We decry cuts, but spare the Philip Hammonds who fritter cash

Against prestige projects like aircraft carriers, the Olympics or high-speed rail, the poor taxpayer hardly gets a look-in
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Anyone opposing the glamorous high-speed rail project of the transport secretary, Philip Hammond, is a nimby. Or so he says. Critics of his HS2 line are Aylesbury luddites, Brackley reactionaries, Great Missenden moanies. Macho ministers do big projects, like high-speed trains, aircraft carriers and turbine parks. Those who oppose them are wimps. To Hammond it is inconceivable that they might be concerned at the money.

Hammond asked on Monday that his HS2 line through the Midlands, costing £34bn or perhaps double, should not be "nickel and dimed" by pathetic considerations of cash. Such considerations he leaves to the pygmies at the Treasury. It is well known that his advisory group, which has long opposed HS2 as uneconomic, recently slashed the flimsy payback total from £67bn to an improbable £44bn, with no hope of private finance. He therefore had to flail on about the need "to keep Britain apace" with foreign competitors and be "strategic". The line would close the north-south gap by enabling southern businessmen to hurry north (and presumably not the reverse). He even came up with a classic Blairite cliche, the double negative: "We cannot afford not to invest in our future."

The pros and cons of HS2 are one thing. What is miserable is the way this and similar debates are conducted at a time of deep cuts in the public sector. Hammond lobbied the Treasury for his project on the grounds that long-term investment should not be slashed during recession. He saved both HS2 and the £16bn London Crossrail, and is slashing local transport subsidies instead. The full HS2 has been estimated to cost every family in Britain £1,000, in addition to higher fares to meet cuts elsewhere on the transport network. Since Crossrail and high-speed trains primarily benefit richer travellers, this is highly regressive public investment.

Yet Hammond's local critics also seem unstressed about cost. To them HS2, notably in the Chilterns, is an attack on areas of outstanding natural beauty. It would destroy countryside, ruin villages, make a noise and exacerbate anxiety and depression among sensitive locals. They point out that high-speed trains are relatively pointless in England because distances between stops are too short to make much difference to journey times. To them HS2 is just another giant scheme from a minister seeking a cosy consultancy when he leaves office.

All this is true, but nobody ever considers it the done thing to raise the taxpayer question. Whatever is spent is worth it, and paying for it is the great undebated. This remains true even when balance and fairness in budgetary discipline are surely critical if cuts are to fall equitably. All we hear in the distance is the wailing and scratching of the chancellor of the exchequer, left alone to assess priorities, calculate costs and benefits, and, when he is beaten, try to find some money from somewhere. When, before the election, George Osborne told his children that daddy was about to be the most unpopular man in Britain, he never spoke a truer word.

As far as I am concerned, Osborne is a grownup politician who can take the heat. But when public comment is 99% for more spending and barely 1% on the other side, it is hard to believe political economy is well served. The 99% hysteria is relentless, including from the spenders within the coalition. Criticise Fox's aircraft carriers and you are leaving Britain – and now Libyans – "unprotected in the world". Criticise billions for Crossrail and "Why do you want to see London lose out to Europe?". Criticise more billions on the London Olympics and you will be "wanting the games to fail". Any fool can sound caring and generous with other people's money.

It may well be that Andrew Lansley's attempt to remove one of the many tiers of NHS administration to push spending to the front line is careless and unplanned. But I can't see that an attempt to recoup the £5bn the NHS admitted it added to its overheads in recent years is a howling outrage that means corpses in the street. As Osborne said this week, in the Guardian, it is ludicrous to have an opposition that makes no mention of the £14bn of cuts it proposed a year ago (against the coalition's £16bn), nor suggests which of Osborne's cuts it intends to make itself.

Spending public money always has the best tunes, and saving the worst. Even to suggest that the currently mooted war in north Africa might be unaffordable is dismissed as heartless talk. To query the prestige projects to which David Cameron has proved as susceptible as Blair and Brown is to fail to see the bigger picture. Yet I notice that interviewers never put the "taxpayer question". They invariably ask: "When will the minister do more, spend more, intervene more?" They never ask why is he not cutting deeper, and perhaps saving more of the nation's resources and taxpayers' money. They are hard-wired to high spending.

Minor pressure groups such as the Taxpayers' Alliance, which at least challenges HS2 on grounds of cost, can deploy only peashooters against the big spending battalions. The latter include the public sector unions and private suppliers to government, who since privatisation have become the most effective lobbyists for high spending. When firms such as Capita and Serco regally entertain civil servants, they know what they are about.

Democracy has always been bad at delayed gratification. The story of boom and bust over the course of the 20th century is grimly familiar: the Geddes axe of 1921, the Snowden cuts of 1931, Lord Howe's cuts in 1979, all led to political crisis, pleading, shouting and usually resignation. Today's cuts debate is equally immature. No one cried "Spend less money" in 2005-8, when Gordon Brown was borrowing and spending like crazy, and Blair himself admitted that "Labour was insufficiently vigorous in limiting or eliminating the potential structural deficit". Now the chickens are home to roost, everyone just cries for more.

Labour's tactic is merely to suggest it has no cuts in mind, and is a caring custodian of the nation's generosity. Ed Miliband and Ed Balls imply that this is the duty of opposition. Surely the duty of opposition is to be plausible, even if not responsible. I carry no can for the Treasury, but politics is not improved when the entire political community, media included, tries only to see how many hits it can score in opposing action to correct what was commonly agreed to be a budgetary crisis. I was recently in Greece, where the quality of debate was much the same, with dreadful consequences. We do not want that here.

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