When Democratic politicians launched into a rendering of the 60s protest class “We Shall Overcome” it struck more than musical chord, making me think that Generation Z — and Generations W, X and Y — might need to learn a lot from the 60s, not least of all in the words of another immortal protest song, Pete Seeger’s “Where Have All The Flowers Gone?” Some of us, now clapped out, remember the refrain of that song: “When Will They Ever Learn?”
It might seem to stretch the skills of even the most skilled BBC continuity speaker to link a 60s American folk song with goings-on in the golden spires of Oxford and Cambridge. Yet the link is there. HS2 was arguably the biggest post-war economic, political and domestic disaster in English history. Yet here we are again, having already spent £1 billion on East-West Rail, a project which is part of the Treasury’s commitment to what has been reborn as the Oxford-Cambridge Corridor. It’s a farce, designed to replicate the US’s Silicon Valley, yet based on totally hollow foundations. When will we ever learn?
The Treasury Mandarins who have supported the Oxford-Cambridge Corridor (known among locals as the “OxScam Corridor”), seem woefully ignorant of the reality of the real Silicon Valley. It seems that if you say the word “growth”, the facts vanish. Have the Mandarins who quote Silicon Valley as their model ever really looked at it? Never mind that the original Silicon Valley needed no £6.6 billion railway line either to found or sustain it. Never mind that the techno-wizards who founded Silicon Valley did not need a Victorian transport system to allow them to meet like-minds. They use that novel invention, the internet. Never mind that our government complains it takes two and a half hours to travel by train between Oxford and Cambridge, when the power-brokers in the UK Silicon Valley need international, not local, communications. Never mind that Oxford and Cambridge growth has been exponential in the past decade, without the need for an East-West Corridor, and has already resulted in a grossly over-stretched local infrastructure. Mention “growth” and “Silicon Valley” in the same sentence, and magically wishes turn effortlessly into facts.
Some new supercomputers would do far more to boost the UK’s version of Silicon Valley than metal rails on a flat bed
The backbone of the East West Corridor is the proposal for the East-West, Oxford to Cambridge, Rail Link. EWR has consistently refused to produce a business plan. In the 12 months to March 2023, the last period for which figures are available, the UK taxpayer subsidised rail travel by £4.4 billion. There has never been any suggestion that EWR would pay its way by passenger fares. Every taxpayer in the UK is therefore being asked to add to an already horrendous bill for rail passenger services, and to subsidise a new route for the already-wealthy south-east of the UK that will never be profitable. To add insult to injury, EWR has opted for the southern route for its new line into Cambridge, despite this being the most expensive, and the most damaging environmentally and to the cohesion of local communities. In choosing the southern route, EWR went against the advice of an independent assessment by ARUP, another example of EWR being permitted to listen to nobody but itself. Its justification for the southern route? The southern route best serves the needs of the Cambridge Bio-Medical campus. Yet that campus is about to benefit from a new Cambridge South Station, putting it on a 50-minute journey to King’s Cross and the links to Heathrow and Gatwick that the modern version of Silicon Valley depends on.
Our Lords and Masters in the Treasury have not focussed on the fact that Astra Zenica’s glowing new HQ in Cambridge was funded not by the creation of new silicon chips, but by the development of vaccines. Technology moves on. We do not need to emulate America’s Silicon Valley. We need to create the second version based in AI and medical services. And to do that we need to link up all the research universities in the UK, not just Oxford and Cambridge. Some new supercomputers would do far more to boost the UK’s version of Silicon Valley than metal rails on a flat bed. Perhaps most damaging is the proposed cost of EWR. Is there anyone still alive in the UK who believes that the current proposed cost of EWR at £6.66 billion will not increase astronomically?
At the core of the proposals for the Corridor is a vast expansion of housing, a wonderful opportunity for land owners who thought they owned land that could only sell for the price of agricultural land, but wake up one morning to find it can sell a development land. It’s also a wonderful opportunity for developers to make millions. What this housing explosion is not is an answer to providing the work force Oxford and Cambridge need, who come from areas not served by the East-West rail link. Hence the widespread belief that this new housing is not for the benefit of local industry, but simply an overflow from London. The problem? Oxford is already gridlocked. Cambridge is heading that way with existing traffic. There’s a limit to what you can do with a medieval town centre. Because there are so few stops on the proposed rail link one estimate has suggested that travel to and from the stations will put 20,000 more car journeys on the road in Cambridge alone. Cambridge has seen massive new housing developments in the past decade — whole new communities in Eddington, Addenbrooke’s and Trumpington Meadows, never mind a host of the new housing including the development of the old Marshalls’ airfield site — which have grossly overstretched the region’s infrastructure. Anglian Water has been forced to object to proposed new developments because there is simply not enough water available, Government response has been to promise new reservoirs and pipelines, but for some reason the monumental cost of all this is not added to the cost of developing the corridor. Nor have the plans addressed the need for the inhabitants of this new housing to access GP and hospital services, the need for several new hospitals, sewage works and a host of other infrastructure requirements.
And what’s happened to the Northern Powerhouse? £6.6 billion would go a long way to creating a Northern Corridor linking the universities of Liverpool, Manchester, Salford, Leeds and Sheffield, world-class institutions with wonderful research potential to become the UK’s real new centre of growth.
“Where Have All The Flowers Gone” has a verse that ends with “Where have all the soldiers gone?”. Pete Seeger’s answer was that they’ve all gone to the graveyard. In our troubled times, £6.6 billion and adding would go a long way to providing soldiers who might be able to stop us all going to the graveyard.
HS2 lives again. A Treasury-driven juggernaut with a life of its own rides roughshod over a country that cannot fund its armed forces, its schools, its universities or its health service — and cannot afford even to mend potholes. And we’re spending £7 billion on a project with massive upfront costs and no proven ability to pay those back even in the long term.
When will we ever learn?
