The regions are being promised transformational benefits when HS2 gets built. They will be able to benefit, so the story goes, by easy access to them, from London.
However, the picture is more complex then this simplistic approach. Today’s blog post by Douglas Fraser, business and economy editor at BBC Scotland, has another view about on the complex interplay between London and the regions.
Fraser says that “London seems ever more to use much of the rest of England as the hinterland that sustains it”.
Scotland, he says, is protected by distance from London’s dominance, but even so London acts like “a magnet for talented individuals and Scottish headquarters.”
And so, when Philip Hammond, Secretary of State for Transport, talks about HS2 transforming the “economic geography of Britain”, HS2 will also make the magnet that pulls those talent individuals away from the regions even stronger, and London even more of a challenge to regional development.