There is something profoundly poetic about the fact that the only successful portion of the United Kingdom’s multi-billion-pound High Speed 2 project is a ten-mile hole in the ground where no one can see it. Recently, the press was invited to marvel at the ‘spectacular’ tunnels beneath the Chilterns, seventy meters down, hidden away like a shameful family secret behind a ‘disguised’ ventilation shaft. It is a masterpiece of engineering, we are told. A glimmer of hope. In reality, it is a ten-mile concrete colonoscopy performed on a corpse, a pristine architectural achievement that serves no purpose other than to remind us that Britain is excellent at digging its own grave with high-precision boring machines.

Let’s analyze the ‘engineering marvel’ narrative that the PR ghouls are so desperate to push. They want us to coo over the gleaming concrete segments and the sheer scale of the operation. It is, by all accounts, a very nice tunnel. It is smooth, it is circular, and it is currently occupied by absolutely nothing. It is a high-tech void. To celebrate the completion of these tunnels as a ‘glimmer of hope’ is like celebrating a man who has managed to build a state-of-the-art garage while his house is being repossessed and his car has been sold for parts. The project is a staggering display of bureaucratic necrophilia, where the only thing left to worship is the hollowed-out shell of an ambition that died somewhere around the third budget revision.

The location of these tunnels is the most telling detail of all. They are buried beneath the Chilterns, an ‘Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty,’ which is shorthand for ‘an area where the people are far too wealthy to be forced to look at a train.’ These tunnels exist because the landed gentry and the NIMBY elite demanded that if the proles were going to be whisked toward Birmingham at high speed, they should at least have the decency to do it in the dark. The taxpayer has spent billions of pounds to ensure that the view of some damp hills remains unblemished by the sight of progress. It is a subterranean bribe, a ten-mile ‘hush’ paid for by a public that can barely afford a bus ticket. The engineering isn’t the triumph here; the triumph is the sheer, unadulterated selfishness of the British class system, which has successfully buried a national infrastructure project to avoid minor aesthetic irritation.

Historically, the Victorians built railways to move the world. They cut through mountains and bridged valleys with a reckless, cigar-chomping confidence that didn’t stop to ask if the local lord’s pheasant-shooting range was being disturbed. Today, we are incapable of building a bike lane without three years of ‘stakeholder engagement’ and an environmental impact study on the psychological well-being of local moss. We have traded the grit of Brunel for the grease of consultants. HS2 has become a parasitic entity that exists only to feed the careers of project managers and the bank accounts of construction conglomerates. The fact that we are now being asked to applaud a hole in the ground is an admission of total national bankruptcy—not just financial, but intellectual.

The political class, of course, is hovering around this concrete tube like flies on a carcass. The Right will claim this shows their commitment to ‘leveling up,’ despite having systematically decapitated the project until it became a ‘High Speed’ line that doesn’t actually go to the North. The Left will eventually inherit this hole and find a way to make it even more expensive while apologizing for its carbon footprint. Both sides are equally useless, presiding over a nation that can no longer conceptualize the future, only manage the decline. They offer us ‘spectacular’ tunnels as if we should be grateful for the emptiness.

What we are witnessing is the fetishization of the process over the result. We are told to admire the boring machines—Florence and Cecilia—as if they were heroic figures, rather than expensive tools being used to construct a monument to inefficiency. We are being conditioned to accept that ‘success’ is no longer a functioning railway, but merely the act of not failing to dig a hole. This is the ultimate destination of the modern state: a series of perfectly executed, incredibly expensive, entirely disconnected segments of nothingness. The Chilterns tunnels are a cathedral of futility. They are beautiful, they are silent, and they lead nowhere. Perhaps we should just leave them empty. They serve as a far more accurate monument to 21st-century Britain than a train ever could. They represent the perfect synthesis of our current era: a massive, hidden debt, wrapped in expensive concrete, buried deep enough that we don’t have to look at the consequences of our own stupidity.