- cross-posted to:
- cambridge
- cross-posted to:
- cambridge
Rachel Reeves will say the so-called “Oxford-Cambridge growth corridor” has “the potential to be Europe’s Silicon Valley" in a major speech she will give in Oxfordshire today.
The Chancellor will claim the region offers “huge economic potential for our nation’s growth prospects”.
It comes after cabinet ministers were ordered to ditch policies that could stand in the way of growing the economy.
As part of the delivery of what Ms Reeves will call the “Oxford-Cambridge growth corridor”, she will also touch on funding for East West Rail, a railway line that would connect the cities, as well as a new railway station in Tempsford in Bedfordshire.
She will say the cities are “two of the least affordable in the UK” and existing transport options mean that to travel between them “by train takes two-and-a-half hours” while “there is no way to commute directly from towns like Bedford and Milton Keynes to Cambridge by rail”.
“Oxford and Cambridge offer huge economic potential for our nation’s growth prospects,” she is expected to say.
Meanwhile Labour voters in the North… 🥶.
Wouldn’t it be nice to have E-W trains across the whole country? Nah fuck it.
Yeah, my first thought was “well fuck the North”.
If they were going to do it properly, drill tunnels under the Pennines east of Manchester and run the road and rail links straight through. We deserve at least one tunnel boring machine when London has had so many, a lot of which were just entombed down there.
Also the sane route for a high speed rail line is up the east coast to Edinburgh (so you can connect straight to the Continent) and you can then run a spur off to Manchester-Liverpool and Leeds, then, later, Glasgow.
London =/= The South
There’s much greater density of lines north of Birmingham than the rest of England with the exception of London. Especially the Liverpool-Manchester-Leeds corridor.
The South West, Wales (ex. Cardiff and the Valleys) and East Anglia are all pretty beret of train lines, in much the same way that the country north of York is.