This week's local elections in the UK have been interesting.
The United Kingdom Independence Party-UKIP,-has walked off with 23% of the votes and set teeth rattling in their fellow right of centre party, the Conservatives.
What does this mean for transport policy,- or rather the government's lack of a coherent one?
If you read UKIP's 2010 General Election manifesto there are grounds for hope. Then the party, in 1960s Wilsonian white heat of technology vein it advocated not just one new domestic high speed railway line but three. Good news for the current ex Labour and now more or less all party HS2 project then?
Not really.As part of its all out bid for votes this year , UKIP decided that local Conservative opposition from the relatively wealthy, lawyer and celebrity studded path of the line through rural Buckinghamshire and Oxfordshire in particular was a vehicle worth riding. UKIP therefore put aside its enthusiasm for dynamic modernisation and infrastructure development in favour of vote grabbing in the "It/they/anyone shall not pass" Chiltern valleys and beyond. There is therefore a risk that this project, Britain's only one of its kind in any area of transport policy, could fall victim to knee wobbling in the London and home counties centric Conservative Party in their groping for the answer to "What do we do about UKIP ?"
Just as in 2010 the Conservatives in panic mode over West London parliamentary seats (most of which they were going to win anyway) ditched Labour's well advanced plan for the much needed third runway at Heathrow, it could be that they now drive transport development into another deep hole by cancelling HS2. Certainly the near hysterical anti campaigns, backed in part by public money from local Conservative led councils along the route will be encouraged to shout their protests even louder. The party leadership should ignore them as come 2015 a vote for UKIP is most likely not to secure a UKIP seat but to lose a Conservative one to Labour, who would probably gleefully pick up and run with HS 2 from where they left it in 2010. They might though cut its costs a bit by not doing so much tunnelling much of which is done to assuage better off Conservative voters with whom Labour has historically had less sympathy. After all, every inch of tunnel adds to building and operating costs for evermore into the future. Labour could simply say that in reality there are already 2 main railway lines through the area plus an assortment of roads, all of which seem to blend pretty well with the landscape and one more is hardly going to cause the claimed massive devastation and end to life as currently known.
Watch this space.
The United Kingdom Independence Party-UKIP,-has walked off with 23% of the votes and set teeth rattling in their fellow right of centre party, the Conservatives.
What does this mean for transport policy,- or rather the government's lack of a coherent one?
If you read UKIP's 2010 General Election manifesto there are grounds for hope. Then the party, in 1960s Wilsonian white heat of technology vein it advocated not just one new domestic high speed railway line but three. Good news for the current ex Labour and now more or less all party HS2 project then?
Not really.As part of its all out bid for votes this year , UKIP decided that local Conservative opposition from the relatively wealthy, lawyer and celebrity studded path of the line through rural Buckinghamshire and Oxfordshire in particular was a vehicle worth riding. UKIP therefore put aside its enthusiasm for dynamic modernisation and infrastructure development in favour of vote grabbing in the "It/they/anyone shall not pass" Chiltern valleys and beyond. There is therefore a risk that this project, Britain's only one of its kind in any area of transport policy, could fall victim to knee wobbling in the London and home counties centric Conservative Party in their groping for the answer to "What do we do about UKIP ?"
Just as in 2010 the Conservatives in panic mode over West London parliamentary seats (most of which they were going to win anyway) ditched Labour's well advanced plan for the much needed third runway at Heathrow, it could be that they now drive transport development into another deep hole by cancelling HS2. Certainly the near hysterical anti campaigns, backed in part by public money from local Conservative led councils along the route will be encouraged to shout their protests even louder. The party leadership should ignore them as come 2015 a vote for UKIP is most likely not to secure a UKIP seat but to lose a Conservative one to Labour, who would probably gleefully pick up and run with HS 2 from where they left it in 2010. They might though cut its costs a bit by not doing so much tunnelling much of which is done to assuage better off Conservative voters with whom Labour has historically had less sympathy. After all, every inch of tunnel adds to building and operating costs for evermore into the future. Labour could simply say that in reality there are already 2 main railway lines through the area plus an assortment of roads, all of which seem to blend pretty well with the landscape and one more is hardly going to cause the claimed massive devastation and end to life as currently known.
Watch this space.
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