Cameron derails Sunak on HS2

David Cameron has criticised Rishi Sunak’s decision to cancel the northern leg of HS2, in a rare intervention that somewhat derailed the Prime Minister’s big day closing Tory Party Conference.

Supporters may say the PM has made the best of a bad situation and that cancelling HS2 and allocating the resources to other projects in the North is a far more efficient way to spend a huge amount of taxpayer money.

However, Cameron criticised the move: “Today’s decision on HS2 is the wrong one. Today’s announcement throws away fifteen years of cross-party consensus, sustained over six administrations, and will make it much harder to build consensus for any future long-term projects. I regret this decision and in years to come I suspect many will look back at today’s announcement and wonder how this once-in-a-generation opportunity was lost.”

This is not at all what Sunak or his team will have wanted. A former PM, from the moderate wing, choosing the hours after a leader’s speech to make his point. Cameron will have known exactly what he was doing.

We now wait to see whether or not there will be Tory rebellions on HS2.

Earlier, Sunak had concluded the conference in Manchester with a speech centred around three key pledges. First, that pledge to scrap HS2 and recycle the saved money into other transport investments (mostly in the North of England). Second, Sunak vowed to increase the smoking age from 18 by one year every year to eventually arrive at a “smoke-free generation”. And finally, a new “Advanced British Standard” qualification will replace A-Levels and T-Levels in England.

Sunak was attempting a factory reset of the Tory party ahead of next year’s election. 

He was introduced by his wife Akshata Murthy, who said the one word she would use to describe her husband’s drive and purpose would be “aspiration”. But some have already called the scrapping of HS2 nothing less than a crisis of ambition.

Rather than proceeding with HS2 given the spiralling costs, the PM said that the £36 billion saved would be best spent on those other projects.

The government claims £19.8 bn will be spent in the North of England: £2 bn on a new Bradford station, £2.5 bn on a “mass transit system in West Yorkshire, £3bn on upgraded and electrified lines between Manchester, Sheffield, Leeds and Hull. The Midlands will receive £9.6 bn, £1.75 of which will be spent on the Midlands rail hub connecting 50 stations. The rest of the country will receive £6.5 bn in transport investment.

Sunak’s decision has also placed him in some hot water with metro mayors.

On hearing the announcement, Manchester mayor Andy Burnham repeated his well-worn line: “It always seems that people here where I live and where I kind of represent can be treated as second class citizens when it comes to transport.” His West Midlands Tory counterpart Andy Street said he was “very disappointed” although admitted that a recent meeting with the PM had been “cordial” and the two had left on good terms.

On smoking, Sunak pledged to pass legislation that would mean 14-year-olds today would never be able to smoke, a similar policy to the one introduced by Jacinda Ardern in New Zealand, an unlikely Tory role model. This has sparked some disquiet among conservatives and it’s not hard to see why. Some pointed out the curious potential consequences of such a policy.

But with an ailing health system and smoking causing one in four cancer cases, the PM argued, in keeping with the new party motto, that he was making “long-term decisions for a brighter future”.

As for education, A-levels and T-levels (the latter were only introduced in 2020) will become the “Advanced British Standard” with an aim to improve options for technical and vocational education as opposed to priming all students for university progression.

The use of British is odd. Scotland has its own system, Highers rather than A-levels with a broader range of subjects. Had Number 10 forgotten Scotland has its own education system?

Preceding Sunak’s speech, Leader of the Commons Penny Mordaunt implicitly launched a post-Sunak leadership campaign but her repetition of “stand up and fight” must have sounded better in her head than in reality.

So, that’s the Conservative Party Conference done for another year with Labour’s starting on Sunday.

The opposition will be confident – as much as the Tories tried to regroup and gain coherence, they fell short. Calls for “family, nation and community” from the National Conservative contingent were met with free-market libertarianism from Truss’s “Make Britain Grow Again” group. It made for a confused message.

Sunak’s strength is his weakness: the stable managerialism that stopped the Tories from self-immolation makes it difficult to engender the kind of energy and vision the party needs to improve the country or be optimistic about retaining power.

Over to you, Labour.

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