Let's repeat the HS2 success story

Labour denies railways will be given ‘lower priority’ under renationalisation plans – as Tories warn of ‘wildcat strikes’

Shadow transport secretary Louise Haigh promised to deliver the biggest shake-up to rail “in a generation” by establishing the long-delayed Great British Railways (GBR) organisation and bringing routes back into public ownership, if Labour forms the next government…

Sam Coates, Sky News’ deputy political editor, asked Ms Haigh how she was going to avoid the “trap” of British Railways – the former national railway system that was privatised in the 1990s – which was forced to compete for central government cash.

“How are you going to make sure that you don’t end up falling into the same old trap as British Railways, where effectively, to get train upgrades, you are competing for cash with schools and hospitals, and given money is going to be very tight, aren’t the trains actually going to be a lower priority?” he asked.

Labour knows it isn’t going to work, GBR cannot compete successfully with the budgetary demands of the NHS, education and other loud voices on the political stage. It isn’t going to work and Labour knows it. We may as well assume that there is an internal calculation suggesting that enough voters don’t know it, particularly younger voters.