How corrupt is the Premier League?

My question is, of course, prompted by the "independent" commission appointed by the Premier League ruling that Everton had broken the Profit and Sustainability Rules (PSR) and should have 10 points deducted, a matter on which I have chosen to stay quiet until I had read and reflected on the commission's 41 page report.

The Everton fans think they know the answer, singing "the Premier League, corrupt as f*ck" at recent games (to the tune of the Piranhas Tom Hark if you fancy joining in). Along, inevitably, with "you can stick your points deduction up your arse" (to the tune of She'll Be Coming Round the Mountain, itself based on an older 19th century spiritual). I can hear you all joining in...

Which I thought when I heard it at a recent match was just ribald anger, frustration and, yes, typical scouse victimhood. But then I thought a bit longer. What if, as most football followers think, Manchester City did exaggerate sponsorship payments to conceal money coming direct from its owners, as well as making under the table payments to managers, all over many years? I've been telling anyone who'll listen for a long time now that I think most of the 115 charges made against City by the Premier League are unproveable. City's expensive lawyers (is that cost FFP/PSR deductable I wonder?) will surely say that the club cannot be expected to respond to documents illegally obtained by hacking. And the club has had plenty of time to make sure any such evidence has long since been shredded and deleted. "We cannot identify any such documents and therefore assume they are forgeries" would appear to be a solid defence to me. 

A small number of the 115 charges relate to breaching UEFA's Financial Fair Play rules. I thought the Premier League had got City on these as they were found guilty of several such charges and only got off the bulk of them on appeal to the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS) on the technicality that they were time barred. The Premier League has no such time bar. (As an aside here I'm glad to see some mainstream media journalists have joined with me in wondering why Arsenal's dodgy promotion to the top flight in 1919 isn't therefore being investigated).

The fine print of the CAS's decision will matter here. From newspaper reports it seems City were found guilty of dressing up £15M payments in each of 2012 and 2013 from its owners as sponsorships. The CAS decided these charges were time barred. Whether they said City were otherwise guilty or whether they didn't consider that given the time bar isn't clear to me. If CAS said City were guilty but no sanction could be levied because of the time bar then they have breached the Premier League rules and automatically guilty. But maybe not.

Otherwise City were found guilty of not co-operating with UEFA's inquiry and were fined. That means they also broke Premier League rules - so why wasn't this actioned back in 2020, I wonder? However, I suspect the Premier League would go for a fine rather than a points deduction for that offence, as UEFA did.

We'll see. Whichever way it goes it's entirely possible the City case won't be resolved this decade. If the charges are well founded but happen to be unproveable  that doesn't make it any less corrupt (maybe more). 

However, it's not just City. Chelsea have already admitted financial irregularities on Roman Abramovich's watch. Its new owners found some of the discrepancies at a late stage of due diligence in their acquisition process and kept £100m back from the purchase price. They fessed up to the Premier League and will expect to be treated leniently as a result - more of which later. The discrepancies appear to involve "off book" payments from Abramovich companies unrelated to Chelsea to representatives of players, managers and agents.

So this kind of cooking the books has been going on over many seasons at one club at least and most football fans would feel almost certainly at a second. Clubs with six Premier league titles and three Champions League wins between them since 2010.

Hmm, feels quite corrupt to me. Not just scouse victimhood, then.

But didn't Everton 'cheat on their financials' as well, as a Times reader commented below one of the more sympathetic articles published since the commission's report? My reply "well if you're such an expert on Financial Reporting Standard 102 obviously Everton should have been taking your advice all along" killed that particular thread and was informed by reading several paragraphs of the Commission's report, which remarked "this is a complicated case". In respect of the FRS102 element of the debate (which concerns what costs a company can capitalise and therefore take out of it's profit and loss calculation in exchange for amortisation charges in future years) the Commission recognised that there was material to support both parties' cases (i.e the Premier League's charges and Everton's defence) but it sided with the Premier League.

The Commission rejected all of Everton's mitigation pleas, which even I, with my blue tinted spectacles, think were mainly special pleading. Oh woe has befallen us, Russia invaded Ukraine pushing up the costs of our new stadium and making our financier of last resort, a friend of Putin,  persona non grata. We got in a tangle over interest on the stadium loans and then Siggy, sorry player X, one of our best and most expensive players got arrested but then not charged after so long had elapsed that we'd let his contract lapse. And, having suspended him, we did the decent thing, didn't pursue a claim against him for potentially £10M (his wages I guess as we paid him until and unless he was proven guilty, which he never was). Give us a break, guv! No chance!

Where I depart from the Commission is in their assertion that events such as being unable to unload Cenk Tosun, sorry player Y, because the covid restrictions in his home country went on longer than England and the loss of the stadium naming rights deal (which hadn't actually been signed at the time) because they had to sever contacts with Usmanov are "the type of event that businesses experience". I'll take lessons on law from a lawyer but not lessons on business risk management. If all clubs had stuffed their risk registers with every kind of conceivable such event and made full allowance for them they would tie themselves in an impossible financial knot. Since they obviously don't why should Everton have done? Because they were the only club building a new stadium at the time Everton were exposed to substantial risk when covid hit. Then the Ukraine war increased energy costs by more than any reasonable business would have predicted together with the double whammy of losing the Usmanov funding lifeline. (Of course Usmanov's USM would have come through with the naming rights deal - they'd done it before sponsoring the Finch Farm training ground for exactly the amount Everton was short by to comply with PSR several years earlier. Dodgy? You bet!)

While Everton's own prediction of its league position in 2021/22 was an ambitious 6th (they finished 16th) the club's average position over the previous seven seasons was 10th and over the previous 15 was 8th. If Everton had finished a cumulative 8 places higher over the four seasons at issue the extra league position prize money would have been enough to make them compliant. Everton didn't need much to go their way to be compliant over the four years.

Nevertheless, it's also clear reading the commission's report that Everton were all over the place on many things. "You need to get some better finance people" Mrs H said when I told her some of the omissions and oversights they'd made - and she's right. The reason Everton were in detailed discussion with the Premier League about the club finances in 2021/22 was that they hadn't appeared to realise that they could not capitalise spend on the new stadium (and thereby take it out of the PSR calculation) until they got planning permission. They got a dispensation from the Premier League that they could allow for those costs in the PSR calculation but then failed to capitalise some costs once they had planning permission. They claimed these costs were substantial but the Commission blew a hole in that argument. The Commission quite reasonably wouldn't accept that interest on commercial loans taken out by the club when Moshiri's appetite for putting in money ended was related to the new stadium. The terms of one of the loans, with Metro Bank, made clear it was for working capital not the stadium! Even if it were for the stadium, Everton put all of the incoming money into one pocket out of which both the stadium and routine spend came, making it harder to make the case over what was for one and what was for the other. Everton concocted a cock and bull story that because Moshiri had written off all commercial loans when he acquired the club he would have done so again apart from the fact that it was building the stadium. The Commission saw straight through that. These financial points, some very complex some just hand waving, were why Everton accepted during the proceedings that instead of £20m to the good they were £8m over. (The Commission decided it was more like £20M).

And, materially, because Everton accepted much of the Premier League's case on the numbers during the hearing and so accepted guilt their only grounds for appeal are that their various mitigation claims should have been accepted or that the sanction was too severe.

Everton's main hope to get the points deduction reduced must be that the commission made no case whatsoever for the quantum it invoked. In particular, it ignored the precedent of points deductions for going into administration (9 points for Portsmouth in 2010, 10 for teams in the EFL in more recent years) against which the punishment looks disproportionate. 

The Commission rejected the attempt by the Premier League to establish a scale for points deductions (6 for any breach of the financial limit plus one point for every £5M over it) saying that panels like itself should have the freedom to consider each case on its merits. But it then levied a 10 point deduction with no justification in one sentence in a 141 paragraph report, when the Premier League's formula would have yielded the same result (9.9 points to be precise). Bizarre.

I expect the points deduction to come down, perhaps to 6, on appeal. Jonathan Norcroft of the Times thinks it should have been more like 2 or 3.

The Commission report is also all over the place on how culpable Everton were. Their accountants were telling them they were on the right side of the limit, but those advisers also told the commission that their job was to interpret the rules to the maximum benefit of their client. The commission took a dim view of this, saying that Everton had a duty to act in "utmost good faith" and not try to bend the numbers to their benefit. But the PSR calculation itself isn't covered by the accounting standards and isn't that what every business pays its accountants to do (within the law)? The commission concluded that Everton had not been deliberately dishonest but had been less than frank. They said that, while Everton had  not been compliant it was not a case of deliberately breaching the rules to try to gain a sporting advantage. On the other hand they also noted that the Premier League approved numerous transfers but warned about PSR compliance each time. That may have been specific or a standard warning but the commission concluded that for Everton to persist in player purchases in the face of such warnings was reckless. It says the club took unwise risks* mistakenly believing it would be compliant.

After all this on the one hand, on the other the commission bluntly concluded Everton found themselves in a position of their own making, it was a serious breach of the limit and required a significant penalty.

They didn't see Everton as being narrowly over the limit, saying that PSR requires clubs to balance their books. They saw the £105m loss over 3 seasons as a generous buffer, not to be exceeded in any circumstance. They seem to have ignored the fact that few clubs break even in any particular season.

Those other clubs had better watch out. First up, Chelsea. They will expect mitigation for the offences being under previous ownership and for coming clean at the first opportunity. Chelsea might have acted in good faith now but they didn't earlier (so that cancels out, perhaps). The commission report on Everton said (paragraph 135):

"We agree with the Premier League that the requirements of punishment, deterrence, vindication of compliant clubs, and the protection of the integrity of the sport demand a sporting sanction in the form of a points deduction."

If Everton have to be made an example of, surely so must Chelsea.

I won't hold my breath in case, as the banner on Gwaldys Street says alongside the Premier League logo, "where there is power, greed and money there is corruption". 

Photo taken from my seat in the Upper Bullens stand for the 2-0 win against Chelsea on 10 December.

* Jonathan Northcroft in the Sunday Times said these unwise risks included making new signings for Frank Lampard after being comparatively parsimonious for Rafa Benitez. Those signings were Dele Alli (no up front transfer fee but significant wages), Onana (£35M), McNeil (£20M), Maupay (£15M), Garner (£9M) and Gueye (the newspaper says the fee was £8m but the usually definitive transfermarkt.co.uk quotes €4m). I'm rather glad they signed the four of those six that have been regular starters recently under Dyche. James Garner in particular is a gem of a footballer. Northcroft also listed the "duds" that led to Everton coming unstuck: Moise Kean (£29M), Tosun (27M), Gbamin (£25M), Klassen (£25M), Bolassie (£25M), Schneiderlin (£24M). These signings were all made in the period 2016 to August 2019. Other newspaper reporters have tended to be more sympathetic, as indeed was Northcroft a week later when he reflected that his first column didn't - and should have - provided a critique of the punishment, which he found excessive comapred with the damage that the breakaway six ESL clubs could have caused. That offence could bring a 30 point deduction in the future and he clearly found it preposterous that Everton's £19.5m overspend over 4 years - allegedly five months pay for Erling Haaland - was treated as if it was a third as serious as possibly destroying the league. He noted that nobody he'd spoken to in the game, including executives  of rival clubs, was saying "only ten points? I'd have expected more". Northcroft concluded that a deduction of two or three points and a warning would have sufficed. "Everton are the child who blew its school lunch money on fizzy drinks, not the prefects who plotted to burn down the gym hall".

Sources:

The Premier League announcement is at the following link, which also links to the 41 page report by the 'independent' commission: https://www.premierleague.com/news/3788486#:~:text=An%20independent%20Commission%20has%20imposed,and%20Sustainability%20Rules%20(PSRs).

Chelsea FC face new questions over how Roman Abramovich funded success. The Guardian 15 November 2023 

CAS releases its reasons for overturning City's ban The Guardian 28 July 2020 

'Reckless' Everton paying the price for refusing to listen to multiple warnings. Jonathan Northcroft, Sunday Times 19 November 2023

Everton points deduction a classic case of picking on the little guy. Club's punishment did not match the severity of the offence, especially when comapred to sanctions for those involved in the attempted Super League breakaway. Jonathan Northcroft. Sunday Times 26 November 2023

Not so super - it's the ECJ that needs competition - or relegation

The European Court of Justice has ruled that UEFA and FIFA acted unlawfully in banning clubs from joining the European "Super" League (ESL) and are abusing a dominant position. It also added that a breakaway league "would not necessarily be approved".  The Euro-judges said that any new competition would still be subject to UEFA's authorisation rules and procedures but those rules would need to be more transparent. Ironically those procedures are already in the process of being changed following the ECJ's preliminary verdict of a year ago which concluded that the rules of football's world and European ruling bodies were compatible with EU competition law (before they changed their mind) but the case was heard on the basis of the old rules.

So this verdict not only ignores what the market (i.e. the fans) want, it's already out of date on publication and effectively meaningless as only two of the ESL clubs are still holding a candle for it and several have already come out and said they have no plans to revive the plan.

I am left wondering why it is that competition law, intended to protect consumers, can end up being used in an attempt to protect those actually abusing their market position (i.e. the Super League clubs). It seems entirely perverse.

The ECJ and Brussels have past form in this regard. It's as long ago as 2005 that the European Commission cost all English football addicts a pretty penny by insisting that Sky could not have a monopoly of Premier League live TV rights. What appeared on the face of it to promote competition cost subscribers money because it pushed up the price that bidders offered and so the price for consumers watching. It also meant that you either had to have a contract with multiple companies or miss out on seeing matches (or go to the pub). I was angry about that at the time and remain angry about it to this day, declining to have a contract with whatever Sultana or BT call themselves now. (It's TNT actually and the crunch for me is you cannot just buy the the Premier League matches, you have to pay for - and not watch, in my case - the so called Champions League matches between many teams that weren't national champions, in which I have little interest, at least until the knock out stage).

More seriously, the Commission's interference revealed a classic misunderstanding about how markets work and what the impact of its decision would be, even though it seemed obvious enough at the time.

Let me be clear - the football authorities do operate as cartels and often not in the interest of the consumers. (A world cup in Qatar, or spread between continents, for example). FIFA and UEFA learned how to keep a grip on the game from its earliest days through the Football Association's requirement that all clubs have to be affiliated and anyone playing in an unsanctioned competition risks being banned from playing in sanctioned competitions. I remember playing in the odd game for a youth team in a Sunday league in Liverpool which didn't seem terribly well organised and collapsed when it became clear it wasn't affiliated or sanctioned. We all risked being banned from playing for our schools and in men's football, which some of the better players were already doing.

But these cartels means that there is a unified set of laws and pyramid structure for football across the world. Sports that are fragmented, like boxing and now golf, are never as satisfying or rewarding to watch. The competition comes in the sporting competition, not a multiplicity of ruling bodies or competing leagues. Even the Americans realised this when their two competing American Football bodies, the NFL and the upstart AFL agreed a merger after 10 years of bidding wars for players. At least that gave us the Superbowl.

So I'm left wondering why the ECJ should have any kind of locus in sport. If they choose to decide that the cartels are legal and you can't just set up a competing football league, which they sensibly do, they have no reason to interfere in the finer detail. 

Meanwhile the UK government seems to see this as an further opportunity to justify its ill-conceived plan to implement a football regulator. As the UK isn't covered by EU competition law since Brexit the government can wrap themselves in football flags and try to claim that they have save football, even though four of the six Engish clubs from the ESL proposal have already said they aren't interested.

It was fan power wot did it, not Brexit!

ECJ ruling leaves on question - is the Super League really back? The Independent, 21 December 2023 https://www.independent.co.uk/sport/football/european-super-league-ruling-uefa-laws-b2467796.html

Sky to lose their Premier League live monopoly. The Guardian 18 November 2005 https://www.theguardian.com/football/2005/nov/18/sportsrights.sport

The route to peace in the middle east

It's painful to think what so many people have been going through in Israel and Gaza since the Hamas attack on Israeli kibbutzim just over a month ago. Opinions seem dangerously polarised not just in the region but also here in Britain.

But apparently that's not entirely the case. I was encouraged to read in the Sunday Times that many Brits have sympathy with both sides. Among those with sympathy for the Israelis, 84% also sympathised with the Palestinians. Even among the most vehement pro-Israel supporters 77% had some sympathy for the Palestinians, with 45% showing them a "great deal" of sympathy. Those that felt most strongly about one side were not necessarily more likely to feel ill of the other.

I've was trying to hold that thought in mind when I watched the news coverage of the pro-Palestinian protests in London on Saturday 11 November. I'm far from alone in thinking that the timing of that protest was deeply disrespectful of our national Armistice Day also known as Remembrance Day. The fact that the protest was not planned for Remembrance Sunday wasn't, to me, a valid reason for finding it acceptable. There are plenty of other days in the year available to protest. The whole sorry spectacle was made more tense by the hullabaloo in the build up to Saturday. I console myself with the thought that it was relatively small numbers of trouble makers, on either side of the argument, while the majority looked on with distaste.

Certainly the people who go out on the streets to protest seem to overwhelmingly favour the Palestinians. In contrast, Hadley Freeman reports that posters of kidnapped Israelis are routinely torn down in London and replaced with pro-Palestinian graffiti. Social media has shown a woman tearing them down because she "didn't believe" Hamas had kidnapped the missing Israelis. Perhaps this is not surprising when a senior Hamas leader has refused to acknowledge that his group even killed any civilians in Israel, saying only "conscripts" were targeted. This notwithstanding ample evidence from the Israelis and various fact check and authoritative news organisations supporting the evidence that 260 people attending a concert in southern Israel were killed on 7 October despite a video widely shared on social media claiming that to be false.

In the immediate wake of the 7 October Hamas attack we didn't see Israeli flags widely flown unlike those of Ukraine flags flown, it seemed, everywhere following the Russian invasion. The F.A. bottled it and didn't light up the Wembley arch in Israeli colours for the England friendly match on 17 October, having illuminated it in the colours of Ukraine, France and Turkey in recent times. Instead the players wore black armbands and there was a minute's silence for "all the victims of the conflict in Israel and Palestine", a Corbynite form of weasel words in the circumstances, I felt.

It's very sad, but look at the context, Freeman noted some say, arguing that sounded pretty indistinguishable from something she calls "justification". Parodying that argument she said, "the babies probably deserved it... their mere existience in Israel means they asked for it."

Freeman also contrasted the small number of non-Jews at a vigil for Israel shortly after October 7 with the diverse crowds at pro-Palestinian rallies. "Well, now we know who would have helped us, and who would have pushed us onto the trains" a friend texted her.

Freeman is a liberal Jew, a two state solution supporter who accepts that Israel and, in particular, the present Israeli givernment has done terrible things to the Palestinians. But worse than what Hamas has done? She felt, even by 15 October, that what was happening in Gaza was a tragedy. But Jews need a homeland and cannot live alongside people set on destroying them. She thought this was understood. But it's clearly not - she says that many who march for a free Palestine believe that Israel should not exist at all and sadly I fear she is right.

I don't doubt that many of the protesters on 11 November are well intentioned. But many are not. Dominic Lawson noted that a female protester in Birmingham held a placard reading "Now do you understand why the trees and rocks have to speak?" Lawson noted that the police must have thought it had a horticultural meaning, when it is actually a call to kill Jews for being Jews*.

A gamut of seemingly random special interest groups turn up at these protests. Freeman reported seeing signs reading "Queers for Palestine" and "Feminists for Gaza" and commented: "wait till you hear how Hamas treats gay people and women there, guys".  In contrast, I note Israel isn't just the only democracy in the region, it's one that tolerates sexual and gender diversity more than most countries, as evidenced by the number of LGBT artists who have represented Israel in the Eurovision Song Contest: a remarkable 7 gays, lesbians and a trans woman (twice) between 1998 and 2022.

There seems a complete lack of nuance or any understanding of the intractability of the issues. Freeman noted that if the activists wanted to make a point they could print posters of Palestinian casualties of the conflict and stick them up next to those of the Israeli hostages. But no, they deny the murders and kidnapping happened in a kind of holocaust denial syndrome.

Nevertheless, I thought those arguing for a "proportionate" response from Israel to the Hamas attacks had a strong point, even after I read a Times Journalist whose rejoinder was "just exactly what is a proportionate response to genocide"? I guess from our perspective the need for a proportionate response is as much to avoid the risk of escalation from a local to a regional conflict, with all that implies. In other words, it's sometimes motivated by our own self interest as much as anything else.

Other than following the events of the years since the six day Arab-Israeli war in 1967 brought the issues to my attention as a teenager, I hadn't read much about the history of the conflict until recently. What little I have read may well be inaccurate and partial so I don't claim to have any great understanding of the issues.

I'll bookend my very limited understanding of the background with two points. Firstly, Jews and Palestinians have lived in the area now known as Israel and Palestine since, essentially, the beginning of time. Jews have lived there continuously for around 4,000 years. It's one of the three oldest religions in the world (the others being Hinduism and Zoroastrianism). Around 3,000 years ago the Jews established a monarchy in the land that now includes Israel, Gaza, the West Bank, the Golan Heights and parts of Syria, Lebanon and Jordan. The map below is King Saul's unified kingdom of the 12 Jewish tribes:

In the following millennia the Babylonians conquered Israel, the Persians conquered the Babylonians, the Greeks conquered the Persians and then the Romans occupied Israel in the first century BC. In the meantime the Muslim religion had been established by Mohammed in Mecca in modern day Saudi Arabia. While I doubt that everything was always harmonious between the various ethnic and religious groups in the region it seems that there were long periods when, under the control of a distant empire, peace was maintained. But things started to get difficult for the Jews under the Romans and, following the first Jewish-Roman war in 66 - 73 BC in which a state of Israel was briefly declared, the Romans destroyed the main Jewish strongholds (and temples) with what Wikipedia calls "profound demographic, theological, political and economic consequences". In particular many surviving Jews were expelled or displaced.

Thus began the presence of the Jews in many surrounding and some far away states and, perhaps, some of the root causes of antisemitism and the compex history of the last century or so that we can't seem to escape from.

Secondly, the trigger for the current crisis seems to have been the rapprochment that was growing between Saudi Arabia and Israel. It seems clear that the timing of the 7 October Hamas attack was intended to thwart that thaw and prevent it blooming into a more normal relationship, such as Israel has with Egypt. And it seems to have achieved that, at least for the time being. It may not need saying when Hamas has killed and kidnapped so many Israelis but these are not people with any interest in peace and the attack was surely intended to tilt the region back to conflict. In doing so Hamas has effectively put the residents of Gaza on the front line, at least those who don't live in terrorist tunnels contructed with aid money and materials intended for other purposes.

Of course Israel, with its history of being under permanent threat, has a long track record of using force to neutralise its opponents. When many of those opponents have wanted to remove Israel and Jews from the face of the earth that is understandable but it makes long term peace difficult. Under hardline prime minister Netanyahu Israel has often been been hard to like. But is it, as some allege, an "apartheid state"? 

I'm uncomfortable about the treatment of Palestinians in Israeli controlled areas but apartheid seems to me an inappropriate comparison. I assumed the tretment of Palestinians in the West Bank would be far better than it would be for Jews in, say, Iran, though having checked I stand corrected on that. There are some 12,000 to 15,000 Jews still living in Iran (or at least there were as recently as 2018). They do suffer some discrimination but are generally allowed to get on with their lives (and worship) despite living in a country whose former president, Mahmoud Ahmedinejad, repeatedly denied the holocaust  happened. Surprisingly it's the largest Jewish population in the middle east outside of Israel. Why so?

The vast majority of the 1 million Jews who lived in Arab states in 1945 became refugees almost immediately after the creation of Israel but there were still over 100,000 in Iran until the 1979 revolution displaced the dynastic Shah with an autocratic Islamic state and so in 1967 they didn't need to move. The number of Jewish refugees in 1967 was similar to the number of Palestinians (700,000) who were displaced or expelled in the Nakba (catastrophe) on the creation of the state of Israel. One might say the displaced Jews had a homeland to go to, though they also travelled destitute. The majority had to learn a new language and get used to living in a very different culture. They were assimilated. In contrast the children and grandchildren of the displaced Palestinians, who generally moved short distances and remained in a linguistically, ethnically and culturally similar society, are still deemed to be refugees, a concept I find a little difficult after 75 years, though this perhaps shows how little progress the international community has made in solving the issues**.

The state of Israel, as originally drawn on the map and before the occupation of the West Bank and Golan Heights, seems almost impossible to defend militarily (see map below). One can understand the security concerns of Israelis in reverting to the pre 1967 borders. Personally I struggle to see how the two-state solution that is the policy of the UK government (and USA and EU) could actually work unless the prospective Palestinian state in Gaza and the West Bank was peaceful and the two states could live in harmony. I wonder if it is merely paid lip service and if so I can understand why that irritates Palestinian supporters.

Frustratingly, it might have worked at one time: it was proposed by the UN in 1947 and accepted by the Israelis but rejected by the Arab states. Israel declared independence and was immediately attacked by several of the neighbouring Arab states, with the Nakba and all the subsequent events unfolding miserably over the last 7 plus decades.

Of course, just because there were Jewish states in Israel in the very distant past didn't mean one had to be one created there in 1947. There are plenty of other ethnic and religious groups who don't have a homeland, the Kurds and the Uyghurs for example***. Nevertheless that was the decision of the international community in the shattered world that existed at the end of world war II. One might argue it was to assauge guilt at the Holocaust, though pogroms against Jews predated the Nazis and there had been many proponents of a Jewish state in Palestine for decades beforehand. Or one might argue that it was evidently necessary - Freeman's family literally had nowhere to go after WWII (they came from Poland where, even after the fall of the Nazis, there were still pogroms and Jew-hatred).

Some people know who to blame for it all. At a Labour party conference Pro-Palestinian fringe meeting last month one activist blamed it all on Britain. Naturally I'm not having that. One could read up on the history of the establishment of Israel in 1948 for several days. Indeed the Wikipedia entry History of Israel would take a good couple of hours to read and attempt to digest. Britain ended up with responsibility for the area after WW2. Despite the UN resolution in 1947 to implement the two state solution (with Jerusalem under an independent trusteeship) the Security Council and Britain didn't hurry to implement it. Britain continued to detain Jews attempting to enter Palestine (as was). According to the Wikipedia account Britain was wary of upsetting Anglo-Arab relations. Just like the FA recently, sitting on the fence.

Under terrorist/insurgent/freedom fighter (delete as applicable) attacks from both sides Britain pulled out in May 1948, Israel declared iself a state and its Arab neighbours attacked it.

One could blame the Brits for cutting and running I suppose, but they clearly weren't welcome as peace keepers. Who would want the job now? While all this was happening Britain was extracting itself from India, responsible for part of Germany, dismantling its empire and attempting to rebuild its own shattered and debt ridden economy in the wake of the war.

So what is the route to peace? Obviously one wouldn't start from here. I listened to part of a BBC Question Time episode recently. It came from Belfast and the various Northern Irish speakers urged the need for dialogue. I accept now that it was necessary for there to be dialogue involving Gerry Adams and Martin McGuiness, though I struggled with it at the time having been in Warrington with one of my sons only 20 minutes before the provisional IRA bomb exploded in 1993. I always admired the way Tim Parry, the father of one of the victims, emphasised the need to leave hate behind and "turning something bad into something good". I admired him for it because I knew I could not have done the same. But of course he was right.

What they didn't address was the fact that you can't have dialogue with people who implacably want to see your whole race extinguished. While Hamas has control of Gaza I don't see how dialogue is possible. A Hamas spokesperson told Lebanese TV "We will repeat the October 7 attack again and again until Israel is annihilated. Will we have to pay a price? Yes, but we are ready to pay it. We are called a nation of martyrs and we are proud to sacrifice martyrs".  Egyptian journalist Ibrahim Eissa, noting that Hamas has controlled Gaza for 16 years, has built an underground city for its weapons and ammunition but no bomb shelters for civilians. "Why? Because life is cheap to them" he said. 

There are Palestinians who want peace of course - probably a majority of them. The Sunday Times told the moving story of Izzeldin Abuelaish, a Palestinian  doctor who has lost many family members including three of his daughters. He, like Tim Parry, says hate is not the answer. So a way has to be found to empower Palestininans who want peace to rid themselves of Hamas. Easier said than done, of course.

We now face a situation where new generations of terrorists are likely to be created, though there might be some opportunity for dialogue when the current fighting ends.

Could a two state solution work? I doubt it, personally, as I've said above. Could power sharing work as in Northern Ireland? Well it might eventually but we know from Northern Ireland that isn't plain sailing (It's not actually operating at the moment and hasn't since February 2022. It was also suspended for nearly 3 years between 2017 and 2020). But Northern Ireland shows there can be hope, if enough people want peace.

I'm not a fan of Benjamin Netanyahu. However a quote of his sums up the problem: if Arabs laid down their arms there would be peace, if Israel laid down its arms there would be no Israel. 

The route to peace starts through enough people on all sides wanting it. It can't happen while Hamas still holds the unfortunate Palestinians in its malevolent grip.

* It's a reference to the original charter of Hamas which quotes from the Hadith, a collection of sayings of the prophet Muhammad, as follows: "...the day of judgement will not come until Muslims fight Jews and kill them. Then the Jews will hide behind trees and rocks, and the trees and rocks will cry out 'O Muslim, there is a Jew hiding behind me; come and kill him' ". A pretty clear bit of hate speech then.

** The problem of course is that the Palestinians are effectively stateless. There were also large migrations of Hindus and Muslims when India and Pakistan were created in 1947, with horrendous examples of what we now call ethnic cleaning. We don't refer to the descendants of those migrants as refugess though they, like the Israelis, had a "homeland" to go to even if it hadn't been their home. The Palestininans don't. The Arab states neighbouring Israel have not wanted to bring in Palestinians as it would reduce the pressure for a Palestinian homeland.

*** The examples of the Kurds and Uyghurs show that ethnic and religious minorities can get a really bad deal. Unless, of course, they live in a benign, pluralistic and broadly tolerant state, like the UK or the USA. Nobody expends any energy or concern over Amish, Mormons, Scientologists or the Wee Frees not having a "homeland". The problem seems to arise where a minority group is distinct from the majority both ethnically and religiously. 

Other sources:

Britons despair of violence instead of taking sides. Sunday Times 5 November 2023

We Jews really thought we were among friends. Hadley Freeman, Sunday Times 15 October 2023. This newspaper column was as sad and sobering as any newspaper column I've ever read.

We're not even allowed posters of loved ones. Hadley Freeman, Sunday Times 5 November 2023

Eichmann was genocidal. Hamas is too. Israel, no Dominic Lawson Sunday Times 5 November 2023

Hamas leader refuses to acknowledge killing of civilians in Israel. BBC 7 November 2023

What we know about three widespread Israel- Hamas war claims. Factcheck.org, posted 13 October, updated 24 October 2023

History of Israel. Wikipedia

Did Jews take Israel away from Palestinians? https://jfedsrq.org/did-jews-take-israel-from-palestinians/ 8 December 2020 This source includes many maps showing the evolution of boundaries in the region.

Fact sheet: Jewish refugees from Arab countries. https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jewish-refugees-from-arab-countries?utm_content=cmp-true

Iran's Jewish community is the largest in mideast outside Israel. https://eu.usatoday.com/in-depth/news/world/inside-iran/2018/08/29/iran-jewish-population-islamic-state/886790002/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_LGBT_participants_in_the_Eurovision_Song_Contest

Stateless Palestinians - forced migration review. Abbas Shiblak, FMR26 Refugee Studies Centre (part of Oxford Department of International Development),  https://www.fmreview.org/sites/fmr/files/FMRdownloads/en/palestine/shiblak.pdf

Victim's father marks 30 years since IRA bombing BBC 20 March 2023

An Israeli shell killed three of my girls. But hate will only prolong the horror. Izzeldin Abuelaish, Sunday Times 5 November 2023

Farewell to a Gentleman

 

We lost a true Evertonian last week. One who, unfortunately for him in a way, though I'm sure he wouldn't have had it any differently, was wealthy enough to put together a consortium to buy the club he's supported all his life when it looked rudderless. And to bring it stability and relative success, albeit not trophies. But one who was not mega wealthy and realised he didn't have the wherewithal to compete with Roman Abramovich let alone the sovereign wealth funds who would follow as owners of Premier League clubs. One who looked tirelessly for a suitable, wealthier owner to take the club forward. He was thwarted in that aim for many years by the millstone of the need to fund a new stadium. Why else would Sheik Mansour have bought Manchester City?

After all, when the Abu Dhabi Doos bought into City in 2008 they had just finished 9th in the premier league having finished 14th the previous year. Everton had finished 5th and 6th in those two years. But City were no longer at Maine Road having been gifted a stadium.

Kenwright eventually found his wealthy buyer, the enthusiastic (for quite a while) Farhad Moshiri who was prepared to make the new stadium happen and spend a lot of money on the team. It's hardly Kenwright's fault that the managers Moshiri put in place - a lot of them! - wasted that money, though an unfortunately large proportion of Everton fans - or at least the noisy ones on social media - seem to think it was his fault.  

It's also not his fault that Moshiri's backer of last resort, the super wealthy Alisher Usmanov, became persona non grata because Putin invaded Ukraine, so Moshiri's appetite to keep funding a project in trouble ran out.

I hope those fans who turned on Kenwright have read the many fond recollections of him from former and current players and managers who knew him as a polite, enthusiastic and supportive chairman who didn't interfere but always encouraged and was concerned for the well being of all the club's employees. And who championed the largest and best community programme of any club in the Premier League (and quite possibly the world).

I met Bill once. Well actually I didn't but he spoke to me. One of my most loyal readers of this blog believes I can recall every detail of every match I've ever been to, which of course I can't. Far from it, especially the more recent ones! But I remember the day Bill spoke to me very clearly and it tells you a lot about the man.

It was on the 28th of December 1997. And no I didn't remember that, I had to look it up. The reason I remember is that it turned out to be the day that Duncan Ferguson scored the first ever hat trick of headers in the Premier League and me and my older son were there. Though we missed the first goal.

At that time we lived in Oxfordshire and so, having seen around half the home matches in some seasons earlier in the 90s, we only got to see the odd game. For this one we would have been staying with family for Christmas and/or New Year. We hadn't realised that access to the ground had become all ticket (yes, you really could just rock up and pay cash at the turnstiles until the season before). 

So when we arrived we found we had to join a large queue at the box office in Goodison Road to buy tickets, by which time the game had started. The game had been going a while when we got to the front of the queue. Having got our tickets we walked briskly along Goodison Road and, just as we were coming to the end of the Main Stand, there was an enormous roar as Ferguson scored his first. At which point we ran around to the Gwladys Street turnstiles (why? we weren't going to catch a replay!). The suddenness of that colossal din - if you're in the ground you realise it's about to happen, so it took us by surprise - is why I remember the day so clearly. The game ended 3-2 and I remember nothing more about it. 

Except what happened while we were standing in the queue, at a point where it snaked along the pavement close to the main entrance, with it's uniformed commissionaire. (Do they still have that? Perhaps I'll look when I go to today's match). I was, as usual, in full flow bending my then teenage sons's ear about something and nothing - probably something about his boys' team that I coached - when a quiet voice to our side gently said "excuse me, can I pass through, please?"

I stood aside and a white haired chap, who had been waiting patiently, said "thank you" and walked past making his way towards the main entrance. I turned back to my son and was about to resume my exposition on whatever, when I glanced at the chap's back and said to my son "that's Bill Kenwright. What a nice, polite man". (If the roles had been reveresed I'd have probably walked up without slowing down much, said "excuse me, mate" and pushed through).

At that point Bill was on the board of directors and a minor shareholder. By that time Kenwright was also a very successful theatre producer and director (I'm sure we'd all been to see the fabulous Blood Brothers as a family by then). Even when Kenwright's consortium acquired the club in 1999 there was infighting, in particular with Paul Gregg, another theatre impressario, which thwarted plans to build a stadium at King's Dock right in the centre of the Liverpool waterfront. The project failed in 2003 because the club could not come up with £30m to secure the site. Gregg subsequently sold his shares to an American businessman and it was another year before Kenwright became the club's major shareholder (some sources say Philip Green bunged him the money for it). He became chairman in July 2004.

By 2005 he was looking for investment into the club and always made clear he would stand aside if a suitable buyer could be found. It took more than a decade before Moshiri turned up. Many fans subscribe to the view that Kenwright thwarted attempts to buy the cub off him; he always insisted the money had never actually been there (as Moshiri may now be finding out).

As you can tell I was a Kenwright admirer. I'm disappointed the club has got into difficulties again in recent years and, as Chairman, he obviously has some responsibility. But until Moshiri came along the club was well and cautiously run. One statistic tells it all really - the number of managers they appointed. From the day Kenwright's consortium became the majority shareholder in 1999 to the day he sold to Moshiri in 2016 Everton had 3 managers: Walter Smith was already in place, Kenwright switched him for David Moyes and then, when Moyes left, he appointed Roberto Martinez. So Kenwright appointed 2 managers in 16 years. Moshiri has appointed 7 in 9 years, excluding interim appointments. Kenwright may have been chairman through that time but we know that it was Moshiri interviewing candidate managers, sometimes on Usmanov's yacht apparently. 

There was a fitting tribute for Kenwright before the kick off of the cup tie with Burnley on 1 November and I believe that showed the silent majority of Evertonians share my view of him. The photo above comes from the cover of the tribute edition of the programme for that match.

One other photo shows the touch of the theatre impressario. It's from the tribute at Goodison in September 2012 for the Hillsborough victims a few days after publication of the independent panel's report which confirmed that there had been a cover up shifting the blame from the police to the victims*

The two mascots (for a game between Everton and Newcastle United) took the field to a song carefully chosen by Bill: the Hollies "He Ain't Heavy, He's My Brother". The symbolism was perfect: Liverpool FC is effectively Everton FC's younger brother. There had been speculation that Everton would play the Liverpool anthem "You'll Never Walk Alone". But Bill was much cleverer than that. A year later he got a standing ovation at the annual Hillsborough memorial service at Anfield, saying "you picked on the wrong city - and you picked on the wrong mums".

A class act was Bill. Farewell and thanks for the journey.

* I would say the FA was also significantly to blame, giving the fateful semi-final to Hillsborough. The ground did not have a valid safety certificate at the time and there had been problems at another semi-final in the recent past. And they gave the team with the larger number of supporters the smaller end of the ground. It was all inviting trouble. I have no idea why the FA has got off so lightly in retrospectives of the disaster

Sources include

Wikipedia (of course) 

Bill Kenwright was so generous, Hillsborough campaigner says. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-merseyside-67217127 25 October 2023

Up or down for for the Grand Old Team from here?

Everton fans have had enough to worry about for several years now but things could be about to get much worse. The Premier League charged Everton under its Financial Foul Play regulations* in March but until May the more imminent threat was relegation on the field. A relief filled victory in the must-win last home game of the season, 1-0 against Bournemouth at the end of May, saved them for the time being. 

I was at that game. Henry Winter, the Times Chief Football writer, doesn't normally cover Everton but  was clearly sent to Goodison for the purpose of a story (either way). He wrote a lovely, rather respectful and well crafted match report** which started by quoting the Everton fans' Grand Old Team song:

"If you know your history, you know Everton will fight and how hard they fought here at Goodison Park.... to preserve their club’s run in the elite division that dates back to 1954".

It was an interesting atmosphere that day in and around Goodison. The streets were packed and in full party mode before the match:

The folk on the bus shelter were leading the singing and only two of the four lanes on County Road (aka the A59) were available to traffic. There was a serious risk of getting spattered with blue paint from flares in the streets. The photo below was taken while I enjoyed my pre-match bevvy. 

 

I'm sure there were far more people than could fit in the modern day, restricted capacity, Goodison. I expect a lot had turned up just for the party. The mood seemed remarkably confident. A confidence I didn't entirely share but they were right, as a rather makeshift team with midfielders Garner and O'Neill filling in as wing backs gave a competent performance to the extent that, even though it was only 1-0, the announcement of 10 minutes added time didn't cause many nerves. Indeed, that ten minutes of football must have been among the most composed the team played all season.

The thinness of Everton's squad was stark when I got back to my seat towards the end of half time and saw four Everton subs doing a desultory warm up. "Are they all of our subs?" I asked the lady sitting next to me. "There's a couple of keepers as well" she said. Injuries had depleted the squad a bit but not even being able to fill the bench with youngsters was revealing.

Despite securing survival, just as a season earlier I was rather gloomy about the club's forward prospects. I'd said then that I couldn't see why things would change. Clubs that have struggled usually struggle again the following year, which came to pass. Though by May 2023 my concern was excaerbated by the pending FFP charge. 

The season started with Everton's squad still looking thin and main striker Dominic Calvert-Lewin still crocked.  I went to the first match of the season, at home against Fulham. The performance was good but not the result. The 1-0 defeat was a much better showing than the equivalent fixture played only last April, a game I also went to, where Everton were comprehensively undone by a Willian masterclass. A friend who came with me to this season's game said Everton should have been 3 up before Fulham scored. Without DCL or, at that time, another credible striker, Neil Maupay tried his heart out, nearly scored in the first few minutes, but lost heart when their keeper made a great save at point blank range and the crowd lost what little faith and patience they had left for him. 

However, Everton did at least play enterprising football in that game and that pattern continued with the team making but not taking chances. Roll forward a few weeks and the squad had been strengthened by the addition of Jack Harrison, who Leeds fans warn can be inconsistent and a promising deputy for DCL - Portuguese striker Beto, who I call Nobby, as his full name is Norberto Bercique Gomes Betuncal. In his time on the pitch so far Nobby has looked big, strong and fast but very raw for £25m. He has scored, albeit in his debut in the Haribo Cup against Doncaster, who at the time were propping up League Two. When he battled for the ball in the corner then crossed from the by line for 83 year old Ashley Young*** to score the last goal in the 3-0 Haribo cup win over Burnley the crowd were delighted for him and chorussed "Ole, ole, ole, ole; Beto, Beto" which he acknowledged with a gesture of appreciation. He at least gives us an option if DCL is out or just needs a breather.

Even better DCL, after an unfortunate broken cheekbone set him back, is looking fit (touch wood), strong and is scoring goals. Despite a hamstring tweak and the cheek injury he has appeared in 7 of Everton's 10 premier league matches this season, scoring in 3 of the last 5.

But just as impressive to me is the fact that he seems to have worked on his game while he has been doing his injury rehab. In particular he's improved his ability to pull the ball down on the run and turn from Pickford's long passes, a move which will trouble most centre backs who he can beat for speed. He's done this a few times this season and the one against Bournemouth close to where I was sitting was breathtaking. Had his shot gone in it the clips would have been replayed time after time. But his simpler adjustment of the ball and turning onto it for his goal at West Ham, was impressive too. The great thing when your striker has these skills is you don't have to play him in, you just have to give him the ball near the box, whatever way he's facing. He is looking the complete centre forward again, just as he was when he became Harry Kane's deputy for England three seasons ago. (All of his 11 England appearances and 4 goals came between October 2020 and July 2021). And he's still only 26.

The only thing that remains a puzzle about Calvert-Lewin (besides his dodgy fashion sense) is the fact the Everton fans don't have a song for him even though he's been there since 2016 and now has 50 Premier league goals for the club. I have heard a song purporting to be about him on youtube but I've not heard it sung at the ground. I guess it's because his name is awkward to fit to song. It was much the same for Richarlison, though the fans did eventually have a song for him.

Talking of whom, I had begun to convince myself in the summer that even without Richarlison, if Everton got Calvert-Lewin fit and the squad performed to its potential they should easily be better than at least three other premier league clubs. I was concerned when the early season results weren't matching the performances but since then there's been an improvement, with a good 3-0 win at home against Bournemouth and wins away at Brentford, West Ham and Villa.  I went to the Bournemouth game in early October and the only worrying sign was that Everton should really have scored six, so they still aren't taking enough of their chances. But Bournemouth were poor that day and the home defeat against Luton showed Everton still have a prima donna tendency to be complacent against what they consider to be inferior opposition, a state of mind that can quickly flip to panic when they realise that isn't the case on the day. 

Nevertheless, at the moment I would say the squad is good enough to get comfortably to mid-table, if they can continue picking up points over the next few weeks of relatively difficult fixtures.  The team's run of good results (5 wins in 7) has coincided with young James Garner at last being trusted in centre midfield by Sean Dyche. Garner is looking an outstanding footballer with the precious gifts of being able to win and keep possession. Arguably he is only being outshone at the moment by his England Under 21 colleague, centre back Jarrad Branthwaite who is proving a much more reliable partner for Big Ears (James Tarkowksi) than Noddy (Michael Keane). Everton have been so much better with these two players in the team.

But that confident outlook is before the threat of a points deduction. Unconfirmed reports**** have  speculated that the club could face a 12 point deduction if found guilty of breaching the Premier League's financial fair play rules. At five points clear after 10 games one could extrapolate to 38 matches and say Everton could be 19 points clear by the end of the season, so why worry? But that scenario doesn't really stand up. Everton's early season fixtures were comparatively easy and the teams at the bottom may be poor but they could easily start accruing points at more than their current meagre rate. A 12 point deduction would surely test Everton to the limit. A recent "supercomputer prediction" for the end of season table had Everton and Fulham on 40 points ahead of Burnley on 30 and Sheffield United and Luton nowhere. A 10 point gap, not 12.

If it comes to that. Everton have maintained their innocence throughout but we don't know much about the single charge they face: the Premier League hasn't published any details. We know there is one charge of breaching the limit of £105 million for losses over a three year period which, prima facie, they did, losing £372 million in the three seasons up to 2021-2 before allowing for the impact of covid and spend which appears in the accounts but falls outside fair play calculations, such as on infrastructure and the academy.  We also know Everton claimed much larger covid impacts than other clubs, even ones with much larger stadia: more than £90m, though even that doesn't look enough to keep them compliant. Nevertheless, it stretched credulity and I had assumed the inquiry would be focussing on that. But reports have suggested it is actually related to the tax treatment of loans for the new stadium. As all infrastructure spend, including the new stadium project, is outside the fair play envelope, that struck me as odd. But wait a moment - what if Everton had claimed a tax credit on the stadium loans and tried to benefit from that within the fair play numbers? But how can you claim a tax credit when you've lost a packet and aren't paying any tax? A cursory examination of the club's annual accounts shows that it paid no corporation tax in 2020, 2021 or 2022 and there was a £30k tax credit in 2019. So WTAF?

I've known many experts in finance glaze over at the mention of tax, it's a specialist subject. And who really understands their tax return these days? On the other hand you can get sent to jail for getting your tax wrong. Everton may have to hope that they are treated like Ken Dodd rather than Al Capone*****.

I think it will be difficult for Everton to show they have complied, even though they say they went through the numbers with the Premier League in real time and the Premier League assured Burnley and Leeds less than 18 months ago that Everton were clean. But why would a 12 point deduction be applied for something that could be considered a technicality? The Premier League has never applied a deduction of more than 9 points, which was for Portsmouth going into administration, but the standard penalty in the EFL since 2019 for going into administration has been 12 points. However administration wipes a huge financial sheet clean and so you'd think that would be reserved for the most severe penalty.

From here one could imagine a future in which Everton's current progress on the pitch leads to a comfortable mid table position through this season and going into next. At some point in 2024 or early 2025 the new stadium should be complete and a glowing future could beckon. The club could become an attractive acquisition for one of the sovereign wealth funds yet to buy into the Premier League, which seems to be the only way to join in the party at the top.

On the other hand one could imagine a 12 point deduction leading to relegation and a financial meltdown - I believe some of the large stadium related loans are repayable immediately if the club is relegated. A firesale of players wouldn't be enough to prevent administration. Funds would not be available to complete the stadium, which would sit there on the banks of the Mersey like a gigantic white elephant. A bit like Valencia's part built stadium - started in 2007 on hold since 2009, might be finished in 2025. A phoenix Everton 2024 Limited might easily spin down the leagues to League One, like Derby County, or worse.

My brother thinks the latter secnario is unduly pessimistic. The stadium should be 90% complete by the end of the season and he argues that it will make business sense for someone to complete it. Liverpool City council will want it finished as it kick starts regenration of the only part of Liverpool still pretty much untouched since the end of WWII. Once finished it should be an attractive venue for large events in the north west and has already been selected to host games in the 2028 Euros. On this line of thinking the private equity business 777 partners who want to acquire Everton must have worked through such scenarios and decided the siuation could be managed. My brother's question is not will the stadium be finished but rather who will own it? That doesn't make me feel much better - situations where the club's owner rather than the club owns the stadium have often been unhappy (e.g. Coventry City, Derby County). But at least there would still be a club.

I'll end with the view from my front row seat in Upper Gwladys Street for the Burnley game. For once no obstructed view and even a helpful ledge to use as a shelf for my half time cuppa, making it possible to open my Mars bar wrapper without scalding myself for a change. Nil satis nisi optimum indeed.

* a deliberate mis-wording. I know it's really Financial Fair Play but it's not actually about fairness, is it? The regulations are designed to keep the current elite where they are and all the other clubs in their place

** Henry Winter's match report, Abdelaye Doucoure stunner keeps hosts up, appeared in the Times on 29 May 2023 (online 28 May 2023)

*** Young is, of course 38. He looked every day of it slowly getting up in the first half against Burnley after getting clattered but to be fair to him he made a lot of yards to bundle in his goal in stoppage time, getting between several defenders to arrive at the front post with immaculate timing. His was a rather dispiriting signing when it was made but he's a good professional

**** Premier League calls for Everton to be hit with 12-point deduction - report. The Guardian 25 Oct 2023

***** Ken Dodd was found not guilty of tax fraud by a jury at Liverpool Crown Court in 1989. Part of his defence was that he didn't realise he owed the Inland Revenue money as he lived on the coast. His defence counsel was the famous QC George Carman and the prosecuting counsel was Brian Leveson, later known in connection  with phone hacking and press regulation.  See Did Ken Dodd get away with the crime of the century? Mail Online 9 Nov 2019

Other relevant reading:

Everton FFP hearing: Premier League flopped in front of independent commission claims Simon Jordan. Sky Sports 27 Oct 2023

Everton's financial situation is uncertain - what does this mean for the new stadium? theathletic.com, 3 Nov 2023

Was HS2 always a fraud?

I've been reading an opinion piece in the journal Rail Engineer, titled HS2 offered so much*, lamenting the government decision on HS2.

The main point it makes is that people have been focussing on excessive costs but forgetting the benefits. That is not the case at all. The costs have been escalating and the various decisions to trim back the route have hugely reduced the benefits, a classic double whammy. Changes in business travelling patterns have probably also caused forecast passenger numbers to shrivel, deferring benefits even if growth is assumed.

Amongst the hand wringing it notes that the original 2013 cost estimate was £16.3 bn (in 2011 prices). They describe this as a "basic estimate prepared for business case" and it was for phase 1 to Birmingham. While one never has a detailed design on which to base a business case, I didn't realise that it was acceptable to punt that much public money on a "basic estimate" that wasn't considered at all reliable, but there you go. I suppose in fairness there were Parliamentary votes to approve the full scheme once designed with supposedly reliable cost estimates, but by then the project had political momentum and was uncancellable. And we were preoccupied with Brexit.

The current budget for phase one (which no-one believes) is £40.3bn plus £4.4bn contingency. In 2015 the cost for the full route was £27bn, based on route drawings but no ground investigation. By 2017 it was £37bn based on a finalised route and limited ground and site investigations (eh - even by 2017?). They note the estimate comprised 15,000 lines of data. I don't really care how much detail there was if a lot of it was clearly bunkum. By 2019 it was £44.4bn with the design 80% complete and based on 260,000 lines of rubbish, sorry, data but the DfT was estimating that the total cost would be between £65bn and £88bn (at 2015 prices).

We now know that, before the northern leg was cancelled, the total cost was realistically expected to top £100 bn and that it is being seriously suggested that HS2 Ltd should be investigated for fraud** for keeping quiet about estimates they knew were totally unrealistic. (Remember that the original scheme was for the Y route including the leg up to Leeds, not just one northern leg to Manchester).

The Rail Engineer also notes that there's been a good degree of inflation in the economy since. But that doesn't explain costs going up by a factor of three.

It's rather hard to feel sympathy for those crying into their beer about the cancellation: they've been let down from the start by the HS2 protagonists.

The Rail Engineer article also notes that, after various studies had shown that UK projects are typically 10-30% more expensive than those in Europe, the government commissioned a high-speed rail benchmarking study. It looked at 32 comparator European high-speed rail schemes and was overseen by an expert panel chaired by Sir John Armitt. (Armitt was chief executive of Railtrack and then Network Rail from 2001 to 2007 after which he was chairman of the Olympic Delivery Authority). 

So he ought to know what he's talking about. But I wonder... After finding that HS2 phase 2 was 49% more expensive than a European high-speed rail line with similar characteristics, the panel decided that the factors accounting for this additional cost were:

• strategic objectives requiring greater capacity and more intermediate stations (7%). This could be partly true but the "more intermediate stations" bit can't be. According to Wikipedia there are 20 stations in France that are served by TGV trains - and that's just those beginning with the letter 'A', I couldn't be arsed counting the rest!
• limited capacity of UK rail infrastructure requires dedicated high speed lines into city centres (15%). This is plain wrong. The mainline stations in Paris from which you can catch a TGV train are Paris Gare du Nord,  Gare de l'Est, Gare Montparnasse and Gare de Lyon. That's four of the seven large mainline Paris railway termini. I haven't checked other French cities but there's a TGV station at Part-Dieu in the main business area of Lyon, so go figure.
• fragmented UK construction industry and continuity of work (12%). I can believe this, it applies to nuclear power stations in spades
• Onerous design requirements (5%). That's the speed then is it? I simply refuse to believe it's only 5% and economist Bridget Rosewell, who was a commissioner at the National Infrastructure Commission, is with me on that***
• scope development compounded by limited experience of delivering high-speed rail in UK (10%). In other words, we don't know what we're doing while we're gold plating it.

This analysis seems to me to be missing the point. We know our projects tend to cost more than those of similar countries, though theirs are also subject to large overruns on time and cost (see Berlin airport for example). In April the High Speed Rail Alliance noted that American sources were lamenting the fact that the New York Second Avenue subway was costing 8 to 12 times more than the "composite baseline case"  compiled from data from several European countries. Factors identified included a lot of bespoke design. But on the other hand the Americans use a lot less tunnels than the Europeans (the Brits are using even more on HS2).

The real question is why, even though we know our projects cost more, do our projects cost a lot more than we think they are going to? Especially when we completed HS1 less than 10 years ago.

It seems it's because they did know (or at least strongly suspected) that was going to be the case but thought they'd never get the project approved if they fessed up.

Which is not new of course. It's exactly what the builder of some of New York's earliest transit infrastructure did. Get the project approved, start building it, then they won't dare to cancel it. Well Sunak just called your bluff chums.

And while I thought it was ridiculous to use the term 'fraud' when I first read it, now I'm beginning to wonder. The Sunday Times investigation** spoke to a number of whistleblower/malcontents who had worked at HS2, one of whom has been contacted by HS2's fraud and ethics team. The article went in some detail through the cost evolution, with numbers which are difficult to relate in detail to those given in the Rail Engineer article, though the general picture is even more stark. The main thrust of the article is that there were people working in the HS2 team who had felt for a long time - and sometimes popped their head up and said - that the costs were totally unrealistic.

Of course that's what happens in big projects that go off track. Management will always initially say that the cost estimate remains valid and press their team to find ways of finding savings. If you don't do that the steadily increasing numbers just become self-fulfilling prophesies and all discipline about containing the cost is lost. It's a game I played many times myself, with more success on some occasions than others, though my project totals were typically several millions rather than tens of billions.

What I found interesting in the article was that Chris Grayling, on appointment as SoS for Transport in 2016, had grave misgivings about the project. He called it a "crackpot scheme" according to a DfT source, while backing it publicly. Later that year a confidential report by Paul Mansell, a Treasury adviser, estimated that it was "highly likely" the scheme would cost more than £80 bn against the then budget of £55.7bn. But when the final vote to approve construction of phase one was taken in February 2017 there was no mention of that report and Grayling said it was "on track for delivery". The bill was passed with big majorities in the Commons and Lords. The DfT source said Grayling was unaware of the Treasury report at that time. I wonder if the chancellor, Philip Hammond, was aware of it?

By summer 2017 Michael Byng, a consultant who devised the method used by Network Rail to cost its projects, calculated that the overall cost of HS2 would be £104 bn. That may have been the first realistic estimate. It was nearly double the then official figure and 15 times the cost of the most recent high-speed TGV line in France (They have the benefits of much replication and an infrastructure of experienced personnel and suppliers as a result. But you wouldn't expect that to explain a factor of more than 2 or 3 at the most).

By late 2018 Grayling had appointed a new HS2 chairman, Alan Cook and had asked him to review the costs. The next month Grayling told Cook that, if the scheme couldn't be delivered for £55.7 bn "I think we will have a serious discussion about scrapping the project". One might have expected that would lead to HS2 closing ranks and standing behind the budget. But no, In June 2019 Cook sent a first draft of his report to Grayling. It suggested the project was billions over budget and years behind schedule.

This was not reflected in submissions to Parliament. In July 2019 the minister for transport, Nusrat Ghani, answered questions in a Westminster Hall debate on HS2 before the Commons vote on the bill to approve the Birmingham to Crewe phase two leg. She said "I stand here to state confidently that the budget is £55.7 bn and the timetable is 2026 and 2033". She repeated her assurances five days later during the third reading debate. But a freedom of information request later revealed Ghani had been told three months earlier that the project would breach its budget. In which case Ghani, now minister of state for industry, would appear to have misled Parliament.

By August 2018 Cook's final report revealed that the cost was now expected to be £88 bn, very close to Treasury expert Mansell's estimate. Even that number proved optimistic.

One wonders if the ministers of the day actually knew the estimates were unrealistic before the Commons vote and sent HS2 away to confirm the number, get the vote through and then come back with their request for more money. In that case they could hardly place all the blame on HS2 Ltd and were complicit in the "fraud". More likely they'd be able to hide behind the fact that costs on big projects are always under review and the "official" cost estimate hadn't been changed. Nevertheless this seems a matter ripe for an enquiry to me.

It's all so stupid. we could have built HS2 like HS1 and had a prefectly acceptable railway, bringing the overwhelming majority of the benefits. The Sunday Times article points the finger, as I have***, at Lord Adonis, who wanted the railway to be "super fast", meaning it had to be as level and straight as possible, constraining choices on the route and adding cost in land purchase, construction methods and materials. 

I accept that if we had gone for an HS1 spec the project would still have cost more than the original estimate, everything has gone that way. But it would be much more likely to have been completed in full, at an affordable cost and on a reasonable timescale. Basically it could have worked.

*published 18 October 2023, www.railengineer.co.uk

** We were instructed to lie about the true cost of HS2. Sunday Times Insight investigation, 22 October 2023. 

*** see Who to blame for HS2 20 October 2023

The cost of the New York subway project and the general lament about costs of projects in the USA can be found at https://www.hsrail.org/blog/why-transit-projects-cost-more-in-the-u-s-than-almost-anywhere-else-and-what-we-can-do-about-it/#:~:text=In%20the%20case%20of%20New,high%20even%20by%20U.S.%20standards.

Who to blame for HS2

Rishi Sunak's decision to cancel the northern, Birmingham to Manchester, leg of HS2 was one of the least surprising political announcements of recent times. We all knew it was coming because his plan to announce it at the party conference in Manchester along with a bunch of new and recycled alternative projects in the north was blown by, yet again, a Downing Street aide carrying unconcealed documents (d'oh!). But also because it's quite clear that none of the cost estimates can, even now, be considered remotely reliable. 

I haven't commented about HS2 since my post "Take the H out of HS2 now" (16 September 2019). That suggestion was prompted by the rather cursory review commissioned by Boris Johnson before the decision to proceed. In it I posited that the reason the costs were out of control was that we were building a project with technology we didn't have when we started. The one time Chief Engineer and later Technical Director of HS2, Andrew McNaughton, told MPs in 2012: 

"We learnt very strongly from people we respect, like Guillame Pepy in France [Pepy was boss of the French state owned rail company SNCF] that they had wished they had not designed to the limit of the day because the technology continues to advance"

In other words we were trying not to copy other countries but leapfrog them by being at what I often heard referred to in discussions of technology development projects as the "bleeding edge", a word play on the phrase "leading edge" much used by people advocating caution about unproven technology.

So they designed HS2 for sppeds of up to 400km/h (260mph). In comparison the French trains run at 320km/h, just shy of 200mph, 

I've now come to the view that McNaughton and his colleagues, while absolutely culpable for the fiasco, are not actually at most fault. Who is? It's a long list:

Gordon Brown, David Cameron,Theresa May and Boris Johnson

Alistair Darling, George Osborne and Philip Hammond.

Geoff Hoon, Andrew Adonis, Philip Hammond (again), Justine Greening, Patrick McLoughlin and Chris Grayling.

You will have guessed that these are the prime ministers, chancellors and secretaries of state for transport from when HS2 was first given the go ahead in 2009 up to the quick and dirty review sanctioned by Boris Johnson in 2019. The people who have followed in those posts aren't exactly innocent, but the project had gone too far by then to be sensibly descoped.

Why are they all to blame? Simply because, having conceived a vanity project which could have made sense, they blessed the vision for HS2 and left the railway nerds to get on with it. I would place most blame at the feet of the chancellors as they are supposed to ensure value for money and keep the flights of fancy of PMs and departmental colleagues within sensible bounds.

I've read that Gordon Brown first kick-started the HS2 project because he was spooked by the Tories stealing a march as David Cameron and George Osborne were advocating it. The project then got the go ahead after a cursory 10 minute discussion at Brown's cabinet.

A grandiose vision having been embraced by the PM and authorised by the cabinet, the transport secretaries would be unlikely to pipe up "shouldn't we build something we know will work at a lower cost?"  So Geoff Hoon (known as "Buff" to his colleagues - Buff Hoon, geddit?) didn't need to bother himself about the practicalities as the concept was already blessed on high. And he was only around while they prepared the scheme for formal sanction. By then Andrew Adonis had taken over as SoS.  Adonis championed the project then and has continued to do so ever since. Indeed as recently as June Adonis placed the blame for the time and cost overruns on all of his successors:

"Since I launched HS2 13 years ago, there have been six prime ministers, seven chancellors and eight transport secretaries. Almost every one of these has caused some delay in HS2 by reviewing, amending or otherwise interfering with the scheme."

So he's saying if you'd stuck with what I started it would all have worked out fine. Sorry, Andrew, you can't get off that easily. They had to keep looking at it because you got a risky project approved at an unrealistic cost. Do you really think if none of them had made any changes it would be on time and cost? I blame Adonis as much as anybody because he gave the railway nuts free rein. And they took it - it's no surprise a railway nut would want to be known for building the most futuristic railway in the world, is it?

There were early opportunities to stop the madness. The Commons Public Accounts Committee was given evidence in March 2012 that HS1 had been expensive costing £5.8bn, £84m per mile. At that time the cost of HS2 per mile was estimated to be another 38% higher, £116m per mile. Even then HS2 was expected to be four times as expensive per mile than high speed projects in France. But then HS1 had cost quite a bit more than a French railway too. (Note: you will see different numbers for the costs of HS1 and HS2 quoted in the money value of different years, unhelpfully not telling you which year). 

The summary of the PAC's report in July 2012 focussed on the fact that the forecast for passenger numbers had been "inaccurate and wildly optimistic" leading to the project not being self funding as was intended. Now forecasting passenger numbers is notoriously finger in the air stuff so I might extend my blame to the committee for not emphasising the cost issues, though they did comment that "This isn’t the first time that over-optimistic planning and insufficiently robust testing of planning assumptions has got the Department into trouble."  and " The Department must revisit its assumptions on HS2 and develop a full understanding of the benefits and costs of high speed travel compared to the alternatives." It also referred to "costly mistakes".

When that report was published Justine Greening was the SoS for Transport, so she could have called for a review. But within 2 months the changes were rung again and Patrick McLaughlin took over. There were a lot of changes at Transport, a fact which has some bearing on the fiasco I suspect, but McLaughlin was there for nearly four years and his successor Grayling for three so they must carry a lot of the can.

I saw McLaughlin address a railway industry event while he was SoS. He struck me as an amiable  duffer, who had been a miner before becoming MP for Derbyshire constituencies. He obviously liked railways. And he also seemed way out of his depth on anything technical or complex.

So chances were missed to set the project on a sounder footing before it was too late.  Given that McLaughlin wouldn't have said boo to any kind of goose I'm going to have to point the finger primarily at Adonis for putting the nerds in charge and Osborne for not getting a grip.

But why is it costing so much? I'm sure it's because building a railway for extreme speed is highly onerous. High speeds require a more precise track alignment with gentler curves and hammer the track once in operation. More costly materials have to be used for the trains and the track.

You may have read that the main reason that the HS2 line to Birmingham is costing so much is because of the tunnels they had to add to placate the Tory MPs with seats along the route in the leafy Chilterns. While it has undoubtedly added cost, I don't really buy that.  The surviving leg of HS2, assuming the section to Euston gets built, will have 65 miles of tunnels on its 140 mile route. That's nearly half. With a lot of cuttings as well, passengers will only see the countryide for 9 minutes of the 49 minute journey.

 But wait: HS1 was built pretty much to time (11 years) and cost (about £6bn at the time). HS1 runs at 185 mph - nearly as fast as the French high speed trains. It has 37 miles of tunnels on its 68 mile route. That's more than half. And yet HS2 was already by 2012 expected to cost nearly 40% more per mile than HS1 (and nearly four times as much as an equivalent French railway running through open country). So can it be the tunnels? 

You won't be surprised to hear that the faster a train goes the more careful you have to be with the tunnel design and clearances. "You don't want all the passengers getting off with burst and bleeding eardrums" it was patiently explained to me when I worked for a railway technology company and naively asked why you couldn't run much faster trains through existing tunnels. So I suspect the finger is pointed at the tunnels by the people who want to hide the fact that, to paraphrase another saying, "it's the speed, stupid".

Of course it is possible to build a railway to run at 260 mph. While we've been pratting about with HS2 the Chinese have conceived, designed and built the Fuxing (I'm not making that up - it means rejuvenation) railway between Beijing and Shanghai and also between Beijing, Guangzhou, Shenzen and Hong Kong. We started work on the case for HS2 in 2009.  China started development of its high speed trains in 2012 and they've been in service since 2017, with a design speed of 400km/h and a normal service speed of 350km/h. But on test it has achieved 420km/h (260 mph). But then they don't need to worry about planning, newts, or Tory voters in the shires. And it's over 2000km from Beijing to Shenzen so the speed makes more sense, there's a genuinely beneficial time saving on the journey.

In contrast I've seen it suggested that no sooner have HS2 trains reached their its top speed after pulling out of Old Oak Common heading for Birmingham they will have to start slowing down. In a small country with cities quite close together there's just no need for ultra high speed. 

In any case I've always thought the project should have been designed primarily to provide the extra capacity needed since the large expansion of demand following rail privatisation in 1996. Simply having a direct route from London to Birmingham with only one stop at Old Oak Common and then on to Manchester without sharing the track with slower moving trains would provide quicker journeys anyway so ultra high speed wasn't essential, though I've always doubted the supposed economic benefit of shaving off a few minutes travel time anyway. 

However I do accept one part of Sunak's speech - travelling patterns have probably changed enough to affect the rationale for the project. Post covid business travel to and from London is much lower and so as well as the costs perpetually increasing the benefits have shrunk. The capacity argument is therefore weaker but looking ahead to a decarbonised infrastructure I think it's still valid, the benefits will just be delayed.

I'm far from the only one to point out that the design basis was flawed. Economist Bridget Rosewell has been Commissioner of the National Infrastructure Commission, the independent agency established in 2015, since 2020. The Commission is charged with undertaking a national infrastructure assessment each parliament, making recommendations and monitoring the government's progress on infrastructure.  Rosewell told the House of Lords economic affairs committee in 2019 that she had never understood why HS2 was looking to run trains at 360km/h. 

"The route alignment chosen for HS2 was designed to allow for 400km/hr trains, with 360 or 320 km/hr in tunnels. Speed isn’t irrelevant, I don’t want to say it’s just about capacity and it’s not about speed, but I’ve never understood the need for very high speed,” Rosewell said then, adding “I’ve said this right at the very beginning back in 2008/09. I don’t see why we are privileging at 400km/h for the cost that that would imply.”

Rosewell added that designing the line for 400km/h constrained engineers' ability to "sensibly" plan the route alignment. "That was the top priority [to design for 400km/h] and then everything filled in after that" she said. "It was a mistake".

High speed trains in France and Japan operate at 320km/h. Rosewell added that the 360 km/h speed limit would produce a time saving of only two or three minutes compared with services running at 320km/h. "...it seems implausible that we could ever justify that" she said, " I see no reason to go faster than the French TGVs, I think it's silly".

There are some important cost implications of running at over 320km/h. Above that speed conventional ballasted track cannot be used. The HS2 rails are being built on concrete slabs and the rolling stock was specified as recently as 2021 for speeds up to 360 km/h (225mph). At 320 km/h (200mph) cheaper ballasted track can be used. Proponents of slabtrack argue that ballasted track systems are noisy in use, expensive to maintain and pose safety risks with individual ballast particles liable to be dislodged by the turbulent air caused by passing high speed trains. But both systems are in use on modern high speed railways around the world. The Germans, Dutch and Japanese tend to use slabtrack while the French and Spanish tend to use ballast. (Significantly the German Inter City Express goes 20mph faster than the French TGV). 

"If they did do ballast to start with it would not be a disaster, you would still get the benefits, But it comes down to what can be afforded" said Prof William Powrie of Southampton University.

But the design choices are, of course, inter-linked. A high proportion of the first phase of HS2 is in tunnels. Slabtrack systems require a shallower base which means the tunnels can be smaller in internal diameter. According to Rail Engineer slabtrack is twice the cost of ballasted track to install, though it does have advantages in use, maintaining better track geometry. After all, you don't want the trains falling between the tracks going at 200mph, as a much more slowly moving train did on a section of rail in the tunnel near to Liverpool Lime Street that had been overlooked in the monitoring programme about 25 years ago.

But by the time grown ups like Rosewell became involved it was too late to make major changes without wasting even more time and money.

So what should we have done and what should Rishi Sunak have decided to do? Not start from here, of course but given how we have long since started how much has been spent and how much is committed? It's not easy to find definitive figures so I do sympathise with those who say the HS2 costs, despite lots of published information, remain opaque, though a figure of £15bn was published on gov.uk in March 2022 and spend was running then at over £5bn a year so it's clearly going to be more than £20bn. That figure may not include contractual committments (e.g for trains, tunnelling machines and other equipment ordered), so we could guess £25bn to £30bn. The HS2 website claims £23 bn has been "contracted into the supply chain"* without saying how much has been spent and how much there is to go. I don't know what cancellation costs there are, including making sites safe and potentially reusable. 

What were the options?

Cancel it, get nothing for the £25bn, look very stupid and damage Britain's cedibility (such as it is).
Continue with the full Euston to Manchester route and accept that the cost could easily be £100bn but at least get something useful, even if not till the mid 2030s or even later.

Scrap the Birmingham to Manchester leg to save several tens of billions of pounds but leaving a project which wouldn't remotely produce the benefits originally projected, which were down to £1.30 for every £ spent by the 2019 review (and that still included the eastern leg to Leeds). Some argued that this would mean that the whole project rationale would fall anyway, leading to cancellation of the whole project anyway after parliamentary scrutiny. (Though people saying that don't understand the concept of sunk costs).

Scrap also the Old Oak Common to Euston section as well eaving a futuristic railway running between Birmingham and a suburb of north London few had previously heard of, 7 miles from the city centre. 

Of these options I would, at this stage and despite all my criticism of the project, have continued it to Manchester, though I accept that many business leaders were always against HS2, saying that the money would be better spent on other infrastructure projects. Sunak's decision, provided a decent number of those projects get implemented, makes a degree of sense. Provided those projects are for real, which doesn't seem to be the case for some of them at least.

Interestingly I've read that chancellor Jeremy Hunt would also have continued with the route to Manchester.

What I certainly wouldn't do is sell the land for the painstakingly put together route between Birmingham and Manchester, closing off the option of a new railway at a future date, whether it be high speed, ultra high speed or whatever. That seems to me to be an act of political vandalism, especially if it crystallises a loss for the taxpayer of £100m, as reported. Though one which Labour might actually be grateful for, as they wouldn't have to consider whether to reinstate that part of HS2 if it wins the election.

What is most frustrating is that it didn't need to be like this. If we'd just built it like HS1 we'd be in a better place. Had we started construction of HS2 in the north as Alistair Osborne said in the Times (using 20:20 hindsight admittedly) we'd probably have or be close to having an operational railway over part of the route by now. We might have had a fast railway linking Birmingham and Manchester and Birmingham and Leeds. As I've always thought the problem with building high speed links to London is that it doesn't really help the north, it just encourages more people to commute to London, this could have been very beneficial for the north. However, I don't think that was ever realistically going to happen. 

But it's a lesson for the future perhaps. Build things that you know are going to work. And start at the place you are supposed to be benefiting.

One final thought. I have in recent years longed for the time when a government would appoint some kind of royal commission in an attempt to depoliticise an issue and gain cross party concensus. What to do about social care is the obvious current example. And yet... on the issue of HS 2 there has been, until Sunak's speech, almost total concensus between the Conservatives, Labour and the LibDems. Just because they all back it doesn't mean that they're right or that they've understood what it actually is that they are backing.

* HS2 also say that 97% of the supply chain is made up of UK businesses. Whether they measure that by value or number of companies they don't say. The trains are indeed being built in Britain - by a Hitachi - Alstom joint venture. This is typical of the dissembling we see these days. Just as with our "world lead in wind turbines" what we are doing is installing technology from other countries, which doesn't really give us any kind of commercial or technological lead.

Sources include: 

Bridget Rosewell's comments to the House of Lords and William Powrie's comments are covered in the New Civil Engineer article "Pressure mounts for HS2 to reduce speed" 22 Feb 2019 

Articles in The Times over just two days in the run up to Sunak's announcement included:

Rishi Sunak Aide called HS2 "greatest mistake in 50 years" Oliver Wright, Stephen Swinford, 27 Sept 2023. The aide was Andrew Gilligan and he said HS2 was Britain's greatest infrastructure mistake in half a century in 2019. Gilligan has a chequered history: Telegraph newspapers twice had to pay out damages in 2016 and 2018 for defamation cases arising from Gilligan's articles and in 2019 the Sunday Times had to issue a correction about a Gilligan article rued to be "misleading". Still he was right on HS2.

Too late to stop HS2's runaway costs, Alistair Osborne The Times 26 Sept 2023. Among other things this article noted that construction of HS2 should have started in the north. The "Northern Powerhouse" cross pennine rail link requires a chunk of HS2 to be built anyway. But of course, the trains don't need to go at 260mph, so it doesn't really need to be quite like HS2. But the point is well made: if construction of HS2 had started in the north 

How HS2's fate will be decided in 2025, Robert Lea, The Times 27 September 2023. This article discusses the options available at Easter 2025 when the two boring machines which would create the 7 miles of tunnel from Old Oak Common to Euston. If it's decided to terminate at Old Oak Common the six platforms designed for the interchange wouldn't really work as a terminus (11 were planned for Euston but recent announcements imply fewer). Unless of course HS2 only runs from Birmingham in which case there might be fewer trains and passengers (though they'll be as long, I presume). Either way more work would be needed at Old Oak Common so saving the Euston leg would still bring costs and maybe delays.

Disgraceful HS2 should have been axed years ago. The Times 26 Sept 2023. Noting that there are fears that the project finances are "far worse than anyone knows" the Times reported Lord Hague saying “It should have been cancelled a few years ago when it was clear that the whole thing was out of control, that the costs are out of control, they wouldn’t be able to ever go to Leeds. I would have cancelled it then. Now you’ve got this classic problem. If you’re halfway though something and it’s been terribly badly managed — really a national disgrace as a project — do you say okay, I’m stopping this, or do you say actually now we’re halfway through we have to at least complete and make sense of the parts that we can still do.” And that Sunak was “alarmed” at the increasing costs amid claims that project executives have acted like “kids with the golden credit card”

Other sources:

How did HS2 become a £100bn money pit? The Times 29 January 2023

HS2 6-monthly report to Parliament, March 2022. gov.uk 16 March 2022

High Speed 1 and St Pancras Station. Institution of Civil Engineers website. Gives HS1 length 68 miles including 37 miles of tunnels. Cost £11bn (£14bn "today" - without saying when "today" is). Journey time to Paris cut from 2hr 56min to 2hrs 15min, a saving of 41 minutes. HS1 took 11 years to build (Wikipedia)

Committee of Public Accounts - The completion and sale of HS1. Evidence by Andrew Bodman, https://publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm201213/cmselect/cmpubacc/464/464we05.htm

(Public Accounts) Committee publishes report on the completion and sale of HS1, https://committees.parliament.uk/committee/127/public-accounts-committee/news/179224/committee-publishes-report-on-the-completion-and-sale-of-high-speed-1/

Why HS2 will be built in full - eventually. Andrew Adonis, Prospect Magazine 7 June 2023

Rail Engineer. Slab Track for HS2, 2 September 2020. https://www.railengineer.co.uk/slab-track-for-hs2/

Photo from HS2 website