Mark Harper wants you to know how much he loves cars

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. 

His argument was that ‘for most people, the most important mode of transport remains the car, the van, the lorry or the motorbike’. It’s true, and underlines why the Conservatives think it is safe to chop bits off HS2, as most journeys are made by car. The pro-car argument included accusing opposition politicians of painting driving as almost a ‘dirty habit’ and an ‘optional extra in people’s lives’. That opened a long passage of attacks on Labour policies, followed by a rather thinner set of announcements. One of them was that ‘today I am announcing that the government will investigate what options we have in our toolbox to restrict overzealous use of traffic management measures’. That is an announcement that the government is looking into something, rather than anything actually changing. The same went for 20 mph limits: ‘We will change the Department for Transport guidance requiring councils to only use 20 mile an hour zones where there’s a good reason and underlining that 30 miles per hour is the default.’ So a review and a change of guidance. And no clarity on HS2.

But 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. Harper was adamant that transport means cars, primarily. Not big shiny infrastructure projects, but small announcements for smaller areas: a foreshadowing of the kind of micro-targeted campaign we will see from the Conservatives in the election.