If you can, please read a sensible analysis of the cost imposed by opposition to new English infrastructure for example roads or railways, by John Burn-Murdoch in the FT 25 August 2023 (The Nimby tax on Britain and America). For example HS2 looks likely to cost £396 million per mile. The French equivalent is £46 million per mile. There are several other examples worthy of thought in his piece. Another outcome is his research (FT research) concludes Britain’s cities are more poorly served by public than any other wealthy western country including the USA. Actually England is bottom of a list of 15 names. Is there a connection with slow growth? A key source, he says is the pro-growth campaign Britain Remade. The research is worrying and surely goes some way to explain our poor economic growth.
There is another interesting facet to this policy failure highlighted in the piece. In an earlier FT article (Mark Odell, 12 January 2012), explains how the HS1 fast rail to Paris and Brussels, so contentious for existing Kent residents along the route twenty years ago proved for many to be a non-event. Mr Faller, one of them, says he has sympathy with residents in the Chilterns and admits most of his community’s fears over high speed rail failed to materialise. His advice is that the government bring Chiltern residents down to Kent, adding;
“All the government has to do is to bring some of them down to Kent and say ‘Look, these people were up in arms over high speeed rail.Now no-one bothers talking about the line’ “.
‘The fact that those in opposition recognise that they can be wrong is important. It is also the wiff of common sense. The importance of common-sense in this context matters, as most of us know, with the exception of zealots, fanatics and the plain selfish, is that common sense is usually the truth. Put differently, we know when we know. We know when we do not know. We know that if we do not know, we do not know……the answer. This is when we listen to common-sense to decide who is right.
Ian Campbell
27 August 2023
