Hang out the bunting! High-speed rail is coming to Manchester... in about 20 years.

Actually, for now, the only people getting really exercised about this great civil engineering project are farmers in the Chilterns, who think it will frighten the horses, and the inhabitants of now-blighted rural idylls where property prices will go south faster than any bullet train.

Some may liken these 21st century nimbys to the luddites who tried to prevent the various parts of what we now call the west coast main line scything their way through virgin countryside during much of the 19th century. Me? I have a certain sympathy with the nay-sayers. The new high-speed line from London to Birmingham, with its extension to Manchester and Leeds by 2032, is not, as the railway-building of the Victorian age was, an indisputably vital artery of some industrial revolution.

No, the new high-speed line is just one controversial answer to a predicted rise in passenger demand, and a £32bn gamble that if you make it possible for people to go somewhere quicker, then they will do so in droves.

In Birmingham, business people say high-speed rail will dispel the notion that the city is one big traffic jam, and put it a mere 49-minute journey from the capital

If Birmingham does become, to all intents and purposes, another corner of Greater London, then exactly how does that help the nation’s rightful second city, Manchester? City council leader Sir Richard Leese, along with local MPs Graham Stringer, Paul Goggins and John Leech all say Manchester will reap the benefits of high-speed rail too. Businesses will get goods to market more efficiently, and workers can be sped to the most suitable jobs.

I hope all this is true, although you wonder whether this anticipated rise in passenger demand could not more easily be met by putting more and better rolling stock on the rails we already have.

It currently takes 128 minutes to get from Manchester to London by rail. By 2032, high-speed rail will cut that to 68 minutes. That’s very nice, but when it comes to inter-city travel, it’s hardly a dealbreaker.

I have never yet weighed up the possibility of a trip to London and thought: "No, it takes too long". I have, however, said: "No, it costs too much". At least, it does, if you don’t book in advance and travel off-peak.

With ever-rising fuel and energy prices, and a £32bn investment to recoup, it’s hardly likely that the high-speed train of 2032 is going to be any more affordable than rail travel today.

And can we really be sure that demand for rail will continue to rise? Twenty years ago, there were no domestic computers, no e-commerce, no video-conferencing and hardly anyone working from home.

Who knows what the next 20 years of social and technological change will bring. Will we, even if we can afford to do so, really want to be zooming up and down the country in greater and greater numbers just because we can do it at 200mph?

Pity of light-fingered chef and a cry for help in Tesco

TV CHEF Antony Worrall Thompson makes a commendably clean breast of his shame at being cautioned for shoplifting from Tesco.

Naturally, he needs ‘treatment’. He needs professional help to figure out why he was pilfering.

"I want to know why I’ve done this," he tells the Daily Express, as if pinching goods on five different occasions was some kind of out-of-body experience. "But it’s very difficult to cure something when you don’t know what the illness is. Hopefully that is something that a psychiatrist will tell me."

Meanwhile, we in the media quote experts to further medicalise Thompson’s light-fingeredness. Middle class shoplifting? Well it’s a syndrome, obviously. A sickness. A response to stress – a cry for help. For God’s sake, somebody do a charity single or a telethon to help these people. How else can we stop them stuffing polenta up their shirts and pancetta down their socks?

Some have recalled Worrall Thompson’s troubled background: the child of a broken home, with an alcoholic mother, he claimed he was sexually abused by four different people.

Sadly, similar tales could be told by many a young criminal going through magistrates’ courts up and down the land on any day of the week.

But I don’t recall anybody wasting much time trying to understand the psychological profile of, say, the foolish individuals involved in the August riots, many of them banged up for thefts of lesser value than that for which Worrall Thompson was cautioned.

The TV chef who steals five times from Tesco is ill and needs help. The stupid kid who helps himself to a pair of trainers from a looted shop is evil and needs punishment.

I’m not sure life is quite as simple as that.

Wednesday whinge

YOU wait ages for a report on whether immigration affects job prospects for UK citizens, and then two come along at once. A study by the National Institute of Economic and Social Research concludes that there is no link between rising immigration and soaring unemployment in this country. In plain words: no, they’re not coming over here taking all ‘our’ jobs.

But then the Migration Advisory Committee contradicts this by reporting that one Briton is displaced from the labour market for ever four migrant workers coming here from outside the EU. But this displacement is not permanent.

Plenty of ammunition for both sides of the argument there, then. What is beyond dispute is that while as many as 1m east Europeans were coming to this country in the Noughties, the unemployment rate remained pretty static.The logical conclusion is that those Poles and Latvians were coming here to do jobs which unemployed Britons had already decided they couldn’t or wouldn't do.

Good luck then to those politicians who think that, even after an awful recession, they can chivvy all these home-grown benefit-claimants into work, declaring an end to the ‘something for nothing’ culture.

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