Paul Salveson says thinking big on transport could help turn the tide of support for Labour
This year’s Labour Party conference will be an opportunity for Labour to regain some of the support which it has been haemorrhaging in the last twelve months, among both members and supporters. Over the last few weeks, I’ve heard from several friends who are longstanding active members saying they’ve had enough and are pinning their hopes on the Corbyn/Sultana “Your Party” or whatever it calls itself. At the same time, many supporters, and even members, seem to be falling for the charms of Reform UK. So Labour is being pulled from both left and right, particularly in England, and the prospect of a Farage-led government is becoming stronger.
Labour is gathering in Liverpool, a city that is never one for going with the prevailing tide. Once a place with strong working-class Tory support, today it has a solid Labour majority on the city council with a centre-left leadership under Liam Robinson (who happens to be from a rail background) as well as on the councils making up the combined authority for Liverpool City Region, with Steve Rotheram as mayor.
Labour could win back some of the support it has lost – or at least stop itself from losing more – by thinking big on transport, particularly rail. I’m not saying that out of any bias (as if!) but because rail has the potential for delivering massive social, economic and environmental benefits and can help to rebalance investment away from the South of England towards the North.
The Labour leadership seems set to make some major announcements on rail, including a final go-ahead for Northern Powerhouse Rail – a new high-speed line linking Liverpool with Manchester, West Yorkshire and the east coast. At the same time, the desperately needed connection from HS2’s current endpoint (a field north of Birmingham) may get the go-ahead. Let’s hope that both do get the green signal, but there’s much in the details that Labour must get right. The pursuit for speed and journey time savings is not the key issue – it’s about improving connectivity and opening up capacity on a rail network still struggling with major bottlenecks, particularly in the central Manchester “Castlefield Corridor”, which constrains growth right across the North.
The two major projects, which, even if the Government can get a better grip on spiralling costs, will be in many billions of pounds, need to be planned together, though not necessarily delivered at the same time. The more pressing challenge is getting HS2, or its successor, to Manchester and joining up with the West Coast Main Line north to Preston, Carlisle and Scotland. A lot is already happening with east-west links – The TransPennine Route Upgrade – which will provide some relief to capacity constraints across the Pennines.
Those two projects, as well as the Castlefield Corridor, huge though they are, will not be enough. Across the North, decades of under-investment have left towns and cities like Blackburn, Bradford, Burnley, Barrow and Barnsley (maybe there should be a “Campaign for the Bs?”) with poor transport connections to their main neighbouring centres. Their economies lag behind the rest of the country, and there are strong undercurrents of unrest around issues such as immigration and housing. Rail hasn’t got all the answers, but it has quite a few of them, offering the best way to shift large numbers of people to cities where there are jobs, training and educational opportunities. North-east Lancashire in particular needs investment on a massive scale, with rail at the heart of a revival which ought to see electrification, service improvements and re-opening of the 10-mile stretch of line between Colne and Skipton to provide a much-needed connection from West Yorkshire (Leeds in particular, but also Bradford) to Burnley, Accrington, Blackburn and Preston. Most of these are places where Reform is making strong headway.
There are certainly other parts of the North that need investment, and the combined authority mayors like Burnham, Rotheram, Brabin and Coppard are already proving themselves effective at getting funds from central government. The biggest problem is in the neglected Northern towns which don’t yet have strong combined authorities like Greater Manchester, Liverpool and West/South Yorkshire. Yet I’m not convinced the “combined authority” model is up to the job.
As I’ve argued many times before in these columns, the North needs a strong devolved government akin to what Scotland already has. That could be one powerful region for the whole of the North, or something similar to what John Prescott argued for decades ago – smaller, but still powerful, directly-elected regional authorities with revenue-raising powers and control over areas such as transport and economic development.
We should have moved on many years ago from the disappointment of the referendum on regional government for the North-East (we never had one for Yorkshire or the North-West) and given the whole of the North the democratic – and financial – tools to rebuild a neglected region.