MORNING SERIAL

IF you are in Aberystwyth on the west coast and want to get to your nation’s capital of Cardiff in the south, you have to get a train across the whole country, eastward into England to Shrewsbury, then change to go south to Cardiff. This is about four and a half hours for a journey you can drive in under three.

It is almost like the entirety of Wales’ main rail infrastructure was originally built to export the country’s natural resources, as opposed to connecting its people to each other.

Wales’ rail woes are not a problem in isolation; they compound issues of poverty. How do you increase living standards when your infrastructure is so poor? Not only does it affect productivity in the indigent areas themselves, but the lack of connectivity to the more affluent areas of Wales means that young people have to leave the communities they grew up in to find work. This brain drain only compounds the issues in the neighbourhoods they leave.

Rather than assessing the rail needs of Wales and funding them appropriately, defining HS2 as a Wales and England project has clearly been seen as a useful cost-saving exercise for the UK government’s pet project. There is no way a person can look at that project and think it is of any meaningful benefit for Wales. Simply arguing that people in the north of Wales will now be able to get to London slightly faster shows no understanding of the lived realities and challenges facing rail-users in Wales. This is to say nothing of the total hypocrisy of saying that Wales benefits from HS2 but Scotland doesn’t, when the UK government’s own analysis states:

■ Services to Glasgow and Edinburgh will be around an hour faster than now via HS2 and the West Coast Main Line.

■ Services to Edinburgh, Dundee and Aberdeen will be up to twenty-five minutes faster than now because of upgrades to the East Coast Main Line.

But Scotland will get its fair share of this once-in-a-century funding and Wales will miss out.

> Independent Nation by Will Hayward is published by Biteback Publishing at £15 hardback and £9.99 ebook, https://www. bitebackpublishing.com/books/ independent-nation

CONTINUES TOMORROW