Here we go again: the Government might scrap another bit of the HS2 in the North. The high-speed rail project was heralded as an integral part of the Northern Powerhouse strategy (remember that?), aimed at bridging the North-South divide and rebalancing the economy.

When, in 2014, the then chancellor George Osborne announced the plan, he boldly claimed that once connected by a modern transport system ‘northern cities could take on the world'. Nine years later, so many parts of the initial HS2 line have been chopped that there's basically nothing left of it in the North. Meanwhile, the Northern Powerhouse Rail (NPR) project (which should have provided a much-needed East-West connection across the North, and should have developed in tandem with HS2) has been watered down to a simple upgrade of the existing Transpennine route, quietly disappearing from the headlines.