Battling gloomy polls and mounting doubts, British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak on Wednesday urged skeptical voters, and his own Conservative Party: Keep me in office and I'll offer you change.
In his first — and possibly last — speech as leader to the party’s annual conference before an election due in 2024, Sunak said he's not afraid to make tough choices and big decisions that will deliver “long-term success” rather than “short-term advantage.”
But one of his big decisions has divided the party and threatens to derail his agenda: scrapping much of an ambitious but overbudget high-speed railway line that was planned to link London and Manchester.
Sunak said he was canceling the rest of the embattled HS2 project because its costs have doubled and “the facts have changed.”
“The economic case has massively been weakened by the changes to business travel post-COVID,” he said, arguing it would be an “abdication of leadership” to continue.
Some Conservatives said the decision was a bad move — and doing it at a conference in Manchester was disastrous.
Andy Street, the Conservative mayor of the West Midlands region, called it “an incredible political gaffe” that would leave the party’s opponents saying “the Tories have come to Manchester to shaft the North.”
The embattled High Speed 2 railway, once billed as Europe’s largest infrastructure project, was meant to slash journey times and increase capacity between London, the central England city of Birmingham and the northern cities of Manchester and Leeds with 250 mph (400 kph) state-of-the-art trains.
Depicted as a key part of the government’s plans to level up the country by redistributing jobs and investment from the affluent south of England to the poorer north, its cost was estimated at 33 billion pounds in 2011 but has soared to more than 100 billion pounds ($122 billion) by some estimates. The Manchester-Leeds leg was lopped off by the Conservative government in 2021, after the coronavirus pandemic brought train travel to a halt. U.K. passenger numbers have recovered, but are only about 80% of pre-pandemic levels.
Sunak said the high-speed line will end at Birmingham, 100 miles (160 kilometers) from London, rather than farther north in Manchester. He said that would free 36 billion pounds ($44 billion) for new road and rail projects across the Midlands and North.
Manchester Mayor Andy Burnham, a member of the opposition Labour Party, said the decision sends the message that “we can’t do big and difficult things anymore, and I don’t think it reflects well on Britain.”
“I just don’t think it’s fair to people in Greater Manchester to do this," he said.
Jack Brereton, a Conservative lawmaker from the Midlands, said HS2 welcomed the move to truncate the line, saying “we can reinvest that money in schemes that actually will deliver that levelling up in the Midlands and the North.”
Sunak is trying to persuade the voting public that a party in power for 13 years deserves another term in office. In recent weeks he's announced populist measures — such as slowing moves to phase out fossil fuels — designed to win back voters who have rejected the Conservatives over Britain’s stagnating economy, cost-of-living crisis and waves of strikes, including one Wednesday by train drivers that upended some conference participants' travel plans.
Like many Conservatives, he invoked the spirit of former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, whose free-market policies transformed Britain in the 1980s, at a high cost to working-class communities. Sunak suggested he was Thatcher's political heir — and not the five other Conservative prime ministers since.
“We’ve had 30 years of a political system which incentivizes the easy decision, not the right one — 30 years of vested interests standing in the way of change,” Sunak said.
Sunak took office just under a year ago after his predecessor Liz Truss alarmed financial markets and roiled the economy with a plan for unfunded tax cuts. She lasted just 49 days in power. Before that, Sunak was Treasury chief to Prime Minister Boris Johnson, who resigned amid multiple ethics scandals.
He disappointed some in the party by ruling out tax cuts, at least this year, saying, "The best tax cut we can give right now is to halve inflation and ease the cost of living." U.K. inflation hit a 40-year high of 11.1% a year ago and is now just under 7%.
Opinion polls suggest voters are weary of the Conservatives and their turmoil, putting the left-of-center opposition Labour Party 15 to 20 points ahead.
Sunak's rivals are already jostling for position on a party leadership contest that could follow election defeat. Home Secretary Suella Braverman used her conference speech to appeal to the party’s authoritarian, law-and-order wing, advocating tougher curbs on migration and a war on human rights protections and “woke” social values.
The conference mood was subdued: “There’s no oomph,” lamented one delegate, as many in the party contemplate the possibility of losing power.
Sunak acknowledged that people feel “an exhaustion with politics.”
“Our political system is too focused on short-term advantage, not long-term success,” he said. “Politicians spent more time campaigning for change than actually delivering it. … I won't be this way. Our mission is to fundamentally change our country. ”
