Today, the Department of Transport tweeted this ridiculous claim.
I actually feel sorry for the civil servants at the DfT. They know this is a con but their political masters are using them to push Government (read Tory) propaganda out in an election year. This is a naked abuse of what the civil service is there for, but there’s no low this Government won’t stoop to – including politicising the civil service.
Why tweet this? There’s no supporting press release or announcement of anything happening on the DfT website, or through the DfT’s normal press releases, there’s just this tweet. So why put this out now? Oh, wait. Rishi Sunak was in North Wales yesterday on his pre-election campaign ‘grand tour’. What a co-incidence!
So, what’s happening with North Wales electrification, announced as being funded by scrapping Hs2 phase 2 by Sunak last years and included in the risible ‘Network North’ not even the back of a fag packet plan?
Nothing. Zip. Bugger all. Last month RAIL magazine carried an excellent article detailing why nothing is likely to happen before 2030. You can read it here.
For a start, the £1bn is a con. There’s no HS2 money to ‘release’. It doesn’t exist. It wasn’t due to be borrowed for years yet. It sure as hell isn’t say in a pot in the Treasury labelled ‘for HS2’ that’s just waiting to be rebadged. It’s classic ‘jam tomorrow’ politics. Cancel something you *were* building that had a business case, planning permission and even spades in the ground and announce utter vapourware for sometime in the future instead.
Before a spade enters the ground in North Wales there needs to be a business case for the work. That doesn’t exist. There *was* one, but that dates from 2015 and is hopelessly out of date. That £1bn figure is assumed to be based on that now-defunct business case. Since then, construction costs have increased by roughly 7% per annum – meaning that there’d be no spare change from £1.5bn.
As you can see, the project exists on in the imagination. It’s not included in Network Rail’s future plans and budget which is known as CP7. Control Period 7 runs from April 2024 to March 2029.
The truth is, there’s not a cat in hell’s chance of ANY work planning/consultations being done before the next General Election, which could come as early as May this year. As for actual spades in the ground – don’t make me laugh…
This is nothing but a dishonest and deceitful election con by Sunak and the Tories. Don’t fall for it – or him.
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This is a rewrite on a much earlier blog which is now out of date due to a changing financial world, but where the basic economic rules still apply. Rules that our (hopefully soon to be Ex) Prime Minister – despite his time as Chancellor of the Exchequer – seems to be unaware of. More likely? He’s gaslighting you. Let me explain…
What are Capex and Opex – and why does the difference matter?
Capital expenditure is an expense incurred to create future benefit, such as buying new assets for a business – like buildings, machinery or equipment. Doing so generates profits for the future over several tax years. Hs2 is a very good example of the principle. It will generate jobs (which generate tax revenue), kick-start regeneration in some of our major cities and make the UK a more attractive place for businesses (which generate corporation tax). Capital investment on decent infrastructure is well understood as bringing economic benefits. This BBC article sums up the situation. As capital expenditure will generate tax revenue year after year it’s not just a one off. That income stream would enable the Treasury to spend money on many different things, from the NHS to social welfare, to more modern infrastructure and even tax cuts if it so chose.
Operating expenditure covers the day to day functioning of a business, like wages, utilities, maintenance and repairs. It also covers depreciation. It’s money needed every year. It’s not a one-off – and it doesn’t generate any extra income the way Capex does.
The UK has a poor record for capital expenditure on infrastructure. It’s why so much of the countries infrastructure is old and outdated (like the railways) and why our productivity is so low.
The OECD (Organisation Economically Developed Countries) recommends that baseline infrastructure investment is 5.5% of GDP annually for an economy with aspirations to growth. We’ve only spent this amount twice since WW2. This is especially relevant now as the UK desperately needs to invest in ‘green’ infrastructure to both tackle and be resilient to Climate Change. HS2 was one of the projects that ticked all these boxes. The importance of such investment has been thrown into the spotlight by the recent storms that have closed railways and flooded large parts of the country. We need modern infrastructure designed and built to cope with them.
Now to the present. Rishi Sunak has announced he’s ‘scrapping’ HS2 and diverting the capital expenditure to operating expenditure, like filling potholes and subsidising bus fares. It’s economic madness, but it’s also a con as the ‘diverted’ money doesn’t exist. There’s no pot of money sat in the Treasury labelled ‘for HS2’ that’s waiting to be diverted elsewhere. HS2 is funded from Government borrowing and the money for the sections of HS2 Sunak has cancelled isn’t on the Governments books as it wasn’t due to be borrowed for many years yet. It’s fantasy money, as real as the stuff you play Monopoly with. Sunak knows this, but he’s taking voters for fools as he also knows most people have no understanding of either economics or Government finances.
Sadly, much of the media is helping him perpetuate the con by lazily copying and pasting his claims and not once asking any awkward questions, informing people of economic basics (like Capex and Opex) or doing any analysis of his claims.
Don’t be fooled.
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It’s a rhetorical question really as his policies on stuff like Rwanda make it painfully obvious he hasn’t.
Why?
Here’s an extract from ‘Alice in Wonderland’ which could easily be subtitled ‘Rishi in Blunderland’. It’s where Alice is in conversation with the Queen of Hearts.
“Alice laughed. ‘There’s no use trying,’ she said. ‘One can’t believe impossible things.’
I daresay you haven’t had much practice,’ said the Queen. ‘When I was your age, I always did it for half-an-hour a day. Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.”
There you have it. Sunak and the Tory party’s whole Rwanda policy summed up. They believe in impossible things – only Sunak spends far more than half-an-hour a day in doing so, his whole time as Prime Minister is based on fantasies.
Right now the Tories are trapped in the literary and literal past. A past where you could just make stuff up and pretend it’s real and everyone will believe it. Hence pretending that the Tories getting legislation through Parliament to say Rwanda is ‘safe’ means anything in the real world, or outside the UK.
There’s another author they’ve fallen foul of. Eric Blair – better known as George Orwell. Frankly, there are so many quotes from his novel ‘1984’ that are relevant for today, but the Tories Rwanda policy brings this one to mind.
“The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.”
So far, their policy has cost nearly £300m – without a single person being moved to Rwanda – unless you count three Home Sectaries. That’s money that could have been spent recruiting people (who will than pay tax) on processing people’s immigration claims in the UK and clearing the backlog that’s occurred because the Tories have weaponised immigration. but that doesn’t suit their political agenda. They’re using immigration as a dead cat to distract from their appalling record on the economy and much more.
We’re told to believe that Rwanda is a hill that Sunak is willing to die on – no matter how stupid that is. But that’s the Tory party at the fag-end of 2023. They’ve been driven mad by a succession of lies and liars going back to the Brexit referendum of 2016. That’s when the rot set in. Unicorn thinking has bedeviled them ever since.
It’s time for a change. The UK deserves better than this political shit-show and asset strippers.
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This morning the media – including the BBC, who really should know better – are running headlines puffing the latest Sunak con over HS2 and ‘released funding’. Here’s the BBCs uncritical advert for the Government filed under ‘business’ which is headlined thus;
‘Rishi Sunak sets out how pothole funding from HS2 savings to be used’
God, where to start? Firstly, let’s ask how the BBC can be an uncritical organ for this propaganda? Filed by ‘business reporter’ Faarea Masud it’s little more than a cut and paste job from this press release. Not once are the claims analysed, critiqued or put into perspective, never mind numbers crunched. Alarm bells should ring when a ‘business reporter’ doesn’t even point out the economic madness and illiteracy of using Capital expenditure (Capex) for Operational expenditure (Opex). There’s good explainer of the difference here.
Can you imagine the howls of outrage from the Automobile Association who’re quoted in the article if the Government had announced they were scrapping the RIS2 new roads programme to use the dosh to fill in potholes instead?
Let’s be clear about one thing. This £8.3bn doesn’t exist. It’s a back of a fag packet calculation of money that hasn’t even been borrowed yet. The money to build Phase 2b of HS2 wasn’t due to be borrowed for many years yet (the Hybrid Bill authorising construction hasn’t even passed through Parliament, never mind actual construction contracts been awarded). There’s no pot of money sat in the Treasury labelled ‘for HS2’ just waiting to be rebadged.
The pothole ‘plan’ is credited to Sunak, but it’s Transport Minister Mark Harper who’s quoted in the article. Harper lets various things slip but the BBC immediately drops the ball by not questioning anything he says. For example, this supposed £8.3bn will be spent over 11 years, so the annual amount is chicken-feed when it comes to putting right the effects of 13 years of cost-cutting by the Tories. The DfT let the cat out of the bag in the report when they explained that;
“The Department for Transport said local authorities in England would get an extra £150m for road repairs this year, and the same amount for 2024 and 2025. The rest of the funding will be allocated over the next decade”.
So, that £8.3bn becomes £150m and after 2024 nothing is guanteed for anything as the Tories will have lost the election. This is classic ‘jam tomorrow’. It’s nothing more than an election bribe in the hope it will fool the feeble-minded (and the BBC). Let’s add some perspective the BBC fails to. There are 317 councils in England), so that £150m is less than £474,000 per council! I live in Halifax in West Yorkshire, it would probably cost that much to resurface the long pothole-filled road outside my home! Yet, according to the Department for Transport, in 2021-22, only 7.5 miles of roads in Calderdale were fully resurfaced, up from three miles five years before. In 2023-24 Just £3.17m is earmarked for road maintenance in Calderdale, any extra money won’t even touch the sides of the problem.
The BBC puff piece contains another cut and past quote from Sunak which is complete bollocks;
“This unprecedented £8.3bn investment will pave the road for better and safer journeys for millions of people across the country and put an end to the blight of nuisance potholes.”
The ‘blight’ of potholes is down to the Tories. They’ve underinvested in this country’s infrastructure from day 1. We’ve now had 13 years of decay where Councils estimate the cost of repairing just local roads was closer to £14bn! An imaginary £8.3bn – even if it was real – won’t fix the roads. This is desperate stuff from a Government that’s ruined the country and completely run out of ideas what to do now. It’s like the infamous ‘cones hotline’ from the John Major era. What’s depressing is the way much of the media (national and local) is regurgitating this guff and presenting it as if it’s anything other than what it really is – a damning indictment of 13 years of austerity, economic mismanagement and a crippling lack of vision and purpose.
So, Sunak’s lying – again. We’ve heard all this before. Like this tweet from 2021 which hasn’t aged well at all – just like the road outside my house!
The one thing we do need to put an end to – as soon as possible – is him and his rotten and dishonest Government. He’s putting the con back into Conservatives.
Don’t fall for the con, or the Conservatives.
I’ve a small favour to ask… If you enjoy reading this or any of the other blogs I’ve written, please click on an advert or two. You don’t have to buy anything you don’t want to of course – although if you did find something that tickled your fancy that would be fab! – but the revenue from them helps me to cover some of the cost of maintaining this site (which isn’t cheap and comes out of my own pocket). Remember, 99% of the pictures used in my blogs can be purchased as prints from my other website – https://paulbigland.zenfolio.com/
This morning certain national and other newspapers are uncritically rehashing a DfT press release, claiming that money released from scapping phase 2 of HS2 is going to fund new bus services next year.
This is very frustrating because those newspapers and journalists are helping the government publicise the con. Not one of the journos has stopped to think, do any analysis, or ask any awkward questions. For example, discussing the theoretical size of the slice of a non-existent pie rather than pointing out the fact the pie itself doesn’t exist. Is it any wonder people in the UK are so woefully ill-informed when members of the 4th estate become an uncritical arm of government propaganda?
Here’s the DfT press release journalists have cut and paste to cobble their stories together from.
Note some important points;
This funding won’t be available to sometime (unspecified) in the next financial year – subject to all the usual caveats about bids, business cases, approvals etc. No-one knows what it will actually be spent on. No-one actually know where it’s really coming from. The press release makes some wild guesses on what it ‘could’ be spent on – like this;
“While it is up to local authorities in partnership with operators to decide how best to use the funding, the new funding for next year is enough to support up to 25 million miles of new bus services across the North and Midlands”
Note the word ‘support’. They mean subsidise. Sunak himself is quoted as claiming this;
“We’re backing buses with one of the biggest ever support packages and keeping bus fares down to ensure the country’s favourite means of transport is more affordable for millions of people”
*More* affordable? The Government has already announced it’s keeping the fare cap, so how does this make buses ‘more’ affordable? It doesn’t. It’s yet more weasel words and part of Sunak’s con. This is yet another example of Sunak’s ‘illustrative’ claims that will never be delivered before the next election when he’s out on his ear.
There’s also a huge financial elephant in the room here that not a single journo has picked up on. This is using Capex as Opex.
Let me explain. Capex (capital expenditure) is when you invest money in long term assets which are an investment for the future – such as building a new green railway with a design life of 120 years that actually generates a return. Opex (operational expenditure) is money spent on short-term, day to day expenses, like wages – or subsidising bus fares! You need to replenish that money every year because once it’s spent it’s gone. There’s a good explanation here.
Instead of having a new green railway, the modern spine of our crumbling network which is beset by Climate Change we’ll have what to show for the money? Nothing – apart from the abandoned, half built structures on HS2’s route to Crewe – a monument to Rishi Sunak and this governments short-term thinking and lies.
It’s no wonder some perceptive commentators are calling Sunak ‘Truss lite’. This is similar to her economic madness of borrowing money from the markets to fund tax cuts.
Yet again Rishi Sunak is trying to con you with ‘jam tomorrow’ – and large sections of the media are helping him to do it.
I’ve a small favour to ask… If you enjoy reading this or any of the other blogs I’ve written, please click on an advert or two. You don’t have to buy anything you don’t want to of course – although if you did find something that tickled your fancy that would be fab! – but the revenue from them helps me to cover some of the cost of maintaining this site (which isn’t cheap and comes out of my own pocket). Remember, 99% of the pictures used in my blogs can be purchased as prints from my other website – https://paulbigland.zenfolio.com/
November 2021 brought us, after a long wait, the Integrated Rail Plan (IRP). Less than two years later, it has been blown away by something that is quite the opposite – something that is not integrated, and not all about rail, although if ‘Plan’ means a hastily compiled wish list of things that ought to happen anyway, a Plan it might be.
Of course, there’s two gargantuan holes in this ‘plan’. The £36bn ‘saved’ by scrapping HS2 North of Birmingham doesn’t actually exist as it hasn’t been borrowed yet, and many of the items on the list will fall foul of the footnote hidden away at the bottom of page 24. Few, if any of them are likely to pass the business case test.
The howlers in this Disintegrated Not-a-Plan (DNP), such as promising to build tram routes that opened years ago, have caught attention, but the elephant in the room has escaped comment – despite it being a £12 billion elephant, a third of the promised total spend of £36 billion. That elephant is that, having cancelled HS2 Phase 2 into Manchester, and the new approach from the West that HS2 would have built for Northern Powerhouse Rail (NPR) trains from Liverpool to share, £12 billion has had to be ‘protected’ for NPR to build an approach all on its own, without the benefit of HS2 trains to share it. Of course if NPR does that, a big lump of cost drops out of HS2 Phase 2b, which will overnight appear a much sounder investment.
It had also been proposed that NPR would take over HS2’s proposed Birmingham – Manchester services, and extend them to Leeds to make up for loss of the dedicated HS2 route via the East Midlands. This however becomes impossible without HS2 Phase 2b to Crewe and Phase 2a from Crewe to Birmingham, as there is no way on Earth that the existing lines have the capacity for those extra trains, particularly at the key bottleneck of Stafford.
Other elements of the IRP, less than two years old, are blown out of the water. The IRP carefully explained how truncating HS2’s Leeds/York line at a disused power station near Loughborough, and taking trains into Nottingham on existing lines, would release more capacity on the Midland Main Line for better interurban and local services that HS2’s dedicated route would have done. That never struck me as plausible, but now the DNP claims that the its predecessor IRP would have led to worse services at stations such as Leicester, Market Harborough and Kettering. No such nicety as evidence is produced to show why the DfT, the specifier of train services, would specify a worsening of services, nor any suggestion as to how the DNP would improve them (spoiler alert – it won’t), let alone improve connectivity between the South Midlands and Yorkshire and the North East in the way that HS2’s original plan would have done.
The IRP explained in great detail why Bradford should not have a new station on a TransPennine high speed line; now apparently that is essential, to the tune of £2 billion. Now I don’t mind at all if Bradford does have a high speed station after all, it’s only down the road from me in Halifax, but what has changed since the IRP to make what was once impossible so essential now?
Turning to other things that the DNP does propose, about £8 billion is apparently going to be spent on mending potholes. But if local authorities were properly funded, the potholes wouldn’t need mending in the first place, as mending of potholes is not a one-off job but an ongoing commitment. So where is the next tranche of pothole-mending funding going to come from – you can only cancel HS2 once! Weirdly this part of the DNP admits that the government is going to do a most un-Conservative thing in borrowing so as to fund revenue expenditure. It’s almost as mad as Liz Truss borrowing £bns to fund tax cuts for the rich.
One very good thing in the DNP is a promise to upgrade junctions north of Ely, downgraded from proper junctions to single-lead connections by Network SouthEast, but now part of the Felixstowe – Nuneaton freight artery. In fact it is so good a thing to increase freight capacity from the East Coast Ports that one wonders why it has been so long coming. But where are those freight trains going after Ely? If running via Nuneaton and the West Coast Main Line to the North West and Scotland, they will simply run into the same congestion one the route via Stafford that Phase 2a of HS2 was meant to relieve by taking non-stop InterCity trains onto their own line.
But the position of the DNP on running HS2 to Euston instead of tipping all passengers out in Zone 2 makes quantum mechanics look simple! In the Prime Minister’s speech to his conference, Euston seemed safe. But subsequent reports suggested that the tunnels from Old Oak and the station itself would only be built if private funding could be found for 10,000 houses with a station on the side. Then Tweets sorry Xs from the Treasury, normally the villain of such pieces, were unequivocal that Euston would be built. As it should be, because to be blunt, without it the £44 billion or so now being invested in Phase 1 of HS2 has no significant value; with Euston, it has.
But what isn’t in the DNP? Nearly everything that matters if you want a step-change in rail capacity in the North. What’s the biggest problem today? Stations, and Manchester Piccadilly and Leeds in particular, both of which eke out capacity by putting two or even three trains into the same platform. This is operationally fragile as well as confusing for passengers, and if you lengthen trains to provide more seats, becomes impossible. By removing the London trains into their own station, HS2 would have freed two platforms at Piccadilly for local services to become at the very least more reliable, , and ultimately more numerous.
Is an obscure and shadowy process in a Manchester hotel room really how to decide to spend £36 billion of investment capital?
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The widespread derision that greeted Sunak’s plan to fool people that by scrapping phase 2 of HS2 he suddenly had £36bn to spend on some wonderful and well-thought out new initiatives wasn’t what he was expecting. But when you’re as out of touch with the real world as multi-millionaire Sunak is – that’s not really that surprising.
Some sections of the media, both right and left, smelled a rat and – aided by people on Twitter who did the digging for them a slew of stories appeared, illustrating that some of these projects already existed whilst others were ones that had been sitting on drawing boards for years, were already in the pipeline or had already been rejected/cancelled by previous Tory PMs – the ‘new’ Bradford station being a classic example.
Useless Transport Minister Mark Harper and his sidekick Hugh Merriman were trotted out with Yorkshire leaders to pretend that there was suddenly £2bn to spend on a new station at Bradford. In truth it was no more than a cheap PR stunt which local leaders allowed themselves to be dragged into. There is no £2bn. There are no costed plans for such a station. there’s no planning permission, no land acquisition, no public enquiry or any of the other formalities required before anything actually happens. There’s more chance of me winning the lottery than anything remotely useful happening before the next general election, but the fiction has to be maintained in the hope of keeping a few Tory votes. For Bradford, it’s always ‘jam tomorrow’.
Harper managed to look even more stupid yesterday. After a number of impossible schemes in the ‘Network North’ report were pulled from the official website, Harper claimed in an interview that the schemes that had disappeared weren’t real commitments to do things (no shit!) they were just ‘examples’ of what could be done – with money that doesn’t exist! That’s not what Sunak had said, but then everything Sunak had said was a lie anyway.
I keep banging on about this but it’s important to understand why the £36bn claim is such an outrageous lie.
HS2 phase 2 was due to be constructed between 2023 and 2035, with services starting between then and 2041. That meant spending would be spread out over nearly two decades with peaks and troughs during that time depending on the intensity of construction or fit-out work. There is NO pot of money sat in the Treasury labelled “for HS2” that’s just waiting to be spent on other things. The vast majority of the money hasn’t even been properly budgeted for or even borrowed yet! Governments borrow money depending on the needs of regular spending reviews. Right now, that money doesn’t exist. You don’t borrow money needed in 2033 in 2023 (never mind money needed even later) as you haven’t even worked out how much you’ll actually need. All you really have is a forecast. They’re projections, not actual costings – or cash.
There is no £36bn. It’s a projection, a possible future budget, not real money in the here and now.
Sadly, a lot of the public have no idea of the reality here, and part of that blame lies with the media, who are woeful at telling people the truth. There’s a number of reasons for that. Part is laziness, part’s pressure to churn out stuff and damn the truth – and part is deliberate misinformation from ‘client’ journalists who’re really just mouthpieces for the Government – and say what they’re told to. Especially if the outlet they work for happens to be one owned by certain millionare media ‘tycoons’ who use their ownership of newspapers and TV channels to further their own personal/political agendas. That said, some journo’s working on left of centre outlets aren’t averse to spinning a story to fit a misguided ‘green’ agenda.
The end result is the same. Joe Public is woefully misinformed on subjects like HS2 – either by accident or design.
Here’s an example from today. A newspaper from those well-known ‘Northern’ counties – Devon and Cornwall – published this piece on the Camelford by-pass, entitled ‘Camelford bypass set to benefit from HS2 cancellation funding”
Wow! Camelford is going to get a new bypass now, eh? No. Of course not. A local Cllr put the story right on Twitter.
Wait! What? There’s *already* an outline business case?
Yes. It was originally submitted in 2019 and refined in 2022. It’s been sitting on civil servants/ministers desks since then. And is doesn’t need money from HS2 either. The ‘Atlantic Highway Camelford Improvement’ is eligible for money from an existing budget, as the report mentions:
“The Department for Transport (DfT) has made the A39 a part of the Major Road Network. This means we can apply for funding from the current 5-year national roads programme (2020 – 2025)”.
You’re being lied to – again.
This is classic delay tactics by Ministers. Want to make it like like you’re doing something whilst you’re actually doing nothing? Simple, just commission another study or ‘review’ and kick the can even further down the road. Plus, it means no-one actually has to pony-up the money they don’t have and just lied about! Plus, remember the small print of page 24 of that piece of crap ‘Network North’ Sunak laughably claims is a plan;
“As usual, individual projects referenced in this document will be subject to the approval of business cases“.
I’m going to end on a slightly brighter note. Labour have opened their conference in Liverpool and some of the ideas they’re putting forward are going to make a few Tories nervous (and hopefully, criminals).
Firstly, Labour have said that when they form the next Governement they’ll appoint a Covid corruption commissioner to claw back some of the £bns that went missing on dodgy PPE and unworkable systems like ‘track and trace’.
Secondly, they’ll revisit the planning laws. Shadow chancellor Rachel Reeves pledged to “rebuild Britain”, including by speeding up the planning process for key infrastructure projects – such as railways, including HS2 and whatever survives from the mess the Tories call ‘Network North’. Plus, a motion calling for the HS2 high speed rail line to be built in full was backed by Labour delegates.
Labour are starting to look like a party preparing to take power, which is excellent news. Maybe the future’s not so gloomy after all…
I’ve a small favour to ask… If you enjoy reading this or any of the other blogs I’ve written, please click on an advert or two. You don’t have to buy anything you don’t want to of course – although if you did find something that tickled your fancy that would be fab! – but the revenue from them helps me to cover some of the cost of maintaining this site (which isn’t cheap and comes out of my own pocket). Remember, 99% of the pictures used in my blogs can be purchased as prints from my other website – https://paulbigland.zenfolio.com/
The other week I visited a village called Shawford, in Hampshire and passed a pub famous as the location of the demise of the TV character who’s catchphrase is the title of today’s blog. It seemed very appropriate to use to describe the latest tone-deaf crass stupidity from our Tory Prime Minister, Rishi Sunak. Fresh from not levelling up, cancelling the majority of the UKs new green railway to drive a motorway through previous commitments to net zero, he tweeted this.
From his private plane.
I can only assume his recent list of culls included all of his PR advisors, as even the most tone-deaf intern could spot the optics of this. But Rishi? Oh no. As a multi-millionaire he’s so used to wealth and privilege it simply doesn’t occur to him.
But that’s it, isn’t it? Trains are for plebs. Who needs a railway when you’ve got access to a private plane? I assume the helicopter he normally uses must be in for servicing or summat
The sooner we eject these out of touch idiots from Government the better – before they do any more damage the the country…
I’ve a small favour to ask (as I’m not a multi-millionaire with a private plane)… If you enjoy reading this or any of the other blogs I’ve written, please click on an advert or two. You don’t have to buy anything you don’t want to of course – although if you did find something that tickled your fancy that would be fab! – but the revenue from them helps me to cover some of the cost of maintaining this site (which isn’t cheap and comes out of my own pocket). Remember, 99% of the pictures used in my blogs can be purchased as prints from my other website – https://paulbigland.zenfolio.com/
We’re less than 24 hours from Sunak’s appalling speech to the Tory party conference and things are already falling apart for him. But that’s the problem when you tell lies, they’re often so easy to expose when honest folk start to do some investigating.
Remember the Sunak’s claim that, right up to the last moment ‘no decision’ had been made on HS2? He lied. Not only was that obvious when the ‘Network North’ document and fantasy shopping list was slipped out (which had clearly been cobbled together days before) but he also made a video for social media. ITV had a look at it – especially the background, and revealed it was made at least a week before conference. You can see their report here. This morning Transport Minister Mark Harper (another conference liar) has been touring the TV studios, essentially saying ‘so what’? Yeah, who cares that we have yet another Tory Prime Minister who lies so glibly?
Now the wheels are coming off some of the ridiculous claims of what projects the imaginary £36bn of ‘savings’ from scrapping Hs2 phase 2 will fund. Some of the projects are utterly batshit. The whole list seems to have been cobbled together by someone Googling old transport schemes or people’s aspirations without any consultation with people who know about transport. Hence the addition of two absolute howlers.
Apparently, Network North will build an extension of Manchester Metrolink to Manchester airport. There’s only one problem. That was completed in 2014. Another completed project included in the wish-list was highlighted by Nottingham MP Lilian Greenwood.
Another list of projects has mysteriously disappeared, as local BBC reporter Dan Holland has found.
The fact that most of these schemes are little more than vaporware is given away by a footnote on page 24, which says “As usual, individual projects referenced in this document will be subject to the approval of business cases“.
But, as many of them are basket cases, not business cases, they’ll never happen. Some would never get through Network Rail’s GRIP process (Governance for Railway Investment Projects), like the idea to electrify the Hope valley line between Manchester and Sheffield. Whose daft idea was it to prioritise that? We’ll never know as no-one’s putting their name to this list of fantasies. Certainly, no-one in the rail industry was consulted, or Northern Mayors. Back in 2015 the Northern Electrification Task Force (set up by the Transport Minister reported on the priorities for electrification in the North. Number 1 on the list of 12 routes was the Calder Valley (Leeds to Manchester and Preston via Bradford and Brighouse). I blogged about it at the time. You can find the full list here. Hope Valley came in tier 2, so why’s it been mentioned in this report ahead of all the others? How many marginal Tory constituencies are on the route I wonder, or on the route of some of the other invented schemes?
Here’s the list of tier 1 routes. Guess how many have been electrified since 2015? Not a single one!
Calder Valley (Leeds to Manchester and Preston via Bradford and Brighouse)
Liverpool to Manchester via Warrington Central
Southport/Kirkby to Salford Crescent
Chester to Stockport
Northallerton to Middlesbrough
Leeds to York via Harrogate
Selby to Hull
Sheffield (Meadowhall) to Leeds via Barnsley / Castleford & connections
Bolton to Clitheroe
Sheffield to Doncaster/Wakefield Westgate (Dearne Valley)
Hazel Grove to Buxton
Warrington to Chester
How many are on the fantasy list? Just one (Sheffield to Leeds) with no funding agreed.
The truth is – ‘Network North’ is a con, which is why the ‘North’ now includes the South-East and Devon and Cornwall! Just look at the map! It’s the whole of England (and a bit of Scotland)! Oh, and why is Manchester now where Preston is?
Money has been diverted from the North to imaginary schemes right across England. Worse, money that was building a new green railway now will (supposedly) built motorways and dual-carriageways, sometime in the future, maybe – ish. And fill in potholes. So much for ‘net zero’ – and so much for ambition.
Can you start seeing the size of the con yet?
We’re going from spades in the ground actually building something that’s been 15 years in planning to a series of schemes (some resurrected, others just dreamed-up) where the vast majority of them will never happen – but they will look good on election pamphlets in marginal constituencies in 2024.
One of the great ironies of all these is one of Sunak’s main justifications for scrapping HS2 phase 2 which is the fact it’s been repeatedly delayed. Yes, and whose bloody fault is that? His Governments! If the Tories hadn’t continually dithered and delayed, changed their minds and kept interfering in the plans, Phase 1 and 2a of HS2 would have opened in 2026 and 2027.
Now we see the Tories doing their damndest to sabotage the future through a scorched earth policy of selling off land earmarked for HS2 as quickly as possible to make it as difficult (and expensive) as possible for Labour to re-instate what’s been scrapped. It’s political cynicism and economic destructiveness at its worst.
There’s another problem too. Credibility. Who in the financial markets of business sectors will trust the word of this bunch of liars again? Why would anyone take the risk of investing in the UK when a government acts this way? Over the past few years the Tories have proved they simply can’t be trusted to keep their word, be it international agreements they admit they’d willingly renege on (brexit) to HS2.
A final problem. This is government by diktat. No-one was consulted about this. This is Sunak usurping power and ignoring the democratic process. Ignoring the will of Parliament, ignoring regional elected political leaders and ignoring the institutions of state such as bodies tasked to run the transport needs of the country. It’s profoundly undemocratic. We don’t even know who drew up this daft list of projects. All we know is no-one who matters was consulted – apart from the Tory Mayor of Birmingham, Andy Street, who was stopped from resigning (if the threat was ever real) by being fobbed of with the promise of a rail scheme he’s been fobbed off with in the past and which still hasn’t been delivered.
The whole of the UK not just the North should be appalled at what’s occurred. This is no way to plan anything – much less the economic wellbeing of a country. But that stopped mattering to the Tories years ago. Now all that matters is trying to cling to power.
It’s been said that what the Tory party conference was really about was a battle for the soul of the Conservative party. What that conference proved was that they don’t have one.
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I’m not going to pull any punches here but neither am I going to get into too much detail right now as I’m too bloody angry and still gathering data.
Here’s what I do know. Sunak has lied. Big time and repeatedly – and this is all down to him. Cabinet responsibility my arse. From what I’ve been told by various sources no-one had a clue what he was going to say until the very last moment. Many not even then.
No-one in the railway industry had any idea. Nor in HS2 Ltd, or the Infrastructure Commission. The Regional Mayors of the cities affected (including the Mayor of London) hadn’t the foggiest. None of the people who should have been consulted on cancelling the biggest civil engineering project in Europe were consulted – at all. This was a decision made by one man – and whoever’s been whispering in his ear.
Because Sunak lied to everyone.
He insisted just a few days ago that ‘no decision had been taken’ He lied. How do we know? Because shortly after his appalling speech at the Tory party conference this document, titled ‘Network North’ was slipped out on the DfT (who hadn’t been consulted either) website.
It’s 35 pages long. There’s no way on God’s green earth this was cobbled together over last weekend – although cobbled together it was. It’s appalling and I’ll be pulling it apart in another blog.
Sunak is claiming that by cancelling phase 2 of HS2 he has £36bn to spend on transport projects around the UK. It’s a lie. There are no £36bn savings. The money doesn’t exist. None of these projects could possibly happen before the next election. The budgeted spend on HS2 phase 2 over the next 5 years is around £3bn. The small print on page 24 of ‘Network North’ gives the game away. These schemes are a wish list that have no business case (and never will) nor planning permission or any other of the legal hoops such schemes have to jump through. Plus, the amounts they’re supposedly meant to cost are pure guesswork. It’s a con, an election con.
HS2 Phase 2 had (to quote Sunak’s laughable phrase) ‘spades in the ground’. He’s scrapped a scheme that was actually being built for ‘jam tomorrow’ but he knows he won’t be around to make any of them happen. It’s pure bullshit, and the party faithful (and the gullible) will fall for it – as well as a few parochial Northern luddites. He’s set rail investment and tackling Climate Change back by a generation. Oh, and don’t even get me started on the faux Greens who’re welcoming the decision to cancel a green railway to divert the money to road building instead. I have a special circle in hell reserved for them…
We are all being lied to – big time. We need to start understanding that – and we need to start doing something about it. Much of the national and nearly all of the regional media are doing an appalling job on this because they’re not doing the obvious and following the money. What money? The £36bn is a fantasy, as HS2 Ltd and Government accounts show – so why are they not pointing this out?
I’ve a small favour to ask… If you enjoy reading this or any of the other blogs I’ve written, please click on an advert or two. You don’t have to buy anything you don’t want to of course – although if you did find something that tickled your fancy that would be fab! – but the revenue from them helps me to cover some of the cost of maintaining this site (which isn’t cheap and comes out of my own pocket). Remember, 99% of the pictures used in my blogs can be purchased as prints from my other website – https://paulbigland.zenfolio.com/