It is a feature of
the UK’s electoral system that one party gets absolute power on the basis of a
minority of votes, whilst opposition parties are rendered impotent.
Occasionally – very occasionally – however, circumstances conspire to place a
certain amount of power in the hands of the opposition.
The possibility of a
future resurrection of HS2 is a case in point. In an attempt to not merely kill
the project, but to drive a stake through its heart and garland the coffin with
garlic, Sunak is rushing to try and cancel contracts and sell off the land
already purchased. But land sales can take time, and in all probability there are
less than 12 months to go before an election which all the polls and pundits
predict will usher in a Labour government. If Starmer really wanted to
resurrect the project (as most of his party colleagues north of Birmingham seem
to be demanding), then he could announce that he will immediately reverse any
land sales as soon as he gets into office. It wouldn’t stop land being sold, of
course; but if people really believed that the time, effort, and money that
they would need to put into acquiring the land would, in all probability, be
wasted, most of them would think twice before rushing into any deals. The government
could respond by selling off the land cheaply (rather than at a higher price as
some have predicted),
but any valuer looking at a repurchase by the government would presumably take
that lower price into account when assessing market value. Instead of which,
Starmer is standing on the sidelines bleating about the Tories tying his hands
by selling off land, and using that as an excuse not to commit. It’s possible,
of course, that he doesn’t want to build HS2 – a respectable position, even if large
swathes of his party disagree with him – but he’s choosing to hide behind the
Tories instead.
Meanwhile, it turns
out that, despite what he said and what most of the media reported
last week, Sunak most emphatically did NOT announce the electrification of the
north Wales mainline. Not only is the figure he placed on the cost little more
than a finger
in the air estimate, he’s now saying
that nothing on the long list published last week was intended to be taken
seriously, it was just a list of illustrative examples. A bold attempt to
counter the fact that he had p***ed off large swathes of the north of England
by pleasing a larger number of people elsewhere has ended up p***ing them off
too. Perhaps he was just insufficiently clear about the actual status of his
little list, but it looks more like a wholly deliberate intention that people would
be so delighted at his ‘announcements’ that they wouldn’t scrutinise the detail
too closely. Or maybe he’s enough of a realist to understand that nothing he
can or say do will avoid the looming defeat and that his best strategy is to
make things as difficult as possible for an opposition which has committed to
accepting his policies and budgets as a starting point, no matter how unrealistic
and incoherent they might be. He might almost be so desperately incompetent as
to be clever: perhaps the stupidest one is the one who accepts unrealistic
budgets and incoherent policy as a valid starting point and tries to work from
there.
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1 comment:
HS2 always was a vanity project full of overpriced gestures by a Government that could only exist on such gestures ( see Covid crisis, Nuclear deterrent etc). There may have been a case for improving London to Birmingham rail route, but the biggest need was the cross country Liverpool to Hull route with a whole host of major centres clustered around it. Scandalous sums of money have already been blown and no doubt more will go down the drain because extracting from a big deal such as HS2 also costs money. Yet another example of public money being syphoned off into private and corporate coffers. Was this part of a devious plan all along ?
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