Today, the collision between Storm Emma coming up from Portugal and the so-called Beast from the East flowing westwards from Siberia conspired to pretty much bring the southwest of England to a standstill. Actually, the presence of loads of cars on the roads, despite weather warnings and police requests for people to stay at home contributed to the chaos but, obviously, it was the weather that was the key factor.
With roads closed due to snow, black ice, accidents and abandoned vehicles, the icing on the cake was another dose of damage to the railway line at Dawlish, leaving those of us who live to the west of Exeter essentially cut-off for a short while. The railway line at Dawlish is a particularly well known transport infrastructure issue, since it passes along the top of a seawall that was famously torn apart by storm conditions 4 winters ago and rebuilt at some 10s of millions of pounds. Anyone with an ounce of sense would realise that in these days of rising sea levels, increased storminess and more frequent ‘extreme’ conditions, putting a railway line right next to the sea just isn’t a good idea and no amount of repair work is going to solve the problem. Put simply, at some point the line will have to be moved inland…
In addition, today also saw the renewed destruction of the coastal road at Slapton running atop the mixed sand and gravel barrier that forms the beach there. This road was partly destroyed some years ago and rebuilt with a slight inland kink in it at the point of the damage. Judging from the pictures of today’s damage it will take more than a kink to straighten that problem out.
So, bad weather has stuffed the southwest region today. But actually, I would argue that it is Government and politicians who have really stuffed us. Significant money needs to be spent to improve transport infrastructure in the region but, instead, minimum amounts of the country’s money are spent patching things back together whilst oodles of cash are thrown at the HS2 project to build a new fast railway line to the north of the country (and by oodles I mean OODLES) and wasted on other pet political projects (Brexit anyone?). If a fraction of the money spent on some of these other projects was dripped into the southwest, huge and permanent improvements could be made. But this will never happen. It will never happen because the southwest is packed full of old people, farming people, military people and people who aren’t even here but still own loads of the houses. These are all the types of people who tend to vote Conservative and, consequently, almost every seat in the region is allied to that party. The majorities are mostly so great that there is no particular political value in the Conservative Government spending money down here because they will be voted for enough regardless of what they do. There is no particular political value in the Labour Party promising to spend money down here because there is just too much ground to make up and, in any case, they are never going to win many seats in the region. We are left to struggle with an ever-eroding infrastructure because there’s virtually no political mileage for anyone in trying to make a difference. Basically, as the title of this post suggests, we are stuffed in the southwest, and it is hard to see why anything would ever change.
Thanks guys.
Tim O'Hare 