Sunak’s doughnut strategy

It’s party conference season and last week it was the Tory party’s turn, and this is likely to be their last before the next general election. Rishi Sunak, the prime minister, unveiled a sharp U-turn on policies which had previously been geared towards at least appearing to support the reduction in carbon emissions and investing in rail-based infrastructure projects such as the HS2 rail line which is under construction between London and Birmingham, which was originally supposed to reach the East Midlands and Yorkshire as well as Manchester and is now likely only to run between the west London suburbs and Birmingham. Sunak gave a rambling speech promising to curtail 20mph speed limits, cameras aimed at raising fines that “rip off motorists”, low-traffic neighbourhoods and “fifteen-minute cities”. In a number of interviews where he or his ministers were asked whether the Manchester section of HS2 would go ahead or not, they refused to “comment on speculation”, as if the government’s own intention was something they could be said to ‘speculate’ about, and reminded us that most journeys made in the UK are by car.

I was always opposed to HS2; I thought it was a horribly destructive and unnecessary project, a rail line that takes a stupidly circuitous route out of west London when it needs to go north (though in this it follows the same pattern as many of the other northbound railway lines and indeed the M40, which runs for some 30 miles west before it turns more to the north at Oxford). It roughly follows an older express line, the Great Central, which ran through Aylesbury, Brackley and Rugby on its way to the East Midlands; while some parts of this line remain intact, some is preserved and some of the trackbed is intact, much of the line through Brackley and Rugby has been built on and a fast line that passes through a small town but does not stop is unlikely to be very popular there. It also does not serve the centres of the cities it was planned to serve in the East Midlands but rather was going to stop at suburban ‘parkway’ type locations. However, much of the line south of Birmingham is at least partly built — the trackbed, viaducts and so on — and just abandoning it now would be senseless. All this destruction to just cut a few minutes off the journey to Birmingham for people able to pay premium fares is also ludicrous; high-speed lines only make sense for longish journeys such as London to Manchester, Liverpool and Glasgow.

Much as Sunak claims to be reorienting transport investment towards road, the Observer reported today that two major road projects, the A303 upgrade at Stonehenge and the Lower Thames Crossing, were also under threat because of spiralling costs. The latter is a ridiculous project and should absolutely be stopped; as I have detailed before on this site, it links only to the A2 corridor, not the A20/M20 which carries most of the traffic to the cross-Channel ports, which will still be required to use the Dartford crossing. As for Stonehenge, the upgrade has been called ‘urgent’ but I dispute that. The congestion at that point is exaggerated and has been alleviated somewhat by removing the old spur road and traffic lights. A couple of weeks ago I saw a tweet thread which claimed that infrastructure projects here cost so much more and took so much longer because we pay too much attention to NIMBYs and adjust projects too much to suit them, but some of these projects are simply grandiose, unnecessary and senselessly destructive, and any consultation process worth its salt should have nipped them in the bud rather than let them drag on so long.

As for 20mph limits, there is a kernel of truth in what he is saying: too many of them have been imposed on a blanket basis across whole council areas (such as Ealing in west London) without considering whether they are necessary everywhere, the upshot being that one can make a journey of 10 or 15 miles nowadays entirely along A- and B-roads with that speed limit. Until now, red routes (roads controlled by the mayor’s office) have been exempt, but the mayor now intends to impose them along most main roads in London, including large sections of the South Circular Road. (In some places this is quite justifiable, such as on the A24 through Tooting, which is south London’s “curry mile” and popular with tourists, but not everywhere.) In the 1960s and again in the 1980s, plans to build cross-town highways were dropped as a result of popular opposition; people making journeys across a large urban area therefore need to use the existing main roads, and a 20mph speed limit is not feasible for whole journeys of 10 miles or more. Yes, some people can use public transport, but the good public transport links in London tend to go into central London rather than round the suburbs; such journeys are often circuitous, requiring multiple changes of train, with long walks between platforms at stations like Clapham and Willesden Junctions, and often infrequent services.

Sunak is also right about the need to rein in other excesses among local authorities, including the imposition of 24-hour bus lanes in places it was never previously thought necessary, and bus lanes that leave insufficient room for other vehicles, especially trucks, to pass each other safely (see the Archway Road in north London and Clapham Road in Stockwell, south London). As for low-traffic neighbourhoods, this was an issue in 2020 but the ill-thought-out schemes that were rushed into operation then (using money made available at short notice by Boris Johnson’s Tory government, which waived the need to carry out any consultation because of the Covid emergency) have largely been dismantled and some of the ‘zones’ that remain are just one or two blocked-off rat runs. Borough councils pay lip service to securing popular consent, carrying out ‘consultations’, but then ignore the result or interpret it selectively, much as we saw when Ken Livingstone extended the Congestion Charge in his second term, dismissing the negative result by saying it “wasn’t a referendum”.

As for “15-minute cities”, he is appealing to voters who have fallen into conspiracy theories. A 15-minute city is a neighbourhood or suburb (never an actual whole city) where most amenities are within a 15-minute walk, including shops one might visit daily, schools, doctor’s surgeries, a sports centre of some sort, and so on. Part of the conspiracy theory (as opposed to the actual concept) is that we are going to be confined to our neighbourhood, but no local authority has the power to do that; they never have had. Much as with his “meat tax” and “seven bins” claims from his “net zero” speech earlier in September, he is making a show of ‘abolishing’ or ‘scrapping’ something that was not happening and was never even proposed. Why would we not want basic amenities within a short walk? I do not want to have to use my car to get to any amenity; it costs money, and less car use means less stress for the driver and cleaner air for everyone.

He also reminds us of the high proportion of journeys that are made by car: this is in many places a direct result of transport policy that began under Thatcher and has been continued by governments of both parties since. This includes allowing rail fares to rise year on year, making it not worth the while of any car owner to take a train for an inter-town journey as the fare is considerably more than the fuel, and prohibiting local authorities outside London from subsidising bus services. More recently, housing policy has allowed developers to build more and more new housing on the edges of towns and cities which has no amenities within walking distance. One new development I am familiar with, Broadbridge Heath outside Horsham in Sussex, has no doctors’ surgeries and only one (private) dental practice; the nearest doctor’s surgery is a 40 minute walk away in central Horsham, but a six-minute drive or a 23-minute bus journey which you might prefer not to make if you’re vulnerable to infection. Broadbridge does have a large out-of-town Tesco, some smaller shops, a primary school in the old village and a secondary school just across the Horsham by-pass, but a doctor’s surgery should be within a short walk of anyone in an urban area and councils should be allowed to make sure any large new development has one. This isn’t dystopian or totalitarian. It’s just making sure our towns are built for human beings, not cars.

Sunak seems to be running a “doughnut strategy” similar to that of Zac Goldsmith in the 2016 London mayoral election. He is appealing not to rural voters or even those in small towns, but those in the suburbs who are annoyed at low-emission, low-traffic or low-speed zones, often on the basis of misinformation as we saw with the ULEZ protest vote in Uxbridge, where the vast majority of vehicles are in fact compliant. (Towns in counties tend not to have 20mph speed limits on main roads, perhaps because counties treat roads as belonging to everyone, not just the immediate local community.) There is no proposal to allow rural authorities to reinstate subsidised bus services, for example, which might be expected if his pitch was to voters in and around small towns or villages; the money he proposes to revitalise towns is paltry.

However, Sunak has not got my vote. I’ve never voted Tory in a parliamentary election, but these are the worst we have seen in my lifetime. However much I don’t like 20mph speed limits or 24-hour bus lanes, there are other issues at stake. The Tories over the past few years have made a stinking mess of the country (literally given the state of the rivers and coastline); they have allowed council after council to go bankrupt by starving them of funds, leaving local rate-payers to pick up the tab; they have made us the laughing stock of Europe by signing a miserable deal and then continually putting off keeping our side of it while Europe keeps its own, to our disadvantage; they have run down our education system, with schools closed because of substandard concrete and academy trusts making a show of treating children as less than human beings; their politicians compete to be the most stupidly and viciously bigoted. However disappointing and charmless Keir Starmer may be as Labour leader, we have had a succession of Tory leaders who have mostly got by on charm, at least to some, and have dragged this country into the gutter. They’ve got to go. A return to 30mph speed limits won’t make up for five more years of this wretched regime.

Possibly Related Posts:

• Two disastrous transport projects
• So much for “war on the NIMBYs”
• Desperate Tories, shameless lies
• It’s Islamophobia, thank you
• Seething with anger