THE WELSH CONNECTION?

Isn't it a little odd that the UK Westminster Government has not so quietly committed itself to spending the best part of £500 million pounds on providing tunnelling for the proposed new High Speed (HS2) railway from London to Birmingham, which happens to go through the constituency of a Cabinet minister. Specifically that of case Cheryl Gillan MP (the Welsh Secretary) and who according to David Cornock (the BBC Parliamentary correspondent for Wales) may well be the bookies favourite for the chop come the next cabinet reshuffle.

Perhaps we should not speak harshly of this Welsh Secretary, who has after all done such a fine job fighting hard to get the electrification of the Great Western Line through the south of our country all the way to Swansea, or was she too busy fighting against the £32 billion pound HS2 in England to fight for railways in Wales? Mind its nice of HMG to spend the best part of £500m on a tunnel to help someone keep their job. An extra £500 million might go a long way on the railways here in Wales. Mind what's £500 million between colleagues?

If the UK is going to seriously spend big money on railways there were some slightly better options than this; they could have plugged HS2 into St Pancras which would have enabled through trains to and from the European mainland. To be honest St Pancras is actually part of the problem, a visible symbol of the so called Metropolitan mindset – it would have made more sense to develop HST capable railways to the south and west of London – that way it might (with some vision) have been possible to run through trains from the rest of these islands to and from the mainland both directly and overnight, now there's a thought?

The HS2 plan intends initially to connect London and Birmingham, with potentially further options for additional connections to Leeds and Manchester and even a possible spur to Heathrow – this should perhaps be considered to be the phase 2 of the current scheme. The question is whether or not we will ever see a Phase 3 or HS3? If so and if the Governments of these islands are serious about high speed rail then any such plan should be for the new network to continue north to Glasgow and Edinburgh, and there should also be an option to build westward past Heathrow to Cardiff and Bristol.

Wales (and Scotland to a lesser degree) runs the real risk of being left behind at a time when developing reliable high speed rail transport is becoming increasingly seen as the norm and as a real green alternative to short haul flights. Perhaps leaving Wales behind (and Scotland independent?) is indirectly part of the plan, if you step back and take the long view, working on the assumption that HS2 is actually built, what we are talking about (potentially for the first time) is significantly improving the rail network on an England level rather than at a UK level.