Oxford to Cambridge: Via the Looking Glass

Heard the one about the proposed railway line between Oxford and Cambridge being classed as an ‘England and Wales project’? It sounds like the start of a joke, but if it is, it’s a very bad one.

The punchline is that Wales will be deprived of much-needed compensatory transport funding, which would normally be allocated if the project were to be designated as England-only, which, of course, in the real world, it should be.

The rationale for this baffling decision that a £6.6bn link between two southern English cities is somehow an ‘England and Wales’ project is that it falls within the snappily titled ‘rail network enhancement programme funding envelope,’ which is non-devolved. In the past, the same funding stream has paid for rail infrastructure improvements within Wales, and the Oxford-Cambridge link has the potential, in the future, to link up with Cardiff (as to the likelihood of this happening, the promised HS2 link with the north of England should be a clue).

This issue highlights the weakness and instability of Wales’ devolution settlement; unlike Scotland and Northern Ireland, rail infrastructure in Wales is funded by the UK government. It also highlights the continuing injustice of the Barnett formula under which Wales, Scotland, and Northern Ireland are supposed to receive funding, a ‘Barnett consequential’, following an English-only spending project. This dates from 1978 and was only ever intended by Joel Barnett, James Callaghan’s Chief Secretary to the Treasury, as a temporary stopgap. As has been repeatedly pointed out over the years, not only is it massively out of date, but it’s based on population, not need, and so does not reflect the real needs of Wales.

The reaction of Welsh First Minister Eluned Morgan is telling. Firstly, it was only a reaction; it took Plaid politicians and Wales’ one Liberal-Democrat MP to do the necessary digging. She then did what she always does when cornered: she patronised the Plaid MS’s by lecturing them, as if they needed it, on how devolution works but at the same time, showed the fear in her eyes, as if she was thinking ‘oh my god, how am I going to explain this away?’

Our transport infrastructure is in desperate need of investment and renewal. A lack of connectivity makes Welsh communities poorer, but while the journeys between Bangor and Pwllheli and between Aberystwyth and Carmarthen, for example, can only be made by rail via Shrewsbury, and so by leaving Wales altogether, we in Wales are expected, as a result of a piece of Treasury sleight of hand, to subsidise a railway linking two affluent southern English cities.

We’ve been here before, of course. The dust hasn’t yet settled on the HS2 scandal: Wales subsidising another railway without an inch of track being laid here. While in opposition, Labour was happy to agree with Plaid that Wales was being sold short by £4.6 billion, that figure has since been ‘recalculated’, by Jo Stevens, the spectacularly ineffective Secretary of State for Wales, to a mere £431 million.

More seriously, this issue reflects the continuing contempt shown by Westminster governments, including the present Labour government, towards Wales. There’s no sign of any intention on the part of the government to replace or fundamentally reform the discredited Barnett formula (Labour also had thirteen years to do it under Blair and Brown). There’s the blocking by Labour MP’s of the devolution of the Crown Estate to Welsh government control, despite the Welsh government and all but one of Wales’ 22 counties demanding this (see the previous Celyn article Bleeding Wales Dry), thus depriving Welsh communities of much-needed revenue. There’s also, of course, the failure to renegotiate the Tories’ bad deal with Tata in Port Talbot, followed by the last minute discovery of the importance of primary steel-making, but in Scunthorpe.

It’s as if Wales is being trolled by Westminster, tauntingly reminded of its subjection.Those inclined towards conspiracy theories will no doubt mistake the Labour leadership’s cruelty, lack of judgement and tin-eared incompetence for some grand design, so generously is it playing into Farage’s hands, with Senedd elections due in only a year’s time. These repeated examples of Wales being short-changed or ignored should deliver votes in truckloads for Plaid Cymru as well. Celyn steers well clear of peddling conspiracy theories, which is just as well, as surely working as a secret agent for not one but two parties would be beyond even the political genius of Morgan McSweeney.