HS2 was conceived at a cost of £37.5 billion and originally supposed to link London, Birmingham, Manchester and Leeds. It will now connect only two stations outside London and Birmingham at a projected cost of more than £100 billion, and perhaps won’t even be ‘high speed’. To discuss what this failure tells us about Britain’s capacity to build things and the consequences for our everyday lives, James is joined by Gill Plimmer, the FT's infrastructure correspondent, and Matthew Lawrence, director of Common Wealth. They discuss the unique features of the UK’s ‘outsourcing state’, beset by bloated projects weighed down by the increasing costs of private capital, and the long, corrosive impact of the failure of David Cameron’s government to invest in infrastructure when borrowing was cheap.

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