briefly, who's saying you're absolutely spot on and it ties into some of the it ties into some of the kind of the new labor kind of end of history stuff that we create a load of bodies that are, you know, that wonderful independent arbiters that cannot,

that they're untouchable to kind of, so even, you know, even HS2 itself has been delivered by an arms length body HS2 limited. That's a government body, but it's an arms length body, you know, an unimpeachable, and it's all these organisms, and it's the same even, you know, we talked about network real modern, inverted commas modernization and the changes to staffing. I spoke to the, the, the, now retiring, and leads, you know, her Majesty's, or his RIP, and Majesty's Inspector, the chief person in charge of safety on the railways. And I asked him the question, how have you assessed that all of these changes, all this staffing changes are not going to impact

on safety on the railway? And he said, well, we have all these systems and processes that ensure that you go through, and none of these changes are actually going to have an impact. But that doesn't... No, that... You're assuming that those processes are going to be followed, that those processes are robust, they can easily be swung to the whims of the organisation. And all of these organisations are assumed to be just acting in benign interests. But as we've talked about, as soon as you have maniacs in charge, it all just collapses, all falls to one side. You're spot on the same. Well, I think if I want to think about where this comes from, right, it's the decision that the UK decided it was going to be after the energy crisis of the 1970s destroyed

fortism, which is that we decided we were going to be a service provider, a manager, an owner, an investor, right? And then, and the government is set up to mirror these things and serve those interests. So, of course, we're going to build a railway, like a hedge fund would build a railway, or a manager would build a rail, we're not building a railway, like a railway builder would build a railway, right? We are trying to, you're ranging a portfolio of people who can provide you the asset. And it's like, no, no, no, you're building a railway, you need to have a person who can build a rail.

And part of this is the fact that a lot of the British state got de-skilled in that process. You know, it's not, it's that we no longer, it's tried to say, you know, we no longer hire railway builders because we hire people who are generalists who we think can kind of manage whatever, and then they're, okay, go off and hire the railway builders, but no one really, and that they hire companies that also don't have railway builders. And how many layers of management do you get to before you hire a railway builder? You've got to have a lot because that's all a combination of like Tory donors and SMEs

that are propping up the numbers for the economy. Absolutely. And like entrepreneurism, like, and every sector of the economy is like this. If you are like, generally, this is the poly crisis, right? If you go, why is it impossible to get X built? The answer is always because we have added 50 layers of middlemen in order to try and guarantee that like the economy looks like it's growing,

business activity is happening, and you have a few rich cunts at the top who like the Tories. Yeah, it's just what we have done is created a kind of set of, it's a bit like the web 3 crypto economy It's designed to look like a real economy You have lots of moving parts of things that it's right here and there that look fancy and snazzy Yeah, not to get to poetry are about this, but you could honestly just stop building HS2

Gaslight everyone lie and say it's still going and ask them not to check It would have much of the same effect. It's kind of what they are doing, to be honest, Alice. It's kind of... So I mean, Christ. Yeah, I know, it's deeply frustrating. The last time the UK built any major strategic infrastructure was the Motoy Network, right?

Now, how was the Motoy Network delivered? There was a broad strategic plan set up by central government and the regional councils, councils that were big, Selneck, all these massive, powerful councils delivered it themselves with their road building units. That's how we built the motorway network. It was not built, you know, okay, we added a few extra bits in kind of neoliberal years, but the majority of it was built by the state at scale. They brought contractors into support them for sure, but it was led by the regional road building units. Exactly as Alex said, you didn't have hundreds of layers of middle managers. It was essentially done at a regional level,

so you didn't have the central government meddling, but the central government set the overall broad strategy. The region has delivered it, and we ended up with, you know, they motoy network that we can't imagine not having anymore. We will never be able to build it just without basically getting back to a structure more like that. So I think that probably wraps it wraps it up nicely for now. No more trains. It's done. It's over. If you want to get a train, fuck you. Yeah, except to say that part of the plan for motorists is going to be investing 70 million pounds to invest in AI technology. So you're a podcaster, right?

And you work in Glasgow and maybe sometimes you also work in London and you don't drive. You know what you've got to do then? You've got to get a fucking kayak and start habling. What are you, what are you, what are you, what are you, what are you, what are you, what are you, what are you, what are you, what are you, what are you, what are you doing? Tf business circle here, right? Yeah, Bunch cars. Yeah, Bunch cars.

You connect them with a chain. Okay, yeah, I'm listening. And then you pick up people in between different cities and you take them to specific destinations. Do you pick people up via a boat and say universe? You could pick up kind of other passengers, you could call them, say, within this chain of cars. It's an interesting idea.

You could get like one guy who wears a formal suit and like a bow tie and serves you snacks at your midway point. Yeah, yeah. I think maybe we can make this more efficient by having like a dedicated lane for it. So it's not interfering with other traffic. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And then we could run them closer together

by blocking that lane off into segments and having signals. Yeah. And if you're running it kind of on the same route, it might wear the tires out. So maybe if you put something more hard-wearing, like steel, like a steel, maybe like a pair of steel sort of rods in a line.

No, no, no, no. I think what we should do is the AI thing instead. All that is to say, what a pleasure. Thank you so much for coming on and making us sort of so excited to get the last train in Britain, which will occur probably in our lifetimes. Yes, yeah, it's been a pleasure. This has been catharsis. It's like a therapy.

Thank you for allowing me to sort of like cry down the microphone for the benefit of your listeners. I'm so sorry everyone. And don't forget, there is a second episode every week. It is $5 a month on Patreon to subscribe. There's usually a stream on Mondays and Thursdays as well from 9 to 11. There's left on red. There's Britainology.

There's more of those at the $10 level if you're so inclined. So with all that being said, once again, thank you, Garrett. Thank you to our wonderful patrons. Thank you, my wonderful co-host. Check out Railnatter on YouTube if you want to see more of Garrett and we will see you on the bonus episode in a few short days. Bye everyone. Bye. Bye. You