HS2 with Yorkshire Post editor James Mitchinson and Alexander Brown from The Scotsman.
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00:00 Hello and welcome to this special bulletin where we will talk about the issue which is
00:12 overshadowing the Tory party conference HS2. I'm Alan Young, I'm deputy editor of the Scotsman,
00:18 I'm delighted to be joined by the editor of the Archibald Post, James Mitchison,
00:22 and the Scotsman's Westminster correspondent Alexander Brown to put a bit of context around
00:27 this story. So it seems the northern leg of HS2, the high-speed rail link which would connect
00:33 Birmingham and Manchester, is about to be axed. Nothing has been confirmed from number 10 but
00:39 speculation is mounting that a formal announcement could be imminent. That could be in Prime Minister
00:45 Rishi Sunak attempting to defend the move in his keynote conference speech, ironically,
00:52 in a former station in Manchester. So James, if I could turn to you first. I know there is
00:58 a lot of anger in the north of England about this. Can you give us a sense of the reaction?
01:03 Yeah, morning Alan, morning guys, thanks for having me. There is a lot of anger actually this
01:11 time and I say this time because this isn't the first time that big infra, if you like,
01:17 big infrastructure has been scaled back in the north. Leeds, if you recall previously, had HS2
01:24 cancelled and there wasn't this huge ferrari that there is now. Previously too, northern powerhouse
01:32 rail, which is the east-west line proposed, was diluted to the point where there was almost
01:41 no benefit to it whatsoever. Now HS2 to Manchester looks as though it's about to hit the skids and
01:49 it's hit national news and, forgive the pun, it looks likely to derail the Tory party conference.
01:57 I think the reason for that is because they're doing it in Manchester. They've literally flown,
02:05 not driven, and they've not gone on a train. Jeremy Hunt flew to Manchester where they're
02:11 going to tell the local people, they're going to look Mancunians and northerners around in the eye
02:17 and say, "You know that thing we promised you in 2009 that had cross-party support, by the way,
02:23 it wasn't partisan in its first instance, that thing we promised you in 2009 and we reassured
02:30 you that this would change your lives forever. It would bring opportunity and prosperity for
02:34 generations to come. You know that thing? Well, you're not having it and it's not going to come
02:40 here." It's like living with an abusive partner, you know, somebody who takes pleasure in inflicting
02:47 harm upon you and delighting in the sort of impact of it right there in Manchester,
02:53 telling them that that thing that was going to change lives is no longer going to happen. The
02:59 optics of that for people living in the north is terrible for a start and you ask me how are people
03:06 reacting? The ordinary punter, I suppose, particularly in our part of the world, sort of
03:14 looks at me with sort of incredulity and says, "Do you think it's ever going to happen in the
03:18 first place?" You know, you can't believe a word they say. That's the word on the street.
03:25 In contrast to that, business leaders, policy makers, civic and private sector are devastated.
03:32 You know, they were building business plans predicated upon the delivery of this
03:36 high-speed rail link and it now looks as though it's not going to happen.
03:42 Just this weekend, we ran a conversation with Professor Andrew McNaughton. He's the engineer
03:50 who designed HS2 and he said to the Yorkshire Post that it is beyond comprehension that they
04:00 stop now and the reason it's beyond comprehension that they stop now is that they don't deliver it
04:07 to Leeds and they don't deliver it to Manchester. So, west, east, non-delivery to two of the north's
04:14 biggest economic hubs. In his words, these are his words, not mine, they're the important parts.
04:21 You know, they're the most important parts. They are the bits of this puzzle that make it make
04:26 sense. Those are the hubs that need connecting. Those are the places that have latent potential
04:33 that can be unlocked and those are the places that are lacking opportunity and prosperity
04:39 because of connectivity issues. He literally, you know, he was very calm and calculated
04:49 and thoughtful and brilliant with us but his anger was palpable.
04:55 Indeed. This is a political problem for what I call, say, as well. Alex, if I can come to you,
05:06 the Tories didn't want this to get out. You know, they didn't want to be talking about this this
05:12 week. Certainly don't want to be talking about it in Manchester, as James says, and having to
05:17 confront people and look them in the eye. This is a bigger problem, though, looking ahead to the next
05:24 election, isn't it, for Rishi Sunak, Yorkshire MP? Yeah, but I also just want to slightly disagree
05:31 with something that James said about looking Mancunians in the eye. I mean, they haven't
05:35 done that. They haven't announced it. This briefing emerged that it was going to be cancelled,
05:40 briefed to a newspaper at a time that Jeremy Horne, the Chancellor, was giving a 15-minute speech
05:45 in which he announced two things that had already been announced. So, you know, the day before you
05:50 had the Transport Secretary, Mark Harper, spending an hour in front of rail bodies, you know, rail
05:54 industry, who have invested and made plans around this and gone, "Right, we're going to have HS2
05:59 here. How else can we improve connectivity in the north?" And he, the Transport Secretary of the
06:04 United Kingdom, was going, "I can't talk about it. I can't talk about it." I mean, there are
06:08 montages now doing the rounds on Twitter where you can see ministers walking and being door-slammed
06:14 about it and saying, "I'm waiting for a decision." Even this morning, as it's being confirmed to the
06:19 Times, as it's being confirmed to the Sky, as I'm being told it by people that HS2 is not going
06:23 ahead, Rishi Sunak, the Prime Minister, went on the morning broadcast round and said, "It's only
06:28 right that I look into it and I don't make a decision yet, and I'm, you know, I'm taking my
06:33 time and I'm not going to do it just for some TV show." But it's not just some TV show. This impacts
06:38 people, and it's popular with some aspects of this party. Ben Howchin, the T-time Mayor, said, you know,
06:44 "It's cost a huge amount of money and we should scrap it." But there are many Northern MPs who'll
06:49 be very, very angry about this. I mean, you only have to look at the reaction of Andy Street, who
06:53 last night called an impromptu press conference, and I can't stress the significance of that.
07:00 This Tory Mayor called a press conference with about 10-15 minutes notice to everyone, like
07:06 journalists from everywhere, and just did it outside in the conference centre, saying to people,
07:10 you know, "I refuse to rule out resigning if it doesn't go ahead," and basically begged the
07:14 Prime Minister to change his mind and say, "Look, if we can get further funding, if I can find
07:19 private funding myself, like, give me a chance to save it." But it shouldn't be for a Mayor to save
07:24 an infrastructure project that's been planned now for a decade. It shouldn't be down to local
07:29 government to have to find ways to improve or fund infrastructure that has been promised. It's a
07:36 political suicide, really, because it's going to damage relations in the North. It's completely
07:40 overshadowed the whole conference as a whole. Not that there's any policy to talk about,
07:45 but it's HS2. All anyone is talking about is HS2. No one is asking Ministers and going, "Oh, well,
07:51 about your speech earlier, what about that?" They're going, "What do you think about HS2?
07:55 What does this mean?" And they can't say anything. So instead of having control of the message,
08:00 which is the whole thing that makes good government, is having, well, firstly, having
08:03 ideas and policies, but then getting those messages across. But that is simply not happening.
08:08 Instead, they're just denying knowledge until we hear from the Prime Minister tomorrow, who
08:12 will say, "I'm scrapping it and the money's going to go here." But we still don't know,
08:16 the industry doesn't know. So it's political suicide, and it's very, very damaging for
08:20 relations with many of his own MPs. - Well, we throw back to James. We know
08:25 Rishi Sunak is speaking tomorrow. It's his keynote speech to conference. Might be the
08:31 last conference before the next election. What do you need to hear from him?
08:38 - Well, what do we need to hear from him? First of all, the points made there are absolutely,
08:48 I couldn't agree more with Alex on a couple of things. One, big infrastructure is not for local
08:57 mayors to deliver. And I think the key to projects like this, or a couple of keys, if I may explore
09:04 them, one is where the risk is placed. And it seems to me that the risk in this instance is
09:11 placed with the contractors and those guys actually building the thing, which makes them
09:17 risk averse. It makes them sort of hesitate when it comes to each spade in the ground.
09:24 It means they buy in very expensive insurance policies. And as a result, placing the risk
09:30 with the third party inflates the price. It's an inevitability. The risk should sit with the
09:36 government. The government should have a delivery board with talented world-class infrastructure
09:42 experts who manage the budgets, manage the timescale and carry the risk. That's the first
09:47 thing. So the risk is in the wrong place, which means projects like this are slow and expensive.
09:54 And there's also, I think, if I may say, the politics and your correspondent there is a much
10:06 more expert in the politics than I am. But in the first instance, it had cross-party support
10:12 because, and I've had several prime ministers in my office at the Yorkshire Post telling me that
10:18 this is the single most important intervention when it comes to levelling up opportunity,
10:23 prosperity and life opportunity in this country. HS2 and Northern Powerhouse Rail, fully integrated,
10:29 are the things that can make a difference. Very little else can make a difference in the same
10:33 way these projects, which interconnect big cities and create huge capacity into town, if you like,
10:40 and those tributaries that are running between the towns. That interconnectivity, David Cameron,
10:47 Theresa May, Boris Johnson, not yet had Rishi Sunak in my office, but he was actually, I think,
10:55 Alex, correct me if I'm wrong, advocating HS2 to Boris Johnson and installing the virtues of
11:01 the project when he was chancellor. And I've had transport secretaries in my office telling me that
11:07 this is the silver bullet. This is the thing that will make this country grow fast. This is the
11:12 thing that will bring opportunity to the north of England. And what do we need to hear from the
11:17 prime minister? Well, we need him to say that those prime ministers previously, those transport
11:26 secretaries previously, his words previously, remain true. And fine, if it has become so expensive,
11:35 surely there's a way of just pausing and rethinking the plan, placing the risk back with government,
11:42 just firing the army of white collar workers who are on six-figure salaries, and just start again.
11:50 Go back to the drawing board. There is no way the electorate, there is no way that I will believe
11:56 for a second that this is too expensive and won't make a difference. I think when it comes to we
12:02 can't afford HS2, it's all right Jacob Rees-Mogg being on Sky News with Kay Burley this morning
12:07 saying we can't afford HS2, but if you live where I live, you can't afford not to have HS2. It's as
12:13 simple as that. Alex, what about the mood within the wider Tory party? There must be a lot of
12:23 frustration about the way this whole issue has been handled. Yeah, it's not just how this issue
12:31 has been handled, it's how the party is currently running itself. Walking around the conference
12:37 centre, or when I've been trying to arrange meetings with MPs here, lots of them have simply
12:43 stayed away. Last year they stayed away because they were unhappy with Liz Truss, this year they've
12:47 stayed away because either they're already standing down so there's no point in them being here,
12:52 or they stayed away because as one MP said, they'd rather be tortured than come to this sort of thing
12:56 with a party in the state that it's in. I mean it's not a happy place and we're still looking
13:02 for Sunakism, right? We still don't know. With Boris Johnson you could say, well he wants to
13:07 get Brexit done, with Liz Truss you could say she wants to cut taxes and inadvertently destroy the
13:12 economy. With Rishi Sunak this far in, it's unclear what he wants to do. I mean he's stopped
13:17 saying levelling up because that was kind of Boris Johnson's thing, and now he said he wants
13:21 to level up but not like this, not with infrastructure projects. The mood is low,
13:26 the mood is incredibly flat. When you speak to MPs here, they're just, it felt like last year felt
13:32 like the last days of Rome, this year feels a bit like the last days of Rome, but that had happened
13:36 and everyone's kind of walking around not realising and they're in denial. There are leadership
13:40 pitches happening everywhere, you know, people are going off-piste and talking about things beyond
13:45 their brief. That's not how collective responsibility and how conferences are supposed to go.
13:49 You're supposed to have ministers stand up, talk about their brief and go, oh that's a policy.
13:54 You know, we as correspondents or journalists covering local areas, normally I would be given
13:58 great detailed policy documents to go through and go, okay so this policy and now I know
14:03 maybe Barnett consequentials or what that means for our area. That is simply not happening because
14:08 there is nothing to say, there is no policy to go through and that makes it so much harder to rally
14:14 MPs and go, this is something to get behind. And they may well be saving it all for the
14:19 prime minister's speech, but MPs aren't confident about that and MPs are now worried and thinking,
14:24 you know, is it going to be Kemi Badenoch? Is it going to be Suella Braverman? Tory MPs are
14:30 worrying about what's next and who's going to be the leader of the opposition, rather than,
14:34 I have to say, HS2. I mean, many of them are more worried about what's next for their party
14:39 rather than what's next for the country's infrastructure. So something that really
14:43 sort of angers me about this is that it's gone to Birmingham and stopped effectively and if that
14:49 remains the case, if HS2 goes to Birmingham and stops and connects London to Birmingham,
14:56 so the number one city to the number two city, it does the absolute opposite of levelling up.
15:00 It just widens the commuter belt for London and improves opportunity for people living in
15:07 Birmingham and by the way, nobody here begrudges anybody life opportunity. It isn't about us
15:12 versus them, but in the sort of context of levelling up, you've not only not levelled up,
15:20 you've levelled down, you've improved life opportunities for people living in and around
15:25 London whilst leaving the north sort of without that opportunity and so that's something that
15:34 annoys me greatly. The second thing that annoys me greatly isn't necessarily, and I think this is
15:39 where the electorate, where if we go and sort of speak to people in the street, it isn't necessarily
15:46 that we're not going to get HS2, it isn't necessarily that we're not going to get Northern
15:50 Powerhouse Rail. It's the betrayal. It's yet another promise of something that would have
15:56 improved our lives that we're not going to get and people are fed up, honestly, they're fed up of
16:03 deceit and they're fed up of U-turns. They're just fed up of being told one thing and getting another
16:11 and I think at some point that string will snap. Indeed. Look, this story is only going to grow,
16:19 let's face it, especially ahead of Rishi Sunak's speech tomorrow, which Alex, I know you will be
16:27 in the hall for. There's going to be lots more to come around this but thank you very much to both
16:33 of you. For your thoughts, we will have the very latest throughout the day at scotsman.com. Please
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16:49 goodbye.