As the Guardian reports this morning:
Rachel Reeves is unveiling plans to create “Europe's Silicon Valley” between Oxford and Cambridge as she stakes the government's success on kickstarting economic growth and putting more pounds in people's pockets.
So, yet more investment for south-east England then, and very little for anyone else in that case.
It's as if Labour is dedicated to the promotion of regional and actual inequality whilst alienating very large parts of England and the entireties of Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland
Political incompetence on this scale is hard to create. Starmer and Reeves are managing it.
How they think they have a hope of being re-elected in 2029 if this is their plan, heaven only knows - and I suspect it is sharing my despair.
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Thank you and well said, Richard.
This post should be read, in particular, with the post on what people want from government.
I live in the area under consideration. The website for the Dashwood estate, down the road, refers to it as the golden triangle. These aristo estates have benefitted from such developments. Lesser mortals, not so much.
There’s a lot of deprivation. This year, there has been a marked uptick in people sleeping rough.
The people of north and mid-Buckinghamshire have long campaigned for the east west railway and Elizabeth lines to have branch lines, using lines scrapped by the crook Beeching, but to no avail. Rural bus and even suburban services should also be improved, but there’s no investment. True blue Buckinghamshire’s councillors are neoliberal to the core.
The Oxford – Cambridge line was axed by Beeching. It was folly. But now it will be back. More transport for the southeast and nowhere else.
Thank you, Richard.
The Central railway could have been resurrected and linked to what became the Elizabeth line. That was considered before what became HS2.
You mean the Great Central? It would have been a perfect solution, abnd built to continental loading gauge.
Everything, absolutely everything is committed to London, the City – and the Past. Labour is committed to Decline and Failure, and they are literally incapable of seeing it.
Innovation? Absolutely Nowhere.
Incidentally, air travel in Britain is based on ‘spoke and hub’; the world is only accessible to everyone through London. It was the same with railways. Everything in Britain is the there to serve London, and the world can only be reached through London. A third runway will reduce Scotland’s direct access to the world. London is EVERYTHING in British politics. Everything else is politcal theatre. Everyone outside London is being scammed. That is the the real politics.
Spot on, John.
Thank you, both.
I have come across people from overseas, including the US, who see how London treats the rest of the country as an extractive colony. They see the parallels with home.
Adding:
“It’s as if Labour is dedicated to the promotion of regional and actual inequality whilst alienating very large parts of England and the entireties of Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland”……..who certainly in England, will vote Deform @ the next election as two fingers to the imbeciles in London. Of course, Deform will do nothing – but like the Mango Mussolini in the USA, at least it will upset things.
Labour In Name Only – LINO – Deform’s best hope for getting into power. & the real joke – Starmer and “Rachel in accounts” will point blank refuse to accept this reality.
Isn’t the old railway, apart from the bus service run by the County Council, from Cambridge towards Oxford covered with housing?
New housing etc in the Cambridge area is hamstrung by the lack of additional water supplies.
Cambridge itself is classed as semi arid due to the paucity of rainfall.
Reeves is spouting rubbish, as usual.
The raul is apparently only Oxford to Milton Keynes
The rest is new road
And £7.9 billion is to go fur new water to build 4,500 new houses in Cambridge – although those figures cannot be right.
Thank you, Richard.
Was there mention of building around Newmarket? I know the Earl of Derby and Duke of Sutherland have land they want to develop. :-).
I don’t think so
Apart from the SE bias, we can also be sure that
– They’ll try to do it on the cheap. And fail.
– Any public contribution (“derisking”) will be pocketed by private actors who can spot suckers like Starmer and Reeves a mile off.
They are even discussing PFI….
Thank you, Richard.
Yes, the Grand Central railway. One can still see vestiges. Plus for what was the Metropolitan line, which extended to Aylesbury, Buckingham and, using a tram, a few miles east of Oxford near Brill.
It did indeed have what was called the Brill Tramway – once the most rural outpost on London Transport
Thank you, Richard.
The stations have become cottages. One can still make out platforms and track beds.
You are right to highlight the continental gauge. The initial plan was for the Great Central to skirt around London to a channel tunnel. That idea was resurrected when HS1 was proposed, but connecting HS1 to the rest of the country was soon disposed of and HS2 thought of as a replacement, much to the amazement of the French engineers and some British ones.
Many of the engineers working on HS2 are from France and Spain. They and their families rent / are put up around here. They are puzzled by the UK’s transport and infrastructure strategy and disregard for family life. Some worked on the Elizabeth line and were hastily signed up for HS2.
Locals do not want HS2, but we do want east west and Lizzie branch lines, new signals, more frequent trains etc.. Locals want the rest of the country to get investment, too. Most people in Buckinghamshire are not parochial about these things.
This, from Abby Innes, is relevant here and to many of your other recent blogs on Labour’s obsession with growth:
‘…corporations in the post-war era had reinvested most of their profits in productive capabilities, including those of the labour force, to generate innovative products and to develop and integrate new technologies. Open-ended, empirically informed economic analyses had also left plenty of room for debates on how firms could and should evolve. In the neoliberal economics of today, by contrast, deterministic neoclassical analysis has profoundly undermined our understanding of how economic development occurs, a momentous Kuhn-loss. Encouraged by this doctrine , those firms most prepared to cut costs to maximise short-term profits have become the epitome of high economic performance, as measured in traded firms through dividend pay-outs. The practical result in the United Kingdom’s large firm sector is an investment famine…When short-term profit maximisation via least investment is the pinnacle of corporate success, an economy is surely in deep social and ecological trouble.’ (Innes, A. 2023: 269-270. Late Soviet Britain: Why Materialist Utopias Fail).
Innes continues: ‘The relationship between large corporations and the UK government now bears a striking resemblance to the regulatory bargaining to which the Soviets (USSR) had retreated when the promise of ever greater economic efficiency and economic progress failed to materialise. Britain’s large firms today are consequently thanked for concessions to social responsibility so nugatory they would have been laughed out of the Treasury by the post-war generation of economic ministers and their officials.’ (Op cit: 270).
It would do well for Labour – and indeed, the EU – to pay attention to this fact. But no, despite endless policies of economic liberalisation, outsourcing, contracting out, scraping or regulations, deliberate undermining and underfunding of any regulatory agencies so that they cannot effectively carry our their remit, and so on ad-infinitum, since New Labour in 1997, apart from the odd (short period) investment has continued to fall.
You might think that anyone with half a brain – and particularly someone who claims to be an economist – might realise that something’s seriously amiss with this model/approach. But no, now we have Starmer’s LINO party promising to pursue policies that were too ridiculous for even the Tories to pursue.
And for what? I can only put this down to FEALTY to the lords of finance and big business, in the hope that some crumbs from the table might be thrown Starmer’s and Reeves’s way to enable them to claim that there’s at least some modicum of their holy grail – growth. They’re going to be badly disappointed – though I doubt that will hurt their future employment prospects. Disgusting!
Much to agree with
Why? Because Neoliberalism has metamorphosed into a religious sect. Since any test of reality would demonstrate quickly it has failed catastrophically in Britain and Europe, Neoilberalism realised it had to turn itself into something that could only be tested for proof of veracity, not against reality; but an authoritative scriptural text. The texts are all chosen by a Priesthood brought through Economic Departments in specialist schools. Neoilberalism has triumphed by turning all politicians into their Conregation. Neoliberalism is now a Religious Cult. There is no arguing with it. It provides the only Authorised Version of economic reality allowed in Brtish politics, and much of banking and business. Why wouldn’t it; it controls the money supply.
One of Macron’s proposals in the past was to ban domestic flights in France shorter than a certain distance in favour of TGV services. Not sure if that is still on the agenda. However, one way to ease alleged congestion at Heathrow should surely be to eliminate flights from there to Manchester and other domestic destinations, and maybe even to Paris, Brussels. When all the time spent on travel to and from the airport, going through security etc., is taken into account, flying does not offer much if any timesavings on these routes.
Agreed
Thank you and well said, John A (another Naked Capitalism stalwart).
With trains from Italy and Spain on the French network, there’s no need to even fly from Paris or Lyon to the big Italian and Spanish cities. There are plans to enhance the Paris to Berlin service. That could eventually continue to Warsaw and when peace breaks out Moscow and link up with the trans-Siberian (something already discussed in Moscow and Beijing, BTW, and something I want to try as I have long wanted to go to central Asia by train).
There’s talk of a Rouen to Rome and even Naples service on the Italian Frecciarossa (technology sold by British Rail to Italy upon its privatisation). It’s easy to get a ferry from the south of England and cross country to Rouen.
Every time I’ve gone abroad, I’ve gone from Manchester to Munich and then bounced on from there. I don’t think I’ve ever been within a dozen miles of Heathrow.
Wise.
I hate the place.
There is even regional inequality WITHIN the much-favoured South-East.
Before Covid, it was possible to catch the Eurostar from Ashford “International” station in Kent and be in Paris or Brussels in less than two hours. Or,if living in south London or north Kent, to catch the same train from Ebbsfleet “International”. It was a relaxing breeze to wait with a coffee in fairly uncrowded stations, amble through customs, and wait on the platform for your seat to be brought to you as each carriage would come to a halt at precisely marked lengths of platform. Knowing your carriage number, you would be waiting at that very spot.
Gone now!
Its easy to drive over to Dover to gaze at France ,just on the horizon. But if you want to take the train there,without the encumbrance of a car, you need to take train all the way west into London St Pancras, to then catch the Eurostar all the way back to East Kent and into the tunnel. Passing through,of course , Ebbsfleet and Ashford stations without stopping. Apparently Eurostar has no plans to re open the expensive facilities at the Kent stations and the British government leaves these commercial decisions up to the company. So too bad for the thousands of potential passengers in Kent.
What are Labour’s northern MPs saying about this? Andy Burnham? The mayors of Liverpool and Teesside? Why does Labour think it acceptable after 50 years of policies favouring London and the south east to throw a few scraps to the north and concentrate yet more power and wealth in an already wealthy region? Why have they not revived the HS2 northern leg – criminally scrapped by Sunak? Has Labour got a death wish?
The Labour Party is not a place where much dissent is tolerated.
Reeves plan to create “Europe’s Silicon Valley” between Oxford and Cambridge has no substance, she has zero knowledge of the industry. I spent the last 30 years as an engineer in the Chip Industry. In the 80’s we had a dozen or so Fabs spread all over the UK, where have they all gone ? China. There were plenty of Jobs, today there are much fewer opportunities for qualified engineers as one government after another has not invested in this crucial industry. The British companies that did manage to survive and prosper have largely been sold off to the big tech companies in the real silicon valley or floated on the Nasdaq and run from the US.
Thanks