George Osborne’s cynical grab for northern votes (and why I’m for it)

When John Prescott used to wax garrulous about a ‘superhighway’ from Hull to Liverpool, everyone assumed it was a wheeze to spray southern taxpayers’ money across the region he saw as his power base. When George Osborne decided to ‘start a conversation’ this week about a super-city along the same route, an English equivalent of Germany’s Ruhr valley connected by yet another decades-away high-speed rail project, everyone assumed it was about recapturing votes in northern conurbations where Tory MPs and councillors are an endangered species.

But on past form you’d still expect me — ardent northerner and rail buff that
I am — to embrace this back-of-a-Downing-Street-envelope concept, however cynical its origin; and yes, I’m ready to do so. It makes at least as much sense to upgrade the trans-Pennine rail route to ‘HS3’ for Osborne’s vague estimate of £7 billion as it does to go the whole hog for £42 billion and counting with HS2 from London to the north.