The FT has this headline this morning:
Then you read the subheading, and it says:
So the truth is, Labour has said something absurd, and even the FT has headlined it, when the truth is that Labour is just doing some very expensive planning.
Don't get me wrong: planning is good.
Don't also get me wrong: railways in Northern England need a massive upgrade. That should have happened long before HS2 did.
All I am saying is that it would be good if the media did not report the nonsense politicians claim and instead revealed the truth behind the hype. The world would be a lot better if they did, because it is already obvious what is going on here. This is a 2029 pre-election stunt, beginning to roll out when Labour must know they have no hope of delivering whatever it might be they are looking at. If only the FT had the courage to say that we would all be a lot better off.
Breaking the power of the press release over the media is vital if we are to get the news we need.
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This does sound like the kind of thing I want the government to spend money on.
Are you saying that there is no material barrier to doing this faster?
That the workers and materials are available?
That more of the 45 billion could be spent within the time frame of this parliament?
And that they are only going so slowly because they are trying to stick to their self imposed spending rule?
I ask because the Trams in Edinburgh were executed in a less than ideal way…
And some of us wonder if this was down to bad planning… and not enough lawyers in the council to ensure good contracts… and the German construction company not doing it’s research on the built environment here and ramping up the bill after finding additional costs etc…
Or are you just pointing to the misleading nature of the headline?
Is it possibly sensible to go slowly with large infrastructure projects and ensure they are well planned?
We could be working on many more than one at a time of course…
Right now I am just pointing to a totally misleading headline. That is all this one was about. Sorry…
I don’t buy the FT, partner does sometimes, it never fails to disappoint – the centre pages are for the most part trash.
Thus the (deliberately) misleading headline is no surprise (UK Gov PR to FT: “look we place ads with you from time to time – so give some positive spin on the Reeves press release will you? – thanks” -…. style of).
Starmer faces his own set of problems: Scottish (& Welsh) wipe out, & ….”to be (a US poodle) or not to be” – decisions need to be made – what a relief that he has such a capable chief of staff in Mr McSwine.
🙂
If Rachel can find £1.3bn for an evaluation process out of thin air, for what may end up as sensible infrastructure project.
Why can’t she do the same for our neuro divergent young people?
Bevause she sees no votes in it.
She is wrong.
I doubt that anyone in the North of England will believe a word of it, they’ve heard it all before. £1.1 billion for the consultants…
Christ, Reeves must have a big sofa to find that lot down the back of it!
But as you say………..what worries me is that it will take so long to actually do the work, that whole thing will have to be re-appraised at considerable cost anyway.
All this has been going on since before Gorge Osborne was Chancellor. Urgent upgrades have been shovel-ready for years: like Manchester’s “Castlefield corridor” where the railway line through the centre of Manchester (and all its main railway stations, is only 2 tracks(!), incapable of delivering what’s required, and the cause of bottlenecks which ripple out across the North-West. The line from Manchester to the Ribble Valley, North Yorkshire and beyond has a single-track tunnel south of Blackburn, isn’t electrified, and many of the stations have platforms so short they can only accommodate trains three carriages long – and at some spots, only two! Commuting is a total, and totally unreliable, nightmare. Things like this are repeated across the whole of the North.
We don’t need yet another round of Whitehall kicking the can down the road. If Reeves and Starmer think this will shore up Labour’s vote in the North they deserve what’s coming.
I have stood on Oxford Road so many times, witnessing this. You are so right.
So… Manchester Airport to Liverpool, Liverpool to Manchester is atroxious. Delays, short carriages… And sunday 1 train every two hours.
So with this frustration, I welcomed this news until I then I heard an interview with a Labour MP (I think Alison McGovern?) who then said work will start in 2030. 2030!
The goverment of Jam Tomorrow. If ever.
I agree that the power of press releases over the media is part of the problem, but I think the problems behind the issue of “telling the truth” run much deeper and are far more pervasive.
Research suggests it is rooted in a mix of human psychology and platform design, particularly social media: we are predisposed to pay more attention to negative, emotionally charged information; misinformation often aligns with identity and group loyalties in ways that facts don’t; and social media algorithms systematically amplify outrage and polarisation because it drives engagement — and thus advertising revenue.
Even trusted news organisations appear to be increasingly resorting to attention-grabbing or click-bait-style headlines to compete for attention and exploit these same reader vulnerabilities.
I draw people’s attention to these two relatively short recent articles, which argue that we must address these psychological and structural dynamics. Apologies if you have already read them.
https://theconversation.com/why-people-believe-misinformation-even-when-theyre-told-the-facts-271236
https://theconversation.com/the-dynamics-that-polarise-us-on-social-media-are-about-to-get-worse-247027
However, maybe I am being fatalistic. Given how rapidly the powers behind technology and politicians have aligned, I can’t see how to incentivise truth telling.
On the flip side, perhaps we need to exploit the very same techniques to get our messages across?
I’d rather tell the truth.
“The purest treasure mortal times afford
Is spotless reputation. That away
Men are but painted dust or empty clay”
Richard II.
Keep telling the truth. People do learn who is reliable and trustworthy.
HS2 was an example of gold-plating a sensible idea: a lack of capacity on the WCML means building a new railway line from London to the North-West is needed. What was not needed was a train track with a notional 250 mph (400 kph) train speed capacity as anyone with an understanding of engineering could tell you. What Labour should do now is to re-purpose the track route that they have already protected and bought land for north of Birmingham and use it to reduce congestion on the WCML. It could even be in operation before HS2.
Agreed, entirely. Massive over-engineering was utterly unneccasary.
There’s another aspect to this that rarely gets mentioned: journalism itself has changed. Years ago I did a “How to use the press” course through my union, and the first rule we were taught was simple — a good news story tells you who, what, when, where and why in the opening paragraph. Clarity first, detail after.
That discipline has all but vanished. Most stories now are written as long stringers designed to make people scroll past a dozen ads before they reach the substance — and very often the substance turns out to be a red herring anyway. The headline promises one thing, the copy delivers something else, and the reader is left none the wiser.
It’s not just political spin that’s the problem. It’s the way the media ecosystem has been reshaped around clicks, engagement metrics and advertising revenue. When the business model rewards attention rather than accuracy, the press release becomes the easiest thing to publish and the truth becomes the hardest thing to find.
Until journalism returns to the basic craft of telling people what they need to know, plainly and upfront, politicians will keep getting away with this kind of headline‑driven theatre.
There’s a deeper issue here that troubles me as a Labour member. This isn’t just another policy collapsing under pressure — it’s yet another U‑turn. And to be clear, I never liked or agreed with anything the Conservatives did. But at least I could understand what they were trying to achieve, even when I opposed it. With Labour, I find myself genuinely lost. So many of their decisions seem counter‑intuitive from the outset, and then they reverse them anyway.
Policies are floated that look guaranteed to provoke backlash, then withdrawn in a way that suggests they weren’t thought through at all. It leaves the impression of a party that is either inexperienced, incompetent or simply not thinking clearly about the country it governs. For those of us who want Labour to succeed, that’s unsettling.
If Labour wants to rebuild trust, it needs clarity, consistency and a sense of purpose. Without that, these repeated reversals don’t look like responsiveness — they look like drift. And that’s a hard thing to watch from the inside.
There was a lot in the Scottish budget I liked, and I’m certainly not opposed to a mansion tax in principle. But I do think the £1m threshold raises an awkward point when you look at the UK as a whole. In parts of London, £1m won’t buy a three‑bed terraced house, let alone a “mansion”. Property values there are so distorted by decades of speculative investment that the price tag no longer reflects the owner’s actual wealth or income.
That’s not an argument against taxing wealth — far from it. It’s an argument for designing taxes that reflect real economic conditions rather than headline numbers. Scotland can make a £1m threshold work because its housing market is more grounded in reality. In London, the same figure would sweep in a lot of people who are asset‑rich on paper but cash‑poor in practice, simply because the market has been allowed to run wild.
The broader point is that the UK desperately needs a coherent, modern approach to taxing property and wealth — one that recognises regional disparities instead of pretending the whole country lives in the same housing economy. Scotland is at least moving in the right direction with the limited powers it has. Westminster, with far greater powers, still refuses to confront the structural issues that created these distortions in the first place.
Scotland is not London.
The power Scotland used is devolved. It has nothing to do with England. England would have to decide for itself – but nothing it decides would make sense for the whole country. Our inequality is too gross.