Eleven months after the Welsh government introduced a 20mph speed limit across swathes of the country, a poll this week showed that 70 per cent of the population was opposed to the policy.
But that didn’t stop Labour‘s Transport Secretary Louise Haigh revealing on Tuesday that not only would the Westminster Government devolve the right to impose 20mph limits to local councils, but positively encourage their introduction.
In an extraordinary outburst, she suggested there would be more cash for both 20mph zones and low-traffic neighbourhoods (LTNs) – schemes to reduce traffic in residential areas – in Chancellor Rachel Reeves‘s first Budget, which will be delivered on October 30. It’s only the latest blunder by an inexperienced minister who is hopelessly out of her depth.
Take her handling of the rail unions. The Red Flag has long been the cherished anthem of the Labour Party. But when it comes to industrial relations, the white flag is fast becoming a key piece of equipment for Sir Keir Starmer‘s administration.
And Louise Haigh’s mishandling of negotiations with the train drivers’ union Aslef has been a masterclass of ineptitude, wishful thinking and cowardice.
Transport Minister Louise Haigh leaves 10 Downing Street after attending a weekly cabinet meeting
In an extraordinary outburst, she suggested there would be more cash for both 20mph zones and low-traffic neighbourhoods – schemes to reduce traffic in residential areas
Her decision last week to hand the train drivers’ union an inflation-busting pay increase worth 14.25 per cent over three years without any promise of reformed working practices – taking a driver’s basic earnings to over £69,000-a-year for a four-day week – reveals her to be a disastrously soft touch.
The truth is that Haigh – famous for her shock of vibrantly dyed red hair – is utterly unsuitable for the role of hard-headed negotiator with the public sector unions. She lacks the authority and temperament to stand up to them, not least because of her statist, Left-wing outlook and own deep ties to the trade union movement.
This is a politician who has never run a major organisation or handled a multi-million-pound budget. Like so many of the modern breed of MP, she spent several years working as a researcher at Westminster, including a spell as an aide to her current Cabinet colleague Lisa Nandy.
From 2012 until her election as MP for Sheffield Heeley in 2015, when – at 27 – she was the youngest of that year’s intake, she was also a public policy manager for insurance giant Aviva.
Throughout her career, she has been firmly on Labour’s Left. Soon after her election in 2015, she was one of 35 Labour MPs who nominated the Marxist Jeremy Corbyn for the leadership – though she did later say she had come to regret the decision. She has described the repressive state of Cuba as her favourite holiday destination and believes in nationalising the railways and restoring the buses to local authority control.
Both a grandfather and an uncle were trade union officials, while she herself was a shop steward in the huge Unite union. Her blinkered faith in the relationship means she sees nothing wrong with acting as a negotiator, even as she accepts funding from trade unions. At the weekend, this paper reported that, since 2019, she has personally accepted over £24,000 from unions.
Louise Haugh was voted in as the Labour MP for Sheffield Heeley in 2015
Haigh stands in her constituency office in Sheffield
Louise Haigh (left) and Angela Raynor during a visit to Perry Barr bus depot in Birmingham
Ms Haigh’s glaring unfitness for her position is not lessened by her capacity for hard work or her reputation as something of a character, as exemplified by her bold fashion choices, such as fuchsia tops and billowing turquoise trousers.
She is certainly a diligent parliamentarian and energetic networker, renowned for her annual birthday parties, which are attended by MPs from both wings of Labour.
In her first year as an MP, she was named as the most active member, having made 90 speeches and asked 471 questions. Speaker John Bercow even singled her out for praise over the way she had taken up the issue of tax office closures ‘with a terrier-like intensity’.
As Shadow Home Office Minister under Corbyn, she was lauded by her Tory counterpart Nick Hurd as ‘far and away the best shadow minister I have dealt with in eight years’.
Her work rate is all the more impressive given that she can be inwardly intimidated by performing in public.
‘She panics about the detail but that never shows,’ says one party insider.
Ms Haigh is not entirely a stereotypical Labour politician. In her teenage years, she was sent to an independent school when her parents split up and her mother struggled to cope with her.
Those schooldays were often unhappy, since she was bullied for being – in her own words – ‘ginger and overweight’, though she has now turned her hairstyle into one of her most conspicuous assets.
She is also unusual among Labour MPs in that she served as a special constable in the Metropolitan Police, based in Lambeth, a post that gave her insights into policing.
Haigh arrives in Downing Street after the Labour party’s landslide election victory
Haigh is the newly appointed Transport Secretary for the UK
Though she now declares herself to be a bus enthusiast, in her early 20s she had – rather incongruously – ‘a proper girl racer’ sports car, painted bright yellow with her name emblazoned on the rear window.
She refuses to talk about her personal life, beyond revealing that she is a vegetarian and shares her Sheffield home with a lurcher called Milo.
She might be refreshingly different in some respects, but when it comes to the unions, she joins a long, unhappy list of Labour appeasers.