It wasn’t the speed or the silence or the comfort or the supply of hot towels. It was the fact that our Chinese friends had built the whole darned thing since I had been there last, in 2006. They made the entire 813-mile track from Beijing to Shanghai, rifle-barrel straight, with umpteen gorgeous new marbled stations, with concourses so clean you could use them to gobble your dim sum – and how long did it take them? It took two years! Two years, amigos. That is how long we have already been gassing away about HS2, a period in which we have spent literally hundreds of millions of pounds on drawings and consultants and planning and what have you – and not laid so much as a rail. 

 

 

That is the kind of period we set aside, in our big infrastructure projects, for the first consultation on the environmental impact assessment. And then there will be the equalities impact assessments and the judicial reviews and the appeals and the planning inquiries and the whole spine-cracking yawnathon that will comfortably soak up a decade or more in which we fail to achieve what the Chinese have done in two years. 

 

If we are to have any hope of meeting the infrastructure needs of this country we need first to recognise the severity of the problem – that with a population set to grow to about 80 million by the middle of the century, we need to plan now for the most effective and environmentally sensitive way of housing this population, of providing them with sanitation and power, and above all of enabling them to move speedily between the great wealth-creating zones of this country.