If there's one factor that might but save HS2 it's the ‘letting down the North’ argument. Didn’t Boris make a speech within the early hours of 13
If there’s one factor that might but save HS2 it’s the ‘letting down the North’ argument. Didn’t Boris make a speech within the early hours of 13 December promising the occasion’s new-found voters within the north that he would by no means take their votes as a right and always remember them? How, then, would he escape the onslaught that will be launched in opposition to him if he determined to dump a high-speed rail line to the north?
We’ve had countless open letters from council leaders, enterprise folks and so forth in current months begging the federal government to go forward with the scheme. Boris is more likely to be particularly receptive to the pleas of Andy Avenue, the Conservative mayor for the West Midlands, who asked every of the candidates within the Tory management election final yr to make a pledge to help high-speed rail.
However Boris mustn’t take significantly the argument that he shall be letting down the Conservatives’ new regional heartlands if he cancels or downgrades HS2. Makes an attempt to advertise ‘the North’ as a single homogenous place, which is able to profit from HS2 or endure from its cancellation, ignore the socio-economic geography of the nation. England doesn’t include two halves separated by a north-south divide that may be magically bridged by a high-speed rail line. It’s a patchwork made up of some locations the place there’s loads of wealth and alternative and different locations which are struggling.
If there’s a divide between London and Manchester it’s nothing like as broad as that between Manchester and the likes of Burnley, Workington and all the opposite locations within the North West which were bypassed by the good wave of regeneration that has remodeled our largest regional metropolis centres up to now twenty years. Take a trip to Manchester Piccadilly and you may hardly inform you’ve left London: it’s all dear residences, sensible outlets and swanky eating places. Central Manchester is a world away from the peripheral cities the place the excessive avenue has been hollowed out and few companies will make investments.
What HS2 does is hyperlink collectively all of the locations which are doing properly whereas doing nothing to hyperlink them up with the locations which are doing badly. Certainly, among the latter shall be even worse off. At the very least in the meanwhile, trains from London arrive into Birmingham New Avenue the place you possibly can catch a connection to Walsall or West Bromwich. HS2 trains will arrive at a sensible new Curzon Avenue, half a mile away, with no onward connections.
It’s outstanding how few of the northern and midlands constituencies which the Tories gained from Labour in December are in a location that can profit from HS2. Wolverhampton? HS2 trains is not going to join there. Blyth Valley? Over 100 miles north of the place HS2 will finish. Workington? Will stay on a department line with a yawning connection to Carlisle or Lancaster. Bolsover? Doesn’t have a station and nonetheless gained’t after HS2. Final November, 25 councils wrote to the federal government opposing present plans for HS2. Some, like Doncaster, worry being ignored within the chilly as HS2 would inevitably result in a discount in high quality of the high-speed hyperlink it at present enjoys down the East Coast Foremost Line.
If the federal government needs to seek the advice of throughout the North and ask what public transport enhancements would take advantage of distinction to them, it will find yourself with a programme of rail and bus that will look nothing like HS2. Boris has nothing to worry from cancelling the venture – so lengthy, that’s, that he gives different transport enhancements instead.