Build bridges, not walls. It’s an evergreen lesson from history, although it would help if Boris Johnson didn’t keep taking it literally.
The prime minister’s fantasy of building a bridge between Scotland and Northern Ireland, supposedly to help both feel more connected to the union, was solemnly trotted out once again this week as if it wasn’t preposterous. What’s pulling the United Kingdom apart is not geography but the politics of a Brexit conducted on England’s terms, and that’s not going to be resolved by plonking some implausible white elephant in the sea.
That’s not the only bridge being unveiled this week, however. The HS2 fast rail network, finally set to get the green light today more than a decade after work first began, also functions more like a bridge than a wall, because it’s meant to bring closer parts of the country that have sometimes felt estranged. Unlike the Scottish bridge, it’s both absolutely feasible and so far advanced already that retreating could have been harder than going ahead, no matter how many billions over budget it’s likely to run.
There are solid reasons to proceed with HS2 that go beyond the merely symbolic. But big infrastructure projects are always at heart about more than tarmac and concrete, which is partly why delivering them invariably becomes tortured. From Japan’s bullet trains to Donald Trump’s wall to Dubai’s skyscrapers, they’re about how a nation sees itself and what values it wishes to project; living monuments to progress, technological innovation, success (or in the case of Trump’s wall, none of the above). It shouldn’t remotely matter which city boasts the world’s tallest building, yet for some inexplicable reason it’s become a symbol of national virility.
And the symbolism of HS2 clearly matters to a prime minister promising to “level up” across the country and return prosperity to the north. True, there’s no evidence that what voters in the Labour seats that turned blue last December really wanted was faster trains to London. But some local improvements do depend on it going ahead, and ministers have hastily assembled a package to boost local bus and train routes alongside a revised HS2 plan expected to include some potentially unpopular cutbacks and compromises north of Birmingham.
Ironically, when HS2 was first conceived, under a Labour government, it was seen as a means not just of connecting up Britain but also of consolidating its place in Europe. Years ago, I remember the then transport secretary Andrew Adonis (who originally championed it) showing me a map of European rail routes on his office wall. Once the Channel tunnel connected British railways to their mainland European counterparts, we looked embarrassingly like poor relations. You could whizz through whole countries quicker than getting from one English city to another.
Back then HS2 was going to bring us closer to Europe, but as the years ticked by, its political meaning changed. David Cameron’s government rejected the idea of linking it up with Eurostar so that passengers could get direct from the big northern cities to Europe, concluding that was too expensive. But the project still had crucial political cover as part of George Osborne’s so-called “northern powerhouse” plan for big northern cities. After Brexit, its meaning shifted again, becoming attached to the idea of delivering for voters in the smaller struggling northern towns left out in the cold as Manchester or Birmingham grew, even though it’s far less obvious how many will benefit from trains that don’t stop where they live. But while this emotional case for building bridges with the north clearly feeds into the more sober economic case for HS2, there’s a risk of wildly exaggerating what it can deliver.
Of course transport links matter. But you can’t build your way out of the deep-rooted problems countries all over Europe are experiencing with post-industrial towns, which have more to do with jobs, skills, population shifts and economic trends (exacerbated in Britain by 10 years of austerity and about to be multiplied all over again by the consequences of Brexit) than with trains. You can’t build your way out of the nationalist feeling mounting in Scotland or Northern Ireland, either, with a bridge that’s almost certainly never going to happen.
What actually builds bridges between cities and countries is the sense that movement between them – whether of goods or people, money or ideas – isn’t a one-way street and that both sides of the bridge are equally valued. If you want to make the four countries of the union feel part of one nation, don’t treat them as petty obstacles to England’s political will being done. And if you want to make the north feel closer to London, that’s about an awful lot more than journey times.
• Gaby Hinsliff is a Guardian columnist
