Fast rail link could make all Britain middle class

[John Ashworth]

A fast rail link could make all of Britain middle class

Without high-speed trains, London would become a first world island isolated from an impoverished hinterland

o Julian Glover
o guardian.co.uk, Sunday 27 September 2009 20.30 BST

There's a moment in an old Bugs Bunny cartoon when a locomotive runs out of control on a desert railroad being built through the wild west. As the train roars down the track towards an unfinished bridge over a canyon, Bugs frantically throws down sleepers and hammers rails in place until, against the odds, the line stays ahead of the engine and the train is saved.

Andrew Adonis is trying to transform British transport, Bugs Bunny style. At breakneck speed he's making tracks before the north-south high-speed railway, on which he is so keen, derails. The transport secretary is a late entrant to a collapsing cabinet, the money has run out, and the time for big plans from this government has passed. No one listens to Labour ministers any more except to hear them moan. If anyone else at conference this week announced a multibillion-pound project to start in Labour's fifth term and finish in its seventh, they'd be laughed off the end of Brighton's Palace Pier.

But somehow, laying out the route as fast as he can before the government comes crashing down, Adonis has kept his railway dream running. It's a triumph of optimism from which all policy-makers can learn, the heads-down-and-charge school of government, the antithesis of Gordon Brown's paralysing addiction to delay. Brown himself is not a true believer, daring not being in his soul, but todayhe put his name to the foreword of a pamphlet backing it. Tomorrow he will no doubt applaud when Adonis and Ed Miliband speak on Britain's green future. This railway, as they used to say, is getting there.

Much that has caused Labour to stumble over the last decade came from a confusion between the collective good and state command. Adonis is a liberal: he knows he can't order a new line to be built (or that if he does, it won't happen), but that projects like this will not come alive spontaneously just because there's a public need. He can plant the seed of the idea, help it grow, nurture a sense of expectation – even inevitability – and shape the circumstances.

This scheme is something only government can make possible, but cannot carry alone. He's trying to bind everyone in so that cancelling it will seem like the surprise, and going ahead the natural course of action. And the more partners he ties in, the harder any government will find it to pull the plug: a benign version of Eurofighter.

He's also fighting British exceptionalism, the attitude that harrumphs at big schemes as dubiously foreign – even uses a French phrase with an implicit sneer, grands projets – preferring incremental improvements that in the end turn out to save less and deliver less. Vince Cable, the Liberal Democrats' shadow chancellor who is going strangely wobbly on funding London's Crossrail route, seems tempted by this.

When the rest of Europe is pressing ahead – even underpopulated Sweden is planning a fast line – the onus ought to be on opponents to say what's wrong with our fellow Europeans' argument, rather than on supporters to make and remake a case that almost everywhere else has been accepted.

You will never prove, for certain, that a fast line linking London, Birmingham, Manchester and points north must be built; all we can say is that it can be and that if it happens no one will regret the effort. Pundits predicted doom for the Channel tunnel, but now it's there, who wants to wall it up? Great projects demand a touch of vertiginous self-belief. Starry-eyed insistence is what made the Brunels geniuses.

Of course, much remains to be settled about high-speed rail – most of all the financing, although the big bills won't arrive until 2015, when public finances should be less tight. There's also the question of where it should go. In December, engineers at the High Speed Two company will propose a specific route from London to the Midlands, and a broad route north from Birmingham. It's telling that so far the debate is more about where the scheme should run than where it shouldn't.

High-speed rail can be justified as green if we sort out non-fossil fuel electric power, but the case is really as much social and economic. The unspoken aim of British politics is to make all of Britain middle class, and the middle classes travel – and will do so more and more. It's best if they go by train. Faster journeys are a bonus; the gains are as much about reliability and capacity – good links between Birmingham, Manchester and Leeds, as well as to London.

Transport routes north from the capital are full, or soon will be. England's great cities cannot enrich themselves in isolation and the harder it is to get between them, the poorer they will be. Rail investment is a progressive cause, if we don't want to see London as a sort of Singapore, a first world island isolated from – and perhaps one day refusing to fund – an impoverished hinterland.

At the election all main parties will support high-speed rail; the Conservatives and Lib Dems got there first. The Tories would love Adonis to switch sides if they win; he's resisted the appeal but like Tessa Jowell (the political face of the Olympics) or (it seems) Lord Mandelson he'll find it hard to walk away from a great project just as it starts to get interesting. Any fool can think of a dozen reasons why Britain's high-speed line will never run. The people who count are the ones who will make it happen.