Manchester City Council have recently announced a £54m plan to improve bus and cycle links across the city. Now whether in a boom or a recession, £54 million is a lot of money for some bus and cycle lanes. However in the last couple of years we’ve also seen massive investment in Manchester’s general transport infrastructure with more to come. This investment (all from the public coffers) now includes :
- £1.5bn of Metrolink extensions to Oldham, Rochdale, East Didsbury, Manchester Airport and Ashton-under-Lyne
- The Manchester Hub and Ordsall Chord c£620million
- A major rail electrification programme in the region £197million
- Electrification of the Trans-Pennine rail route £272 million
- The Leigh to Manchester busway. £76 million
- New transport interchanges at Rochdale, Wythenshawe and Bolton £100 million
- HS2 extension to Manchester £5.4 billion (just the Manchester bit)
The whole lot comes to more than a whopping £8 Billion of investment in Manchester’s transport infrastructure by the Coalition Government. Fabulous ! About time we got some serious investment in the region.
If Labour had had their way we’d have had none of it
In 2008 The Labour Government gave the green light to Greater Manchester's £3bn plan to revolutionise public transport, but only if a controversial congestion charge scheme was introduced.
Consultation was carried out, maps produced showing the zones where you’d have to pay, major scare-mongery started about Manchester dying as a city if the investment didn’t happen. A poll in June 2008 indicated the majority of people were (surprise surprise) against a congestion charge. So a referendum of the Greater Manchester people was announced that would be held in December 2008.
The C-Charge campaign kicked off in September. This was when the do-gooders, the greens and the left seriously mobilised. Dirty tricks campaigns abounded. Claims were made that the ‘Yes’ campaigners were misleading people. Big business mobilized against it, including Kellogs who were accused of encouraging their employees to 'cut and paste' reasons to object to the controversial scheme from a anti-charge campaign website and send them in to object.
Further controversy involved the revelation that on top of the cost of all the consultants paid to mastermind the scheme, the man in charge of the referendum was being paid up to £600 a day. Sir Neil McIntosh, who eventually over saw the count and came up with the referendum wording, would also get a flat fee of £10,000 after the votes were counted on December 12.
The up-shot of it all was the people spoke with a resounding ‘NO’, Turnout figures were 53.2% with 78.8% saying no. Local Labour politicians slammed the result.
Sir Richard Leese, leader of Manchester City Council said: "This was the ONLY opportunity to get £3billion of investment in public transport over the next five years and 10,000 jobs to go with it. So far nobody has been able to put forward a credible alternative to get those levels of investment.”
Labour’s, Lord Peter Smith, (chairman of Association of Greater Manchester Authorities) said the results were “very clear”. He added: “This is not just a vote no for congestion charging, it’s a vote no to improvements on the trams railways and buses and there will now be no improvements."
But That Wasn’t The End Of It !!!
Within 18 months Gordon Brown and his bullying Labour Government was out of office, low and behold all the investment they denied us was addressed and more beside. As we can see by the schemes above, it’s all happening now.
The up-shot is, can anyone really trust a political party that spent a fortune promising THEIR voters, in THEIR heartland that they’d only invest in THEIR region if the voters themselves stumped up THEIR cash. And if they didn’t they’d get nothing. History says otherwise.
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