Mark Harper is rebranding himself as the Secretary of State for Cars, rather than Transport. He didn’t even mention HS2 in his speech to Tory conference this morning: in fact, he barely talked about rail at all. He opened by congratulating his department on ending some of the industrial action on the railways, and linking the ongoing strikes from RMT and ASLEF to the Labour party. He had a brief line about being ‘proud to support our railways’ and the risk of following ‘Labour’s lazy, ideological approach of forking out yet more money from the public purse with no benefit to passengers’, but that was that for trains. Harper moved onto the car, which the Conservative party is now ‘proudly’ in favour of. In fact, from his speech you might have wondered if Harper was hoping that cars themselves might be able to vote too. Given how much public land they take up and given the way towns and cities are designed, he might be onto something.
The focus on the car is part of the Conservatives trying to make the case that HS2 isn’t the big levelling up project some have tried to cast it as
His argument was that ‘for most people, the most important mode of transport remains the car, the van, the lorry or the motorbike’.
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