Levelling Down: How Britain's Infrastructure Fell Victim to The Culture War

Dominic Davies on a how a bulldozer was driven through Britain's future

It is obvious to anyone who has even half an eye open that Britain’s infrastructure is falling apart. Train operators are running infuriatingly unreliable services and charging passengers hundreds of pounds for the privilege. High Speed Rail 2 (HS2) will barely make it to London and may yet be cancelled entirely, while the rest of our creaking national network is becoming increasingly vulnerable to the consequences of climate change.

And it is not only the railways. Bus routes across the country are steadily disappearing, isolating those in regional towns that lack alternative means of transport. Sewage is pumped into rivers by companies that haven’t invested in our waste disposal systems for decades, and the government is facing a housing backlog that would take half a century to clear even if it were meeting its own targets – which it currently is not.

It is therefore especially jarring that the Government which has overseen this latest phase of infrastructure collapse won its majority on two promises, only one of which has received the attention it deserves. The first of these is ‘getting Brexit done’ and second is renewing Britain’s infrastructure, otherwise known as “levelling up”.