THE SUN SAYS Rishi Sunak must bite the bullet and derail woke HS2 – billions could be saved by investing in more immediate issues

Tracks burden

THE case for cutting our losses on HS2 is now overwhelming.

None of the ex-Chancellors or rail nerds still demanding it be completed in full seem to care a jot about its mind-boggling cost or which other budgets might have to be slashed to fund it.

What must the total reach before they have qualms? £200billion? £300billion?

This railway for the AI era was misconceived from the off.

It is a global embarrassment, a byword for failure, topped and tailed and almost entirely pointless.

The profligate waste of public money, now entirely out of control, must never be repeated: The monstrous absurdity of appeasing Nimbys by boring for miles under Buckinghamshire at nearly six times the cost of high-speed rail in France.

Scores of executives on £150,000-plus salaries.

A boss on £640,000.

Our taxes blown on a 52-page annual report into “equality, diversity and inclusion” among its legions of staff, down to exact percentages who are LGBT+.

All apparently vital to build a railway.

HS2 was only ever remotely arguable if built as planned and on budget.

The public has turned against it.

But it will not be enough for Rishi Sunak to axe the section beyond Birmingham.

He must spend some of the billions saved to upgrade northern rail and produce far more obvious and rapid benefits.

And he needs that detailed strategy in place to sell to the North before he explains why HS2, as designed, is dead.

Dodgy Davey

ONE threat to Brexit is even more grave than Keir Starmer winning power: Labour needing the Lib Dems for a majority.

Their leader Ed Davey has no actual idea what he means as he glibly talks up “tearing down trade barriers” with the EU and “getting a better deal”.

But Starmer would gleefully neuter Brexit if he could get away with it — and he could use Davey’s demands as his excuse.

Like his party, Davey pines nostalgically for a past that no longer exists.

A sorry spectacle. But a potentially dangerous one.

Coogan’s guff

HAVE rich celebs not yet learned that their facile political interventions never ­persuade a soul to change their mind?

Ordinary people consider their vote precious.

It’s the only real voice they have.

They won’t surrender their thinking to virtue-signalling millionaires.

The arrogance and hypocrisy is particularly egregious with comic Steve Coogan, who claims to back proportional representation because our election system “robs millions of their vote”.

Except he couldn’t wait to rob the 17.4million Leave majority of their vote after the 2016 Brexit referendum.

Indeed he backed doing just that via a rerun cynically stitched up for Remain.