Manchester-Birmingham route with strong opposition party support canceled due to budget surge
“If the facts have changed, you must courageously change direction.”
British Prime Minister Rishi Sunnack announced on the 4th that the plan to build a high-speed railway directly from Manchester, a large city in northern England, to London, the southern capital, would be canceled due to rising costs.
Prime Minister Sunnack, who became the new Prime Minister after being elected as the leader of the ruling Conservative Party at the end of October last year, held his first national party conference in Manchester on this day and announced his plan to cancel the policy, which would deal a huge blow to Manchester.
Northern England, including Manchester, was a strong base of Labor support before Prime Minister Boris Johnson expanded the Conservative Party’s seats in 2019 by gambling on an early general election immediately after the Brexit agreement. It lags behind economically compared to southern regions such as London.
The Conservative Party (Tory), which took power after defeating the Labor Party for the first time in 13 years in the 2010 general election, immediately announced a plan for the second London direct high-speed rail (High Speed HS2) as a way to ‘level up’ the central and northern regions of the Labor Party’s support base. did.
Broadly speaking, the plan is to build three high-speed rail routes from London, through Birmingham, the center of the central Midlands, to Manchester in the northwest and Leeds in the north-central, drastically reducing the time to travel to and from London.
However, as a huge amount of government debt was spent to support the coronavirus recovery economy, the plan for the Leeds Line, an inland northern route from Birmingham, was scrapped, and on this day, Prime Minister Sunnack said that the Northern Line high-speed rail from Birmingham to Manchester next to Liverpool on the coast would also not be built.
Prime Minister Sunnack said, “This high-speed rail plan is an old consensus. “The facts have changed, and in times like these, we must have the courage to change direction,” he said, notifying Manchester that there are no plans for a high-speed rail line from the Manchester terminus.
What has changed is that the cost of HiSpeed 2 was expected to be 33 billion pounds at the time, but it is now estimated to be well over 100 billion pounds (121 billion dollars, 164 trillion won), three times that amount.
Accordingly, construction will continue as planned only on the HS2-1 section from London to Birmingham, 160km north, and the remaining HS2 route from Birmingham to Manchester will be abandoned. It has been touted that if 400 km/h HS2 is completed as planned, the travel time from Manchester to London will be halved to just one hour.
Prime Minister Sunnack made the rumored cancellation official through a speech at the national convention with the slogan, ‘Long-term decision for a better future.’ He instead emphasized that he would use the remaining £36 billion to build links between the North and Central rather than transport links with London.
The Conservative Party, which won a landslide victory in the December 2019 general election, is falling behind the main opposition Labor Party in opinion polls, with its approval rating plummeting due to the lack of credibility of Johnson and former Prime Minister Liz Truss. There is only one year left until the regular general election in December next year.
At this critical political moment, Prime Minister Sunnack announced the cancellation of the metropolitan high-speed rail system, which the opposition party strongly supported, calling it a ‘courageous long-term decision’…
Source: Donga
Mark Jones is a world traveler and journalist for News Rebeat. With a curious mind and a love of adventure, Mark brings a unique perspective to the latest global events and provides in-depth and thought-provoking coverage of the world at large.