How Whitehall's Death Eaters did for the Midland Mainline

As politics go, the decision to “pause” the electrification of the Midland Mainline is miserably, yet predictably, shabby.

It’s pretty obvious the government knew the problems with Network Rail’s budget were going to come to a head before the election. The final announcement last week was also anticipated by a series of leaks which appeared in national newspapers.

Whitehall's grubby paws were all over them. They were softening us up.

All this when millions has already been spent on preparatory work for electrification, and when the government remains committed to pouring billions into London’s transport system and even more fantastical sums into the shimmering vision that is HS2.

But we shouldn’t be surprised. Post-war British history is littered with the wreckage of large-scale, government-funded projects which became victims of the cock-eyed ‘system’ by which we contrive to manage the UK’s creaking infrastructure - its inadequate airports, its slow, overcrowded railways, its stretched power stations and its crappy roads.

While we’re pretty good at producing reports which forecast demand and warn of problems, getting something done about them appears to produce an institutional psychosis which means we never quite manage to get it over the finish line without a financial hiccup. Or we just never manage to get it over the finish line at all.

Actually when I say ‘psychosis’, I mean ‘Treasury’, the government department which looms over anyone in Whitehall who dares suggest money might be spent.

We shouldn’t joke. While infrastructure has its wreckage, politics has its corpses, many of them rendered lifeless by what is the Whitehall equivalent of Harry Potter's Death Eaters.

Yet the decision to kick the Midland Mainline’s electrification into the long grass is surely a glaring example of a dysfunctional system of administration that has had its day.

What should be a rational assessment of the future needs of the economy has been turned into an advert for how not to stimulate regional growth, and how central government spends far too much time listening either to itself or to voices in London.

Those voices don't speak for us.

A couple of weeks ago I was in Nottingham’s twin city, Karlsruhe, riding on a tram which runs straight on to local rail lines and carries on its journey. It has been operating successfully for years and it’s the result of a political system which lets regions keep their money and make their own decisions.

Were it not for the depressing myopia of Whitehall’s economic prison warders, we could do the same in Nottingham.