Source: Bigstock

A £100 million bat protection tunnel being built in the U.K. might be utterly pointless, except that it brings a wonderful new phrase into the English language: bat shed crazy.

Beside half a mile of the already lunatic rail scheme called High Speed 2, a disastrously ugly aboveground tunnel is being built near a Buckinghamshire wood to house around 300 bats who don’t live there but who might, in theory, flutter over there on a night out and get hit by a train. The scheme works out at £333,000 per bat.

This is significant not least because the amount paid to my parents when they were displaced from their modest home because of High Speed 2 (HS2) was only slightly more than that.

In other words, the British state now rates bats as highly as it does humans, and possibly more highly, because the bats did not have to fight a long legal battle to get their compensation, whereas my parents, and many like them, absolutely did.

Not all big infrastructure projects are worthwhile, and some are particularly bat shed crazy.

To understand how bat shed crazy HS2 is, you need to get your head around the fact that it’s going to cost taxpayers upwards of £60 billion for 140 miles of track (that’s equivalent to the GDP of Panama being spent on a line from New York to Albany), and you need to understand that it’s a rail line replacing a quite good existing rail line, and that all it’s going to do is shave ten to twenty minutes off the already quick and efficient rail journey from London to Birmingham.

Invented by the last Labour government, under Tony Blair, and perpetuated by subsequent cowardly Conservative ones, and perpetually in construction, possibly forever, or until people no longer use trains because they can beam themselves up like Star Trek, HS2 is a mind-blowing way to blow public money on almost nothing, in that once it’s built it will most likely be obsolete or of very little practical use to anyone, given the way life is going.

The philosophy of the Labour government that invented HS2 was that you can boost your economy by creating problems to solve. If there aren’t any potholes in the roads, make some, goes the theory, because filling them creates jobs and wealth.

This is socialism, and why you want to avoid it. This is why America is very lucky to have Donald Trump about to start running it again, like a business. Because not caring about spending and wasting money for the sake of it impacts worse on those with the least, and leads to a terrible moral rot, far worse than any charge leveled at Trump.

My family had to appear before a House of Commons select committee taking evidence on the proposed rail line and explain why we should be compensated for our home of fifty years not qualifying for compensation under an arbitrary fifty-meter rule. It was slightly outside this, but still close enough to the line to be blighted and rendered worthless, and my parents were unable to release equity from it for their retirement.

It took many years, lots of expensive lawyer time, and much fighting, and in the end the British government and HS2 Ltd. agreed to compensate them by buying their home at what they called market value. Only one other family on the street got compensated; the rest were refused help.

Meanwhile, the Bechstein’s bats living in Bernwood, a 350-hectare area, were compensated with this vast bat shed being built in Sheephouse Wood, Buckinghamshire, where the line goes through, and where the bats don’t live, but might visit, and get hit by a train.

The Sheephouse Wood Mitigation Structure will “stop bats from emerging from the western edge of Sheephouse Wood immediately into the railway corridor.”

Yeah, alright. Whatever. Obviously, bats will not go anywhere near a train traveling at 225 miles an hour, or whatever Back to the Future speed they’re claiming this useless train will do as it propels a mythical class of businessperson to a physical meeting they need to get to ten minutes quicker than they might have before.

The bat tunnel is being cited as one reason why the hated rail project has gone so vastly over budget. Latest estimates suggest it will cost £66.6 billion. Three sixes is right. It’s an evil beast of a thing.

The company that’s building it by bulldozing half of the best bits of the English countryside, from Buckinghamshire and the Chilterns through Oxfordshire and Warwickshire, moans endlessly about the cost of accommodating bats, and pesky troublemakers like my parents insisting their house means something to them and they ought to be able to sell it for some money.

Obviously, the new rail line with its massive flyovers and crossings will look horrendous.

But if you saw a picture of what this half-a-mile-long concrete and steel bat shed is going to look like, you’d conclude that the various environmental mitigation structures—there are lots of them everywhere, for bats and birds and badgers—are a more damning indictment of the vain folly of socialism than the railway itself.

At no point has anyone in authority said, “Darn it! This idiotic project to make a quick journey quicker is ruining too many people’s lives, and maybe displacing or just slightly upsetting too many bats. Anyway, they’ve invented Zoom and Teams. Who gets a train to a meeting? Let’s not build it.” No, no one in government has thought of this. It is simply beyond them. Or the project is worth too much to them, for reasons they’re keeping to themselves.

The public reasoning for High Speed 2—High Speed 1 was the obviously brilliant channel tunnel rail link to France—has never had even the remotest whiff of logic to it.

In an age where people travel by train less and less, and conference-call more and more, it is obviously bogus that the government of the U.K. has been investing billions for years in making a one-hour-twenty train journey into a one-hour journey, at some point—no one knows when, because the darn thing never threatens to come anywhere near being finished.

This old-fashioned bullet train—yesterday’s solution to last century’s problem—must be being built for reasons the government is keeping to itself, because the ones they’ve given simply make no sense. It won’t link the north to the south, because Birmingham is not the north. It’s the Midlands. And economically speaking, the Midlands is doing very well, thank you, without being made a bit closer to London.

The second part of the line that was meant to be going north from Birmingham to Leeds, which you could argue was needed if you believe “it’s grim oop north,” was canned.

It’s not happening. What they are linking is two cities with a journey time between them that is so short anyway it’s hard to see who wants it made shorter, and more expensive. I’d pay not to get to Birmingham ten minutes quicker, but I can say that because I’m from the Midlands.

The point is, England is a small country and the distance between the capital city and the center of the country is negligible. You can drive it in two hours, quicker than New York to Albany. The existing train service is sometimes so quick it’s an hour on a good day as it is.

Some journalists claim the government has already spent £100 billion on HS2, which the company denies, backed up by those idiot fact-checkers who always weigh in when someone is onto something. It insists the figure to date is £27 billion, with the projected spend £66.6 billion, admitting that may rise. I bet it will. This is not so much a gravy train as a red wine jus train.

Its alleged future usefulness has ceased to be of any significance, or even the subject of much debate. HS2 is a moneymaking machine, grinding endlessly along. Like a war, or a global vaccination project, it has grown so big it simply aims to feed itself, and keep those involved in it knee-deep in wealth for as long as possible.