Brian Monteith: We can't let the HS2 train leave the station

I promised myself I would not write about the trams this week - or any other calamity that Edinburgh council has landed the city with. And I was sure that readers would want something different from News of the World, Murdoch, Coulson, Brooks and decidedly dodgy politicians trying to find the moral high ground in a cesspit of corruption, crime and sleaze they helped make.

Then within five minutes, like the reliable number 26 bus, along came something that has the potential to make Edinburgh's trams look like the cashbox from the Boy Scouts' jamboree went missing or that construction of the Scottish Parliament building is an example of project management best practice.

What could be more costly than the trams? What is more likely to be years late and then cost a fortune to maintain? What could be left unfinished, like Edinburgh's Disgrace, despite the vaulting ambition and the promises to complete the project?

None other than the high speed rail project known to former trainspotters like me and the handsomely paid lobbyists in London as HS2.

In case you haven't heard of it, HS1 is the new fast channel tunnel rail link that now runs out of London's redeveloped St Pancras Station. HS2 is the proposed high speed train from London to Birmingham at a cost of 17 billion, which is causing a big stooshie in the Chilterns where it is planned to cut through. It will shave off only 30 minutes from the Birmingham-London route and won't replace any flights - because there are none between Birmingham and London.

I could write at length about how mad, bad and dangerous this latest politicians' vanity project is, but that would be missing the point.

The tactic that advocates of HS2 are employing to win support is to suggest that it will eventually be extended to Manchester and Leeds (known as the Y-section) at an extra cost of 15bn and then come to Scotland at a cost unknown.

The evidence shows that HS2 will cost every household 1700 and that 99 per cent of us will use it no more than once a year. Fortunately, the reality is beginning to dawn on cities close to Birmingham that existing links to London will suffer rather than benefit from the scheme. HS2 has its cheerleaders in Scotland too - business leaders who worry about Scotland being left behind and politicians, especially in the SNP, who demand that HS2 comes to Glasgow and Edinburgh (being careful not to put one city over the other).

The business case for building HS2 to Birmingham is seriously flawed, its extension to Manchester and Leeds is sheer fantasy. And the economic case for it being built all the way into Scotland's Central Belt? Well, no one appears to have worked it out.

It doesn't seem to have occurred to the SNP that the main beneficiary of HS2 will be London (as more people find it marginally quicker to get to) and that if Scotland does become independent the line will never venture north of Manchester.Why would it?

So HS2 is a project that has all the makings of being ten times worse than the trams - so who do you think is the leading advocate of it? Boris Johnson, for it definitely benefits London? No, he has grave doubts about it. No, the person leading the charge for HS2 is none other than David Begg.

Yes, that David Begg.

The councillor that ruined Edinburgh's traffic system. The councillor whose road-narrowing and parking restrictions turned good shopping areas such as Easter Road into ghost towns. The councillor that was rooting for congestion charging and trams. Begg the "transport expert" within the Labour gang that has laid waste to the city over the last 20 years.

That same David Begg is advocating that Britain listens to him and, instead of investing to make the current rail system more efficient in a way that would serve people all over the country, says we should invest in a railway that, to be fast, can have only two or three stops outside London - and his campaign says will come to Scotland.

Sam Goldwyn once said that a verbal IOU is not worth the paper it's written on and the same has to be said for the silky talk of David Begg.

He is either a fool or worse - a fool to believe that HS2 makes economic sense, or worse to know that the figures don't stand up to scrutiny.

We need investment in increasing rail capacity at Waverley Station, we need to widen the City Bypass and we need to improve the A9 to Inverness. Scotland has many infrastructure problems worth investing in, but contributing to a faster railway that would serve relatively few and would cost us the Earth should not be given the time of day.