A prominent Conservative donor has threatened to stop supporting the party if Rishi Sunak scraps the Birmingham to Manchester leg of HS2, as ministers consider pulling the plug on the multibillion-pound project.

Concerns have been raised by business leaders and regional mayors that any watering down of HS2 would further damage investor confidence, hinder the levelling up agenda and turn the project into a white elephant.

However, Henri Murison, chief executive of the Northern Powerhouse Partnership, said: “I met with Rishi Sunak after he convinced Boris Johnson to make NPR his top domestic priority.

Read More..

But Bowen, 34, does not for a second buy into Rishi Sunak’s attempts to position himself as a friend of hard-pressed families – and plans to vote for the Liberal Democrats, who are seeking to overturn an 11,700 Conservative majority in Taunton Deane.

Grounds maintenance worker Terence Lowe, 38, who is out shopping with his daughter, scoffs at Sunak’s suggestion the old net zero goals would have imposed unacceptable costs on the British people.

“Sunak has made the right move politically for the party but whether it would make any difference for us … probably not at this point,” says Vivien Bowers, strolling with her husband, Tim, towards the muddy waters of the River Tone.

Read More..

While the prince was on stage at lunchtime US time – with the likes of Bill Gates and former New York mayor Mike Bloomberg, discussing the importance of combating global warming – diplomats and officials were distracted by a news alert on their phones.

Apart from one ray of sunshine over the summer – in Uxbridge and South Ruislip, where the Conservatives hung on in a byelection largely because of opposition to Labour mayor Sadiq Khan’s expansion of the ultra-low emission zone (Ulez) in London – nothing has gone right.

Sunak, while insisting the UK would still meet its net zero goals, announced a delay to the ban on sales of new petrol and diesel cars from 2030 to 2035, relaxed targets to get households to switch away from fossil fuel boilers, and ditched plans for tougher energy efficiency rules for landlords.

Read More..

After a week in which Rishi Sunak rowed back on the UK’s climate commitments and delayed a ban on petrol cars, it seems he is making a pitch to drivers a key part of his pre-election campaign.

While it led to international condemnation, it allows the Tories to attack Labour as the party who will force voters to buy electric cars sooner - Sunak has already signalled that he wants to turn it into a cost of living issue.

It was the narrow Tory win in the Uxbridge by-election, largely based on its opposition to the extension of London’s ultra-low emission zone (Ulez), that appears to have led to the new pro-car strategy from Sunak.

Read More..

The eastern spur from Birmingham to Leeds has been scrapped – with land needed for the route remaining “safeguarded” (or blighted, depending on your view), should a future government choose to fund it.

Asked on Sunday whether the government was committed to building HS2 in full to Manchester, Downing Street’s short reply stated the obvious and evaded the question: “The HS2 project is already well under way with spades in the ground, and our focus remains on delivering it.”

Some loud but fundamentally underpowered metro mayors, and a smattering of small-scale projects – a road upgrade here, a town centre beautification scheme there – that mean little outside those local areas.

Read More..

The trailed decision to “mutilate” HS2 by terminating it in a west London suburb rather than extend it all the way to Euston – and potentially junk the Birmingham to Manchester section – saves short-term cash but at the cost of much bigger long-term gains.

Take the postwar consensus on social housing Though we live in a time where it feels like manmade, multigenerational challenges such as global overheating and microbial resistance could be our undoing, politics has never felt less up to the task.

But being able to sit with that unease and to channel the “ cathedral thinking ” of the medieval architects who drew up plans they knew were highly unlikely to be finished in their own lifetimes might benefit those theoretical descendants with whom it’s hard for us to connect beyond the abstract.

Read More..