The appointment of Justine Greening as the new Conservative/coalition Transport Secretary will be closely examined by two vocal rival southern based party factions. One the one hand are the mainly urban West Londoners whose domain stretches from Westminster out to beyond Heathrow and on the other the more rural Chiltern and Rural Bucks county and country folk. Townies v Counties with the Prime Minister having a foot in both camps.
The previous incumbent was Philip Hammond, firmly in the former group. His predecessor Lord Adonis, latterly probably the best and most interested transport minister for many years, had left on his desk two major strategically important transport schemes, one the privately funded new 3rd runway at Heathrow, almost ready to go, and the other the mainly publicly funded much needed 21st century High Speed 2 rail line from London initially to Birmingham and later to points north. In the face of very noisy party constituency lobbies against both he cancelled Heathrow's runway but continued to run with HS2. In fairness he was constrained by a downright foolish pre election pledge by his boss David Cameron to scrap the runway but he also threw in for good measure an also nearly ready to go inexpensive project to link the airport into the southern railways system. This would have given it much needed direct links to Waterloo and to Reading, Britain's foremost railway hub a few miles out to the west. It would though would have caused additional road congestion in his own Sunningdale constituency. The power of local interests over national ones looked glaring conspicuous. The Chiltern and Rural Bucks near hysterical campaign, partly funded by public money from,- yes, it's true,- the Tory led Buckinghamshire County Council,- has continued unabated .Where MPs have faced any conflict of interests of local or national they have plumped firmly for the former.
What then are the portents for the Justine Greening era in the transport hot seat? Unless this pattern of Ministerial behaviour can be broken and national needs promoted over local ones, the answer has to be probably not good for aviation and London airport capacity but encouraging for HS 2 supporters. Abandoning both projects would leave the Tories open to the charge that they are totally without answers to Britain's growing transport needs and current ever worstening congestion. Worse than that they would be seen to reject anything that could achieve economic growth if it gets in the way of their constituency members' local comfort. This would reinforce some old images of the party which it has long been trying to shake off. It would also say firmly to "the north" that "we really aren't interested in you". Not a good idea on any score.
