The British Prime Minister, Rishi Sunak, announced on Wednesday October 4 that he was scaling back a major infrastructure project for the country, a high-speed train line which aimed to open up the north of the country, but which the cost had soared.
“I am canceling the rest of the HS2 [High Speed ??2] project,” declared the head of the Conservative government during a speech at his party congress in Manchester (north-west of England). “In its place we will reinvest every penny, £36 billion [€41.6 billion], in hundreds of new transport projects,” he promised.
HS2, the second high-speed line project in the United Kingdom after that taken by Eurostar to the Channel Tunnel (HS1), was originally intended to connect the British capital to Birmingham then to Manchester and Leeds. It will finally stop after Birmingham.
“What we really need is better transport links in the North” and this “will be our priority”, insisted Mr Sunak. To justify his decision, he claimed that “HS2 [was] the ultimate example of the old consensus” and that “the result [was] a project more than doubled in cost and suffered from repeated delays.”
The Prime Minister notably affirmed that he intended to boost a rail project already in the pipeline to improve connections between the main economic centers of the North, which will reduce travel times between Manchester, Bradford, Sheffield or Hull, on electrified lines. The leader also announced a long list of improved urban transport projects, whether bus lines, tram lines or road connections.
A tobacco-free country
The Prime Minister also announced his intention to extend the ban on the sale of cigarettes so that, gradually, the United Kingdom becomes a tobacco-free country. “I propose that in the future we increase the [legal] smoking age by one year each year,” declared the head of government. This means that a 14-year-old today will never be legally sold a cigarette and that he and his generation will be able to grow up smoke-free. »
Rishi Sunak also called on his allies to continue arming kyiv, at a time when military aid from certain Western countries seems to be called into question. “I tell our allies: if we give the necessary tools to President [Volodymyr] Zelensky, the Ukrainians will finish the job,” he said, recalling that London was the first to provide tanks to the Ukrainian army.
