THE NORTHERN SLOWERHOUSE: Levelling up means levelling up. Except when it doesn’t. Some levelling up is more up-levelling than others.
Many millions of pounds have been promised. Most of them are being spent on extremely expensive external “consultants”, who are employed to tell us what a brilliant job Boris Johnson is doing.
This leaves bugger all money for the railways. A few quid will be spent on mending the existing creaking infrastructure, as soon as a suitable Tory donor willing to assemble a chain gang comes forward.
This will mean closing worn out lines for years at a time. People and goods in The North will still need to move from one grim and rainy shithole to another. So in response, Johnson has pledged to supply enough rail replacement buses to claim to have bridged the gap.
Anybody who suggests that the single, clapped out London Routemaster bus assigned to the Manchester-Leeds route is somehow inadequate, will be forced to sit beside the M62 and cheer whenever it chugs past at 25mph.
The fleet will be supplemented by Johnson himself. Any shortage of transportation options will be addressed very simply. The missing rail replacement buses will be replaced by rail replacement bus replacement painted wine boxes.
Eventually, the plan, such as it is, is to encourage local interests to take up the slack. Yokels in possession of a horse and cart will receive inducements to whisk stranded commuters from their Godforsaken former Pennine mill town hovels to their shiny new city workhouses. From there, the most enterprising may save up enough to afford a single rail ticket to civilisation, otherwise known as within the M25.
After all, it’s really only London that matters. London, where the streets are paved in gold, or at least they were until the Tories stole it all.