It’s a subject I have written about before and I know I can therefore be accused of banging on.

I also know it is dangerous to compare different types of expenditure in order to establish where money should be allocated. 

Of course a sick baby is more important than, say, a new roundabout.

But sadly an economy cannot be run on that basis. Money does have to be spent on stuff that doesn’t naturally attract instant voter approval or even much interest.

But having conducted my own (by no means scientific) poll, I have not encountered one person who thinks that, given the current parlous state of our Health Service and the strains on our education system, it is possible to justify the plans for HS2.

I will nail straight away the suggestion that I am a NIMBY. The route will not affect me personally, even though it will blight the county I live in and adversely affect many people I know.

Most right-minded people will reluctantly eventually accept the need for the greater good to win out against vested interests some of the time.

Otherwise we would have no transport infrastructure at all, or services of any kind.

The projected cost of the London to Birmingham section has recently increased from 16 to 22 billion, based on current values.

That is a whopping 37.5 per cent increase before work has really started and we all know what that means for the likely final cost.

As I write this article there have been items on the news about Boris Johnson urging the cabinet to inject £5 billion into the NHS. His suggestion may, as some have alleged, have been prompted by a desire not to ease Jeremy Corbyn’s passage into power by public disquiet about health funding at a time when all the news programmes have shown distressing scenes of patients being held in ambulances outside hospitals because understaffed and underfunded hospitals cannot cope with the predictable demands of winter illnesses.

Will, or would, HS2 have the beneficial effect on the future of the UK that its proponents promise?

I have no idea to be honest. But I do know that hospitals and schools would be much more able to deliver the service we desperately need if the same amount of money were made available from the cancellation of HS2, especially after the collapse of preferred contractor Carillion.