Regeneration with higher wages paid to local workers a la Manchester is clearly not the same as a bunch of London office workers selling up and buying cheaper property in Brum.

Biggest Labour hustings yet. Nandy getting standing ovations.

Yeah, I'm sure people will be queuing up to leave London for Birmingham so they can spend £10k a year on rail travel and an extra 2 hours every day commuting...

Two senior mangers in my office already do exactly that from Nottingham, and work from home a couple of days a week.

Others on big salaries like them will gladly move to the nicer parts of Brum to get away from the problems of London (congestion, pollution, schools, knife crime etc) and cash in on the inflated London house market.

You don't know what you're talking about.

Jewish Labour Movement nominate chair of Labour Friends of Palestine for Leader of the Labour Party. If the "it's all about suppressing legitimate criticism of Israel" crowd were acting in good faith, they'd apologise. But since it was they that were pretending anti-Semitism was actually "legitimate criticism of Israel", they won't.

Good. The Labout party should be friends with Palestine.

These 2 things are not the same.

As usual, it's you who doesn't know what they are talking about and can't put a coherent argument together.

If you can't understand how large volumes of money entering a housing market above the median point ripple through the local market and result in younger people being priced out of that market, no one here can help you and you should probably stop posting about these things or anything related to economics to spare yourself further embarrassment.

Your whole argument is we shouldn't invest in areas in order to keep house prices cheap.

gtfo.

That's a straw man, and a feeble one at that.

My argument is that investment should come in the form of Phase 2, favoured by people who understand the needs of the region, designed to bring jobs and skills and therefore higher wages to the region, rather than from the expensive Westminster vanity project of Phase 1 bringing commuters.

But you carry on building from straw.

You're obviously talking bollocks on your main point, but I do agree phase 2 is absolutely essential and probably more important than phase 1.

jalfrezi's point seems obvious and correct to me. House prices increasing as a result of the local area being regenerated might be a minor issue for some but is generally a very good thing for the area. House prices increasing because an area becomes a commuter town for people working miles always is generally terrible for the area. I don't know how much of each will happen and how beneficial or otherwise HS2 will be for Birmingham but it seems obvious that at least some amount of the latter will happen.

The idea that only commuters will be attracted to a regenerated Birmingham, but business won't be, is the fallacy here.

This seems bizarre. Why is there such a large price, or any price at all, to pay for this information?

The idea that you can regenerate somewhere just by building a high speed train service that only ferries people between it and the capital 100 miles away, is the fallacy.

The FT, Telegraph, BBC and numerous other news outlets describe it as a gamble, and there was huge opposition to it in the Commons, but clearly you know better.

If money and/or political will runs out before Phase 2 is completed, we'll be left with little more than a vastly expensive high speed shuttle service.

The comparison was to Manchester, which has had regeneration as a result of increased investment in the area, not from having improved travel links. Having easier travel from Birmingham to London doesn't automatically mean that Birmingham will have that same sort of local investment. If the main effect is to have more people buying houses in Birmingham with the intention of commuting to London then at the most basic level that results in less demand for local business. Obviously that's an over simplification but the point is that improved travel links doesn't necessarily mean increased local investment.

Neither of these points addresses the binkin obvious argument that if individuals in London make the calculation that moving to Birmingham makes economic sense, then why would businesses not make the same calculation?

Cite. HS2 is a political gamble for Johnson, but the project will make it's money back - it's just a question of how long it will take.

Lol. Check the voting records on HS2 next time before making such stupid claims.

Uhh, people in London might move to Birmingham because it's cheap(er than London) and they are ok with commuting to London for work. There is no similar incentive for businesses to move out of London. If anything it's the opposite, because it would result in a larger labour supply for jobs in London (people commuting from even further away) and a smaller labour supply for jobs in Birmingham (houses being bought by people not working in the city).

It requires something more than simply better travel links for businesses to have an incentive to move to Birmingham. If HS2 is accompanied by increased investment and other incentives to attract business then it could certainly end up being a positive for the city but by itself it provides no real advantages that would make moving beneficial for businesses.

google, it's not hard.


That's totally unclear and is just your opinion. You still have yet to explain why building an executive shuttle service between Brum and London will lead to urban renewal - you need to do a lot better than "lots of money spent = regeneration".

Ironically you're guilty of being everything you rail against Corbyn's Labour for being ie supporting too much unfocused spending with unclear outcomes.


I meant among your own Tory MPs.

I see your ill-thought out views have also been debunked again by Willd, ie your false equivalence between company workers and businesses. Have you ever worked in the commercial sector?

One of the reasons (the minor reason) I come down in favour of HS2 is that the objections to it are so obviously specious. Jalfrezi's is the rare exception in being a correct downside but it's also being massively overstated.

Firstly, commuters from London is a small part of the the impact of HS2.

Secondly, commuters from London has a downside but is also a good thing. It's a transfer of wealth away from London, people do become part of the community where they live and and additional wage earners may well work locally rather than London. Local areas also become more viable for new business because of these commuters.

Thirdly, local generation of wealth will cause exactly the same pressure on housing with upcoming areas pricing out the locals (as we have seen in London). The only solution to this is the desperately needed planning to provide supply of houses.

Fourthly, the housing problem has become so fundamental that unless tackled its an argument against anything good and spreading the wealth around the country with better infrastructure is a necessary part of the way out of this mess. HS2 is a part of this. Much more is needed including Northern connectivity projects reversing the Beeching catastrophe etc etc but it will all face the same objection Jalfrezi raises as it will allow people to commute to areas with well paid jobs, driving up local house prices.

So it's a valid concern but it's not a very strong argument against HS2.


You raise the important point which is that if all that is done is HS2 then it's upside will be severely limited. However that doesn't mean HS2 isn't extremely important if a big upside is to be achieved. The short answer is HS2 plus loads of other stuff and that cancelling HS2 at this stage is probably a very bad idea.

I did and found nothing to support your claims.

No different to your commuter argument then.

It's almost like my opening position on this stated the exact same thing:

Found this article to be an interesting read. It's a discussion on why the Left is losing. It looks beyond the UK and the main thrust of the article is that while right wing parties can move to the left on economic issues and nearer to the centre ground left wing parties are unable to move right on cultural issues and this is costing them. Hence we see the split where younger higher educated voters are drawn to the left but there's been a large shift in white working class voters to the right.

https://www.lawliberty.org/2020/02/1...eft-is-losing/

is not remotely the same as

without the investment aspect.

I appreciate you want to walk your stance back now that it's been debunked but, as has already been pointed out to you, Manchester's regeneration was the result of investment in other areas, not in a super-fast shuttle service to London.

£800m spent on expanding Manchester airport and attracting direct flights to/from Beijing and the promotion of its university to attract top talent from around the world were just two schemes that no one is proposing for Birmingham, and without a well thought out investment plan you're just waving a bundle of cash at a new train line, which admittedly is in dire need of modernisation - just don't expect Birmingham to become the "Midlands powerhouse" without other plans.

Although if the right moves to the left then the left is winning. Politics is all about moving the center. What we mustn't do is allow the left to the move to the right because then the center goes the wrong way.

If we want to move it faster then yes left wing parties have to win power more often more and that does mean stopping the divisive thingy. Not taking it's natural voters for granted is also vital.