Last 8 greater manchester tory seats gone I reckon.
I doubt most of the redwall Gter Manchester seats are bothered either way by HS2, they want inflation down further and better bus routes and local train stations not a quicker journey to London which they rarely go to anyway
My point is it is two fingers to people from Manchester by Sunak. Doesn't matter whether it is HS2 or whatever. It is London elite telling the north that they are happy to spend billions on a high speed line out of london but manchester can go and do one.
The Tories have a seat in Birmingham, the Tories have 0 seats in Manchester
No seats in the City of Manchester, but, what, nine in Greater Manchester? Many won on the premise of Levelling Up. "Sorry Greater Manchester, we spent all our money on transport schemes in the south so can't afford to give you the £6bn we promised. But we'll repair some potholes and give you a new bus". Not likely to go down well.
Surely, surely you can see how badly this is going down?
Voters in redwall Greater Manchester seats do NOT live in Manchester city itself and rarely go on the train to London.
They would much rather have new buses and potholes repaired than HS2
*bangs head against brick wall*
Really? "£6bn of rail investment in GM? Or repair some potholes?" "We're just simple people here, the pothole option seems much more up our street."
What voters in redwall Greater Manchester want is what they were promised - i.e. levelling up - i.e. finally, some of the money that was always spent in London being spent in Greater Manchester. Because that brings about jobs and investment and growth. WHICH IS THE POINT OF HS2.
Now, a secret: more even than HS2, we'd like NPR. That does even more: more access to jobs, more relief of suburban routes, more connectivity, more investement. But the middle section of NPR is delivered by HS2: we can't do NPR until HS2 Phase 2b puts in place the Manchester Airport to Manchester section, plus the high speed stations at Manchesters Piccadilly and Airport.
(In fact, ALL of Phase 2b technically supports NPR, because there are two proposed NPR services an hour running Newcastle-Leeds-Manchester-Crewe-Birmingham. But weirdly no-one really talks about them.)
Voters in redwall seats hardly ever go to London. Why would they therefore want a faster rail ink from Manchester city centre to London they would hardly ever use which could be used for bus routes they would use or repairing potholes in their area?
Better bus routes is more levelling up for them and the working class Leave voters and pensioners than posh Remain voting commuters and students getting a faster commute to and from London.
Even adding NPR routes to Leeds and Bradford wouldn't benefit them much either compared to better bus routes and local roads
Why would they want a faster rail link from Manchester to London? Well, as I keep saying, because it would bring investment and jobs to Greater Manchester far in excess of what improvements to bus services would bring.
Levelling up is not sitting and wondering why all the investment continues to go to the south east.
If Turin and Lyon can be linked via a 57km tunnel, why can't we also have a Pennine Base Tunnel? A star shaped layout between Manchester, Sheffield and Leeds.
Just sink the whole sodding thing below ground and avoid the planning nightmares.
Note that it seems to be costing about 1/4 of HS2...
65 miles of HS2 tunnel for the south. You'd want at least the same for the north.
If Levelling Up is a thing - and you accept that connectivity is greater in the south east than in the north - you need to be spending more on connectivity in the north than in the south (assuming your investments are sensible - but really, so onerous is the process of getting investment in transport that generally, they are). However, since Levelling Up was announced as a policy, the reverse has been true. The gap is therefore widening.
Tis is why HS2 was such a stupid project when it came to levelling up. What we wnat is inversment 'in' the North not investment 'to' the North. There are so many ways in which the transport and communications systems could be transformed north of the Trent but which have been sacrificed on the altar of the HS2 white elephant.
If SUnak had had any sense (he doesn't of course) he would have done some proper planning for this over the last year or so and come to this point able to say HS2 from Birmingham north - both to Manchester and Leeds - was going to cost (for example) £100 billion. So to prove our commitment to the North here are a seies of projects IN the north which we will commit to and which will cost, in total, £100 billion.
You could do a hell of a lot for transport and communications within the north of England with £100 billion.
@Richard_Tyndall - while I'm an enthusiastic backer of HS2, if you offered the Midlands and North £100 billion (I don't know if you picked that number out of thin air, but the cost envelope cited in the IRP for the North and Midlands is £96 billion, so well done if you did) ON TOP OF the other funding we would hope to receive (roads, buses, CRSTS etc), I would happily take it. Divvied up by population, that would work out at about £6bn for Greater Manchester. I want HS2 not because it is absolutely the best use of £96 billion for the North and Midlands (though I think it comes reasonably high up the list) but because it's a shot at getting any substantial investment at all in the North and Midlands. Investment > connectivity > growth. Would we get more growth if we spent the money on a Central Manchester underground (along with a Leeds tram, a new single underground station in Bradford, whatever Sheffield wants, etc)? Maybe. Maybe not. But either would be a far, far better option that a fart in a jar for buses and potholes.
Indeed. My argument is not against spending the money. I absolutely get the argument about capital expenditure. My argument is that there have always been so many other, somewhat less glamerous but much needed projects on which this money could be spent which would actually do far more to improve the economy of the Midlands and North. This was the case when it was going to cost £56 billion and is even more the case now they are mooting an overall cost of £180 billion.
It’s completely reasonable to say that we should have done a laundry list of other things before HS2 & HS2 may not be the most effective thing to have spent a pile of £ on. But spending a pile of £ on half of HS2 and then killing it off, making the whole thing almost pointless: that takes a really determined insistence on wasting money
You'd hope most of the sunk cost would be in the Aston -> Acton Euston bit.
HS2 is being announced now, early this morning, so it clears the airwaves for other stuff when Sunak makes his speech later today.
So something is coming.
Free chess set for every house?
We've already had a preview.
...We’ve already had a sneak preview of some of the things Rishi Sunak will say in his speech later, and in it he’ll reflect on his first year as prime minister.
He will say that “politics doesn’t work the way it should”, before setting out how he wants to change the way our political system works and end the 30-year political status quo.
“We’ve had 30 years of a political system which incentivises the easy decision, not the right one” he will tell the Conservative Party Conference.
“Our political system is too focused on short term advantage, not long-term success. Our mission is to fundamentally change our country.”..
Sorry HS2 and NPR built in full is the right long term decision - the easy political decision to save a few quid now is to cancel HS2 because if you don't understand the difference between day to day expenditure and one off investment spending it looks like it provides a few pounds to be spent elsewhere.
A few quid? This is a railway costing in the ball park of £500m per mile. A cost of £100,000 PER FOOT. Even one millimetre of HS2 is costing very roughly £3,000. Offer each one of say 80 UK cities and towns the choice of £500m of public investment directly in their area compared to the continuation of HS2 to Manchester. What do you think their choice would be?
What is being missed from the entire HS2 debate is the just sheer enormous cost of the damn thing. If the costs were remotely sensible you could have a valid discussion about whether the business case stood up in terms of costs relative to the various claimed benefits, whether those claimed benefits are tangible and can be relied on in the longer term (eg. shift away from long distance travel to business meetings) and whether those benefits should in any case be top of the priorities pile for a constrained amount of government investment (eg. alternative transport investment, alternative public investment in say affordable housing.) But the costs are now simply mind boggling and should shut any debate down before it's even started.
There should be an independent enquiry to examine the reasons that public capital expenditure projects are so expensive and get them reduced. For starters, no changes after orders are placed, fixed price contracts, no civil service or politician interference once orders are placed. Make the contractor take the risk, not the taxpayer.
Good luck finding a contractor prepared to take on a fixed-price EPC contract for a major project these days.
I don't know what the form of contract was for Heathrow terminal 5, but apparently that was completed on time and on budget. Could not that be repeated?
Is Street thinking of quitting as Mayor or quitting the Tories and staying on as an independent mayor?
Which one pays the bills.....not that one I suspect....
Andy Street is as rich as Croesus, and his salary as West Midlands Mayor is chump change to him. He could also walk into any number of very well remunerated executive or non-executive posts were he not in the job.
He no doubt enjoys his political job, so would think twice about resigning on that basis, but the money simply won't be a factor in his decision.
Nigel Farage joins the Tories before they lose the election. Suella Braverman becomes leader after. A few think it's their dream come true. Millions will look for a new home.
Braverman might win the Conservative membership vote but would be unlikely to get enough Conservative MPs votes to make the final 2. When she stood for the leadership last year she didn't even make the final 5 with Tory MPs let alone the final 2
Braverman is doing an excellent job of rolling the pitch for her and her brand of " radical conservatism". Her speech yesterday may have been untruthful conspiratorial gibberish but it was presented beautifully.
If you are a true Tory, like Andrew Boff, you should be arguing against this BNP- not so lite with your every breath, in order to reclaim your one nation party.
Andrew Boff is a very left-wing Tory, and a plant botherer.
It'd be like me bigging up Kate Hoey.
The hunt for the ideological impure used to be a left-wing pastime. Depressing to see right-wingers like you and HYUFD indulge in it too.
Its alright, Rishi clearly understands it is a broad church and is therefore flashing some leg at Nige.
“Jobs at risk as new train orders hit the buffers.
Britain’s four rolling stock companies are set to be left with little or no work by the end of next year because of the government’s failure to order any new main line trains for almost four years.”
Railways have suffered a series of gluts and dearth of new train orders since 1948, and this continued into privatisation. There is only one 'native' builder left; the old BREL carriage works at Derby (now owned by Alstom). A couple more have opened in recent years; Hitachi in the northeast and Goole in the last few years. We probably now have too much train building capacity, after having a shortage.
And the blame for this lies firmly on the DfT, whose dead hand (also partly aided by the treasury) has zero long-term planning.
Serious question. How much of this can be blamed on the Government when the railways are privatised and buying new rolling stock should (I assume) be the responsibility of the private companies?
Problem is that it should be, but it isn't.
The train companies are basically just contractors working for DfT these days, and they can't make any decisions on rolling stock without DfT say-so. At the moment there are reliable, modern train fleets standing idle, despite overcrowding on many lines, because DfT is engaged in a staring match with the lessors (the "ROSCOs") to bring the lease prices down. The ROSCOs won't reduce their prices because they've been dicked around so much in the last few years. And so it goes on.
“Jobs at risk as new train orders hit the buffers.
Britain’s four rolling stock companies are set to be left with little or no work by the end of next year because of the government’s failure to order any new main line trains for almost four years.”
Railways have suffered a series of gluts and dearth of new train orders since 1948, and this continued into privatisation. There is only one 'native' builder left; the old BREL carriage works at Derby (now owned by Alstom). A couple more have opened in recent years; Hitachi in the northeast and Goole in the last few years. We probably now have too much train building capacity, after having a shortage.
And the blame for this lies firmly on the DfT, whose dead hand (also partly aided by the treasury) has zero long-term planning.
Serious question. How much of this can be blamed on the Government when the railways are privatised and buying new rolling stock should (I assume) be the responsibility of the private companies?
Problem is that it should be, but it isn't.
The train companies are basically just contractors working for DfT these days, and they can't make any decisions on rolling stock without DfT say-so. At the moment there are reliable, modern train fleets standing idle, despite overcrowding on many lines, because DfT is engaged in a staring match with the lessors (the "ROSCOs") to bring the lease prices down. The ROSCOs won't reduce their prices because they've been dicked around so much in the last few years. And so it goes on.
Cheers. Didn't know how it worked (or fails to work)
“Jobs at risk as new train orders hit the buffers.
Britain’s four rolling stock companies are set to be left with little or no work by the end of next year because of the government’s failure to order any new main line trains for almost four years.”
Railways have suffered a series of gluts and dearth of new train orders since 1948, and this continued into privatisation. There is only one 'native' builder left; the old BREL carriage works at Derby (now owned by Alstom). A couple more have opened in recent years; Hitachi in the northeast and Goole in the last few years. We probably now have too much train building capacity, after having a shortage.
And the blame for this lies firmly on the DfT, whose dead hand (also partly aided by the treasury) has zero long-term planning.
Serious question. How much of this can be blamed on the Government when the railways are privatised and buying new rolling stock should (I assume) be the responsibility of the private companies?
AIUI the DfT has to okay all rolling stock purchases, as when a franchise ends the stock may need to go on to another provider. So the franchises talk to the DfT; the DFT talk to the ROSCOs, who order the stock, or they DfT orders the trains directly and leases them, giving Hitachi massive amounts of lucre.
It's why so many train companies have been forced to buy the dire IET trains.
It's not exactly a sane way of doing this, which is why we have stupidity like the Nova 3 trains being removed from service after just four years.
It might be. It also creates a challenge for Labour. They basically have three options.
1. Commit to reverse the decision. In which case they're then committing to cutting all the extra spending/reversing all the tax cuts, that Sunak will promise the saved money will be used for.
2. Commit to reinstate HS2, without reversing the extra spending/tax cuts, in which case they can be attacked for extra borrowing or plans to increase taxes.
3. Do nothing. In which case, what is the point of them?
It's small beans compared to the hole the Tories have dug for themselves. They've spent thirteen years spending money on HS2, and *now* they're deciding to bin it?
HS2 is one off capital expenditure -how does that allow a tax cut beyond a very small one from the £x00m "in borrowing costs" saved
I'm getting to the point where all the Treasury needs to go on a basic finance course -
This is capital expenditure
This is ongoing monthly / annual income and expenditure.
Agreed. The savings should be redirected to other - far more needed - projects in the North. Maintain the capital spend but do something more useful with it.
HS3 is a large chunk of the cost of HS2 though. I guess they could reinstate the Picadilly expansion, which is (I believe) sorely needed but was cancelled in May.
Otherwise - more roads further north to try and buy off the blue wall?
Number of people in work per mile of road, England:
East Midlands 101 East of England 104 London 407 North East 96 North West 126 South East 127 South West 74 West Midlands 110 Yorkshire and The Humber 109
Even more stark with Motorways. I think the NE might have an argument for some upgrades, but the north is hardly a road-less wilderness. Workers per mile of motorway:
East Midlands 15,747 East of England 15,260 London 99,943 North East 26,945 North West 7,054 South East 9,288 South West 11,222 West Midlands 8,193 Yorkshire and The Humber 7,634
The full dualling of the A1 is the probably the most obvious road project in England. But the decision keeps being delayed. What more is there to look at !
The only bit that is not dualled is the section in Northumbria and round the corner to Edinburgh.
To Dunbar; it's *now* dual thereafter to Edinburgh.
TBH the A120 now carries a lot of traffic for Harwich and it’s not dualled between Braintree and the A12. It’s getting more and more dangerous.
Just a shame they didn't sort out the rail electrification gaps en route to Felixstowe. ISTR the freight chappies have been howling about this for years for their container cargoes to the distribution centres - ideal for trains.
Absolutely! Access to Felixstowe, Britain’s busiest container port, isn’t too bad by road along the A14, but it’s not good by rail. I don’t know what’s going to happen with London Portway, in S Essex. Lines and roads are crowded there, too.
Nigel Farage joins the Tories before they lose the election. Suella Braverman becomes leader after. A few think it's their dream come true. Millions will look for a new home.
Braverman might win the Conservative membership vote but would be unlikely to get enough Conservative MPs votes to make the final 2. When she stood for the leadership last year she didn't even make the final 5 with Tory MPs let alone the final 2
Braverman is doing an excellent job of rolling the pitch for her and her brand of " radical conservatism". Her speech yesterday may have been untruthful conspiratorial gibberish but it was presented beautifully.
If you are a true Tory, like Andrew Boff, you should be arguing against this BNP- not so lite with your every breath, in order to reclaim your one nation party.
Andrew Boff is a very left-wing Tory, and a plant botherer.
It'd be like me bigging up Kate Hoey.
The hunt for the ideological impure used to be a left-wing pastime. Depressing to see right-wingers like you and HYUFD indulge in it too.
Not really. It's me responding to @Mexicanpete that he's a true Tory.
It's a broad church, that I welcome, but representing someone of the fringe of it as mainstream Tory opinion simply isn't accurate.
I note that Lib Dem canvassers in Mid Beds now seem quite optimistic, claiming over and since the weekend that a large swathe of the Conservative vote is moving to the Lib Dems. Up to now nothing like this has been reported. If accurate and those canvassers usually are, then it appears the Don''t Knows in the last Labour commissioned opinion poll are seemingly nailing their colours to the mast, which should be more than enough to take the Lib Dems past Labour. But what do I know?
I note that Lib Dem canvassers in Mid Beds now seem quite optimistic, claiming over and since the weekend that a large swathe of the Conservative vote is moving to the Lib Dems. Up to now nothing like this has been reported. If accurate and those canvassers usually are, then it appears the Don''t Knows in the last Labour commissioned opinion poll are seemingly nailing their colours to the mast, which should be more than enough to take the Lib Dems past Labour. But what do I know?
Seems plausible. HS2 was the final straw.
It’s not the pros or minuses of HS2 itself, it’s the signal that Britain is just fucked and can’t do anything.
The abject twattery on display in Manchester: chaotic, arrogant when they should have been contrite, Farage, Truss, and Sunak's supply teacher lack of charisma is the last straw for the Conservative coalition. In the coming months I think we will see the Tories third in the polls.
I wonder at what point overnight Sunak decided to axe HS2 to Manchester?
He made it clear in his interviews yesterday that he had not yet decided.
Its obvious that it had been made a while back. The issue for the Tories/government is just how leaky things have got. Aside of whether it is the right or wrong thing to do, the big issue is that its dominated the news for weeks because someone cannot keep their mouths shut. And that is a huge problem. Its ruined any hope of a decent conference.
The blob theorists will surely blame the civil service. They might be right, but equally it could be anyone in the loop with an axe to grind (northern Tory MP).
“Jobs at risk as new train orders hit the buffers.
Britain’s four rolling stock companies are set to be left with little or no work by the end of next year because of the government’s failure to order any new main line trains for almost four years.”
Another moronic conservative cock up. I am beginning to get as angry as Malc about the sheer unrelenting God-awfulness of these tenth rate bunch of shits.
Comments
He no doubt enjoys his political job, so would think twice about resigning on that basis, but the money simply won't be a factor in his decision.
The train companies are basically just contractors working for DfT these days, and they can't make any decisions on rolling stock without DfT say-so. At the moment there are reliable, modern train fleets standing idle, despite overcrowding on many lines, because DfT is engaged in a staring match with the lessors (the "ROSCOs") to bring the lease prices down. The ROSCOs won't reduce their prices because they've been dicked around so much in the last few years. And so it goes on.
It's why so many train companies have been forced to buy the dire IET trains.
It's not exactly a sane way of doing this, which is why we have stupidity like the Nova 3 trains being removed from service after just four years.
NEW THREAD
I don’t know what’s going to happen with London Portway, in S Essex. Lines and roads are crowded there, too.
It's a broad church, that I welcome, but representing someone of the fringe of it as mainstream Tory opinion simply isn't accurate.
If accurate and those canvassers usually are, then it appears the Don''t Knows in the last Labour commissioned opinion poll are seemingly nailing their colours to the mast, which should be more than enough to take the Lib Dems past Labour. But what do I know?
HS2 was the final straw.
It’s not the pros or minuses of HS2 itself, it’s the signal that Britain is just fucked and can’t do anything.
The blob theorists will surely blame the civil service. They might be right, but equally it could be anyone in the loop with an axe to grind (northern Tory MP).