Burnham expresses anger at the treatment of northerners as inferior citizens if HS2 is cancelled.
Rishi Sunak is facing allegations of disregarding the people in the North of England and treating them as inferior, as he considers eliminating a crucial HS2 route in the coming days.
It comes as a Tory minister refused to rule out killing off the northern leg of the high speed line from Birmingham to Manchester amid concern over costs. The fate of the line could be decided during a meeting of the Prime Minister and the Chancellor, Jeremy Hunt, later this week, according to reports.
An announcement could potentially be made before the Tories’ annual conference, which kicks off in Manchester on October 1.
Speaking on Sunday the Defence Secretary Grant Shapps said no decision had been made on HS2 – but said Mr Sunak is prepared to take “difficult decisions”. He also told the BBC the high speed rail project wasn’t the “be all and end all” and said it would be “crazy” not to have another look at the scheme after it was reported the cost had increased by £8billion.
Mr Shapps said the Government could not write an “open-ended cheque” if costs were “inexorably going higher and higher”. But in a furious reaction the Mayor of Greater Manchester Andy Burnham said: “Why are we always treated as second class citizens when it comes to transport?”
He told Sky News: “This is the Parliament when they said they would level us up. If they leave a situation with the southern half of the country is connected by modern high speed lines and the north of England is left with Victorian infrastructure that is a recipe for the north-south divide to become a north-south chasm over the rest of this century.” Mr Burnham said the move seemed to be the “desperate act of a dying government”.
London Mayor Sadiq Khan revealed he had written to the Prime Minister about the fate of HS2, warning it could end up being a “colossal waste of public money” if the northern leg and the Euston terminus in central London are not completed. When the railway first opens between London and Birmingham, expected between 2029 and 2033, its end-point in the capital will be Old Oak Common, in the western suburbs.
HS2 trains are not expected to run to Euston until around 2041 at the earliest and there are now doubts the central London extension will ever go ahead.
Last week ex-PM Boris Johnson also told Mr Sunak: “It makes no sense at all to deliver a mutilated HS2. He added: “It is the height of insanity to announce all this just before a party conference in Manchester. “It is no wonder that Chinese universities teach the constant cancellation of UK infrastructure as an example of what is wrong with democracy. “We need to get back to the 2019 agenda of uniting and levelling up our country.”
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