You may have heard Chancellor Rachel Reeves saying the other day that “the world has changed” and more cuts are coming on top of the cuts she’s announced already. But if only the world had changed a little bit more than it has. If only we lived in a world where we weren’t still spending millions of pounds on the wrong things. I’ll give you an example.

It began in 2016 when the Scottish Government announced they would be spending £200million on the rail services between the central belt and Aberdeen. The money would be spent, they said, on a number of measures including upgrading signals and putting in additional loops to allow freight trains to pass, with the aim of making the journey quicker. Twenty minutes quicker to be precise.

The first question to ask – and I remember asking it at the time – is: why? I know that journey from the central belt very well and have taken the train between Aberdeen and Glasgow Queen Street hundreds of times and on the whole it’s pretty good: frequent, reliable and fast, about 2 hours 40 minutes on average. I accept there may be some people who urgently need to get to, or away from, Aberdeen in 2 hours 20 minutes instead, but it’s hard to believe that shaving 20 minutes off the time is going to make much of a difference to anyone really.

But even if we accept that making the journey marginally faster is a good aim, the next question is how much it’ll cost to do it and whether we could be spending the money on something better instead. We know what happened to HS2. We were told it would cut journey........

© Herald Scotland