If you’re after a lesson in how to lose friends and alienate people, look no further than the government’s cack-handed approach to improving transport in the Red Wall.
Last week Grant Shapps announced insouciantly to any northerner who was listening that there was not ‘much point’ (his words) in an important part of the Northern Powerhouse rail project, namely a section of brand-new track covering much of the route between Manchester and Leeds. Although this would have slashed journey times between the west and east coasts at Liverpool and Hull, given the region a source of pride and put Bradford firmly on the rail map, he thought it simpler to put in some improvements on the existing, but already fairly congested, tracks between Leeds and Manchester.
As if this wasn’t bad enough, over the weekend the administration managed to reinforce its reputation as a coterie of skinflints that didn’t know or care much about what went on north of Watford Gap. A number of Tory MPs suggested that a black hole in the national coffers of about £50 billion could be eliminated by scrapping the extension of the new superfast, dedicated-track HS2 from Birmingham (where it is planned to arrive in 2033) to Manchester and Liverpool.
A public relations debacle, yes. But the pity is that the Tories are at least partly correct. True, Grant Shapps could not have been more tactless or misguided. But the second suggestion – however much the great and the good in the north may complain – is clearly right.
If you live in the south-east you can easily forget that, even with fares scandalously high, most of the area is relatively well-served by rail. The persistence of London commuting during the last 150 years has kept closures to manageable proportions; the majority of the network is electrified. Most people still live within reasonable reach of a station with a tolerable service; the middle classes still do use the trains.
Compare the north. Apart from the west and east coast main lines which whoosh you through to Scotland and carry businessmen and bigwigs swiftly from Liverpool, Manchester and Leeds in electrified comfort to London, it is a sorry tale. Closures and years of penny-pinching have hit hard. A lot of northerners are remote from a station; where lines remain they are often diesel; stations are pretty spartan; and not much of the network accommodates very high speeds. Even a long-distance train is likely to be a semi-fast; the 65 miles or so from Leeds to Liverpool can take nearly two hours, or almost as long as the 200 from London to Manchester. Put bluntly, train travel, not being very swift, very convenient or very comfortable, remains something many prefer to avoid. In this case the Red Wall has every right to feel that it has been forgotten.
The Tories must deal with this. If Rishi wishes to satisfy northerners that he is giving them more of the advantages of the south east, he needs urgently to level up the way people move about the area and make it less awkward for those who don’t have a car. A commitment to seriously fast, comfortable and convenient travel over electrified tracks between northern cities, many of which are relatively close together, would not only boost the out-of-London economy. It would make big political, not to mention environmental, sense.
What about HS2? Doesn’t the same argument apply here? Well, not necessarily, for a number of reasons. For one thing, one argument for the southern branch of HS2 is that the west coast main line between London and Rugby is, quite simply, full. We need new capacity, and one way to provide it is by a separate dedicated line to Birmingham. This is not true, or at least not as true, of the extension north of Birmingham. This needs some other independent justification.
And here is the problem. The northern branch is not really a northern project at all. You unify the north, and reduce its dependence on the south-east, by improving communications within the area. But HS2 would exist not for the benefit of those wanting to travel within the north, but for those who want to leave it or drop in for a day. True, building it would take nearly an hour off the time spent by a lawyer, accountant or banker travelling to a meeting in some plush city centre office or hotel. It would also be most convenient for a businessman or local government bigwig going to lobby a minister, or a civil servant on a mission to square a local council leader. (It will not surprise you that much of the pressure to spend £50 billion of other people’s money to keep the HS2 project going, if it does not come from the construction lobby, comes from members of these groups.) But for those whose world does not revolve around London and the south east – the business owner in Dewsbury who needs to get to Warrington for the day, or the resident of Batley who fancies a night at the theatre in Sheffield – it will do nothing. Axing it would be no big deal.
Put simply, therefore, the government has a perfectly plausible, and electorally attractive, line on Red Wall transport if only it cares to use it. Rishi has a golden opportunity to tell the people of the north that he cares about their prosperity too, and believes that they deserve better, at least as regards trains, than they have been getting. And he can perfectly well add: let the well-heeled men and women in suits fend for themselves. If saving £50 billion on HS2 means it takes them an extra hour to get to Euston or King’s Cross, so be it.
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