UK PM Sunak gears up for tough decisions, kicks off election season

Battling gloomy polls and mounting doubts, British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak has urged sceptical voters and his own Conservative Party: Keep me in office and I'll offer you change.

In his first — and possibly last — speech as leader to the party’s annual conference before an election due in 2024, Sunak said on Wednesday he's not afraid to make tough choices and big decisions that will deliver "long-term success" rather than "short-term advantage."

But one of his big decisions has divided the party and threatens to derail his agenda: scrapping much of an ambitious but overbudget high-speed railway line that was planned to link London and Manchester.

Sunak said he was cancelling the rest of the embattled HS2 project because its costs have doubled and "the facts have changed."

"The economic case has massively been weakened by the changes to business travel post-Covid," he said, arguing it would be an "abdication of leadership" to continue.

Some Conservatives said the decision was a bad move — and doing it at a conference in Manchester was disastrous.

'Incredible political gaffe'

Andy Street, the Conservative mayor of the West Midlands region, called it "an incredible political gaffe" that would leave the party’s opponents saying "the Tories have come to Manchester to shaft the North."

The embattled High Speed 2 railway, once billed as Europe’s largest infrastructure project, was meant to slash journey times and increase capacity between London, the central England city of Birmingham and the northern cities of Manchester and Leeds with 250 mph (400 kph) state-of-the-art trains.

Depicted as a key part of the government’s plans to level up the country by redistributing jobs and investment from the affluent south of England to the poorer north, its cost was estimated at 33 billion pounds in 2011 but has soared to more than $122 billion by some estimates.

The Manchester-Leeds leg was lopped off by the Conservative government in 2021, after the coronavirus pandemic brought train travel to a halt. UK passenger numbers have recovered, but are only about 80 percent of pre-pandemic levels.

Sunak said the high-speed line will end at Birmingham, 100 miles (160 kilometres) from London, rather than farther north in Manchester. He said that would free $44 billion for new road and rail projects across the Midlands and North.

Manchester Mayor Andy Burnham, a member of the opposition Labour Party, said the decision sends the message that “we can’t do big and difficult things anymore, and I don’t think it reflects well on Britain.”

"I just don’t think it’s fair to people in Greater Manchester to do this," he said.

Opinion polls suggest voters are weary of the Conservatives and their turmoil, putting the left-of-centre opposition Labour Party 15 to 20 points ahead.