On the subject of HS2:

In 2010, when a high-speed rail line from London to the north – HS2 – was proposed by the outgoing Labour government, I wrote an article arguing that the numbers didn’t add up. The environmental benefits had been inflated by a series of blatant accounting tricks and concocted figures. What the government called the “business case” for the scheme was in fact a cost-benefit analysis, in which the supposed economic benefits had been amplified by outright assaults on common sense. The case for HS2 always was a baggage train of bullshit.

After reading all available documents and finding no justifications for the assumptions the Department for Transport had made, I pressed it for an explanation. After a flurry of panicked phone calls, it eventually told me there was a model for justifying its analysis, but this was “frightfully complicated”. It did not volunteer to send me a copy. The books, it seemed to me, were cooked – thoroughly and fatally.

Well, one of us did read the cost benefit analysis and as we pointed out here, it didn’t pass the most basic CBA tests. And let’s be honest about it, if your economic argument is such that even George Monbiot can see through it then you’ve not got a strong case.

But as ever with George he doesn’t grasp how right he is. He identifies a larger problem from this:

I think it is one instance of the endemic disease that plagues this country, a disease that withstands changes of government, democratic scrutiny and the Tories’ austerity programmes. It’s a disease whose name everyone knows in Brazil, where I used to work and learned my politics. But it is seldom diagnosed here, though it seems just as prevalent. Clientelism.

Yep, we’re fine with that. Not with it happening, but with the identification.

The favours can be widely distributed: a government might buy the votes of a particular interest group with pre-election handouts. Or, in the case of elite clientelism, they can be targeted at a few key players.

Yes, quite so.

Which is, of course, the case for small government neoliberalism. Sure, we all agree that there are some things that must be done and that also only government can do. But we should - must - limit government only to those things which meet both tests. Because government - in any form of democracy, another valuable idea - is going to be run by politicians. Whose interest is always going to be gaining those who will vote for them.

That’s exactly the clientelism George is complaining about - state money, taxpayer’s money, being spent upon buying votes. Could be unions with promises of higher pay, bureaucrats with more clipboards to carry, grifters wanting to build something without value for money checks, possibly even greenies who want renewables at thrice the costs of fossil fuels. But that’s what the game is, deploying that 45% of the economy that the state commands in order to buy votes for those doing the deploying. Clientelism.

This is not exactly new, panem et circenses as political advice is a couple of millennia old by now.

The reason we mention this at length is that Monbiot has shown himself, at times, to be amenable to reason and evidence. We therefore still nurture that hope - extreme as it is - that we can get him over to that side of righteous small government liberalism before too long. As anyone motivated by reason and evidence does become. For just look at what government does when given free rein.