Sunak's stitch-up

He is a feckless vandal - as bad in his own way as Boris Johnson, but without the charisma to pull it off.

Even after all this time, it's really quite astonishing. No matter how bad you expect them to be, they somehow find a way to be considerably worse.

The prime minister's Network North document might genuinely be in the top ten most half-arsed embarrassing policy documents we've seen from a British government in our lifetime. That’s a highly competitive market to muscle your way into and yet somehow by God he's done it.

"I am not going to be forced into a premature decision because it is good for someone’s TV programme,"Rishi Sunak told BBC Breakfast earlier this week, days after he'd made the premature decision to scrap HS2 and before he announced that he had done it. "We shouldn't be rushed into things like that. What people would expect from me is to take the time to go over it properly and make sure we make the right long-term decisions for the country."

Indeed they would. It would terrible to live under a prime minister who scrapped major infrastructure projects and then quickly scrabbled together some back-of-a-fag-packet nonsense to pretend they still had a viable transport strategy. It would be awful to have a prime minister who lied about what he was doing, didn't look at the evidence, barely understood the regions he governed, denied parliament a voice on the changes and then stitched it up so that no future government could undo the damage he had inflicted. But that, unfortunately, is precisely the prime minister we've got.

Sunak's alternative to HS2 is called Network North. It's a plan outlining how he would use the £36 billion he'd saved on other transport measures. 

He should have written it in crayon. Several projects he announced for funding literally already existed. The Nottingham metro extension to Clifton South opened eight years ago. The metro to Manchester Airport was built in 2014. Others have been announced numerous times before with no reason to believe they will ever be completed. The A1 upgrade has been promised by every Conservative administration since 2010. The Transpennine Route Upgrade between Manchester and York was first announced in 2011.

Others had to be surreptitiously deleted after it was published. The initial announcement promised to reopen the Leamside Line in Durham. But a day later, all references to it were removed from the website. Then the entire page announcing the government's commitment to "revolutionise mass transit in Bristol" was deleted.

In other cases the promises started to degrade in front of our eyes. Sunak had apparently been convinced by his Cabinet not to scrap the Euston station link and leave HS2 stuck between Birmingham and Old Oak Common in the suburbs, like some pitiful stump museum exhibit of national incompetence. But then it turned out that the station and tunnels from Old Oak to Euston require public money and might never be built.

Even where the material has not been deleted it is idiotic in the extreme. A quarter of the money saved from HS2 is being spent on potholes, the perfect tiny-minded thing for a tiny-minded prime minister to express his tiny-minded vision for the country. This is maintenance spending, an endless patch-up job. It's not the infrastructure needed to grow the economy.

The worst aspect of the paper concerns what it does to the existing HS2 planning. It burns it to the ground. In an act of pure spite, Sunak is acting to prevent the country ever in the future being able to pursue high speed rail.

He's doing this in a couple of ways. Firstly the government plans to limit the number of platforms at Euston from ten to just six. This throttles the capacity of the programme, which is the entire point of the HS2 project. Then it is going to pack the area around the station with flats so that it can't be expanded in future. They're effectively putting Euston in a property-price headlock so it can never be the site of a functioning high speed project.

Second, the government is selling off the land that had been acquired along the route of the northern leg. That land was bought at huge expense. Now it will be quickly flogged off by the summer to prevent Labour reversing the prime minister's decision. 

There is no possible justification for what is being done here. Anyone who gave a damn about the long-term national interest would keep that land in case a future government thought high speed rail was the way to go. But instead, like a child sticking his middle finger up at the teacher, Sunak is putting on a firesale, desperately trying to restrict the options available to future British administrations.

Clearly it's a trap for Labour, but that trap does not need to function. If Labour were to announce today that it will initiate a compulsory purchase order of the land, it would kill its value and make a sale all-but impossible. Hell, it doesn't even need to do that. I can just say it's still looking at the numbers, but that it is minded to continue with HS2. That would also kill the value of the land. It would send a message to the civil service, who are at this point starting to prepare for a new incoming government, by encouraging officials to move slowly with the sell-off project. 

Would it be aggressive and unusual? Absolutely. Would it put civil servants in a difficult position. Yes. But it is perfectly justifiable. It would simply demonstrate a commitment to a long-term infrastructure project which had cross party consent until half a second ago. 

Alas that's not what Keir Starmer is doing. Once again, caution trumps principle. "I can't stand here and commit to reversing that decision," he said yesterday. "They've taken a wrecking ball to it." In reality, that wrecking ball only functions because he allows it to.

Sunak is intent on doing all this without holding a parliamentary vote. In all probability, he can get away with that. There are two relevant bits of law. Phase 2a, which authorised HS2 between the West Midlands and Crewe. And Phase 2b, which authorised it between Manchester and Leeds. 

The first has received royal assent, which means it's law. The second is still in committee - roughly halfway through its journey through parliament. But neither of these things mean anything. Just because you have passed a law giving the government the power to do something doesn't mean that it has to do it. And it can remove a bill from committee whenever it likes.

Interestingly, a Department for Transport document yesterday stated that "the decision to cancel parts of the HS2 programme will require primary legislation". It's not remotely clear to me why that would be the case.

But regardless, we know Sunak's view: no vote. No parliamentary scrutiny at all. This is a project that has been repeatedly promised in manifestos, subject to a hard-fought cross-party consensus for over a decade, and was deep into implementation. And yet a man who has not been elected by the country or even his party, who is dying in the polls and heading out the door in a year's time, can just come along and kill it without the slightest whiff of parliamentary scrutiny, let alone a vote of MPs. 

It's a stitch-up on a grotesque scale. Sunak has cobbled together a document of vacuities and nonsense. He has needlessly and vindictively acted to restrict the freedoms of future governments to initiate infrastructure projects. And he has denied parliamentarians any role in the process. He is a feckless vandal - as bad in his own way as Boris Johnson was, but without the charisma to pull it off. If he had the capacity for shame, he'd hang his fucking head with it.