The Government’s decision to cave into the unions and offer a 15% pay rise to train drivers will be met with scorn by the public. Labour have been quick to cry poverty since entering government, blaming the Conservatives for a dreadful economic inheritance, but the decision to splash the cash on a 5.5% public sector […]
The new Labour government has inherited a country that feels “stuck”, and has done for many years. Economic growth has flatlined. Infrastructure projects can’t seem to get off the ground, public services don’t work, and costs of living keep going up and up and up. While tackling this stagnation will be difficult, there are a […]
Labour’s announcement that they will renationalise nearly all passenger rail services within their first five years of government has been received positively by the usual suspects. The Guardian has come out praising it as a ‘sensible plan that passengers need’ citing the failure of railway privatisation as ‘a glaring failure of the Tory ideological fixation […]
After a long period of virtual silence on railway matters, the Labour Party has announced a plan for the future of this near-two-century-old industry. Or at least shadow transport secretary Louise Haigh has announced that the plan will be set out ‘in two to three weeks’ time’. For the moment, the headline is that passenger […]
Sadiq Khan, the Mayor of London, last week announced that he was going to freeze Transport for London (TfL) fares until March 2025. To cover the loss to TfL, he will give them £123m. When I say that Khan will give TfL £123m, I don’t mean it literally, of course. Khan hasn’t got that kind […]
There’s only one way to cross the Thames east of London today. Unsurprisingly, this makes the Dartford Crossing is one of the most congested roads in Britain. While it was designed for 135,000 vehicles a day, it averages around 160,000, and on the busiest days more than 200,000 vehicles drive (slowly) over this essential piece […]
I’m reading the diaries of Barbara Castle, the former Labour cabinet minister. She and her colleagues would often exhaust themselves in pay negotiations with trade unions threatening strike action. This was the era of ‘beer and sandwiches at No 10’ (in actuality, Harold Wilson offered whiskies to the visiting union delegations while drinking brandy himself). […]
A couple of weeks ago, while travelling for work, I endured a seamless 5,500 mile journey from the middle of the Indian Ocean to Paddington station, where I immediately hit the the buffers. On that occasion it was a rail strike that prompted a tense cross-country Odyssey in teeming, unheated Great Western Railways trains that […]
Over the coming days, a fleet of excited young Tories, many looking very smart in their fathers’ double-breasted suits, will be making their way to Manchester for this year’s Conservative Party Conference. However, there’s a malign serendipity in the fact that Tories are heading up to Manchester at the same time as they are rumoured […]
With the decision to greenlight new oil drilling at Rosebank, it’s clear that Britain will continue to rely on fossil fuels long into the future. This is a direct result of our failure to embrace nuclear. The phasing out of coal in Britain has been a wild success in terms of carbon emissions, contributing to […]
When the first round of reports broke that the government was considering terminating High Speed 2 at Old Oak Common rather than pressing on to Euston, my first thought was: ‘Why is the Prime Minister being presented with documents drawn up by someone with a glue addiction?’ As an illustration of the government’s increasingly Late […]
Rishi Sunak has made headlines recently by suggesting that he is looking to row back on his government’s green pledges. However, making headlines appears to be all that this is. This new ‘policy direction’ is little more than a carefully curated collection of focus-grouped statements designed to ride the media surprise of retaining Uxbridge and […]
It costs more to build new roads, railways and tramlines in Britain than it does almost anywhere else in the world. With major infrastructure projects like HS2 at risk of cancellation due to spiralling costs and frequent delays, it is worth reflecting on the fact that it doesn’t seem to be this hard everywhere. The […]
Four thousand jobs don’t just drop out of the sky. Nor does £4bn of industrial investment. Certainly not in Britain, certainly not in 2023. Yet two weeks ago, there was cause to celebrate in Somerset as the Indian conglomerate Tata Group, owner of Jaguar Land Rover, announced plans for a massive battery factory, or ‘gigafactory’ […]
It’s finally official: HS2 is ‘unachievable’, according to the UK’s Infrastructure and Projects Authority. That doesn’t mean the project isn’t still happening, or that it won’t cost us billions, it just means that years – decades, probably – ahead of its launch we know it isn’t going to deliver what we need from it. What’s […]
Few CapX readers would disagree that Britain is in desperate need of growth. But while politicians have tended to focus on economic activity in the electorally significant Red Wall, less attention has been paid to the south-east. This is an oversight. Kent and Sussex may be relatively prosperous on paper, but anyone who’s tried to […]
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