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IMAGINE THATAHS HSNIMBYNPPANPPMPINGHSYour browser does not support the element. you need to drive from London to Edinburgh. After taking a motorway to Leeds and a dual carriageway as far as Morpeth, you will spend 30 miles (48km) trundling along a two-lane country road, possibly stuck behind a tractor. In opposition, Sir Keir Starmer mocked the Tories for having pledged to widen this “absolutely critical” stretch of the 1 into a highway five times since 2010. Such broken promises, he told local bigwigs, were a “metaphor for how our country’s been run”. Alas, in Labour’s first budget in October the ill-fated scheme was axed once again.Sir Keir’s Labour entered government in July promising to do things differently—perhaps nowhere more so than in the area of infrastructure. Part of Britain’s malaise, he correctly argued, was a failure to invest in what a modern country needs: roads, railways, reservoirs, pylons, power plants. The abrupt decision of Rishi Sunak, his Conservative predecessor, to amputate 2, a bloated high-speed rail project, was cast as the last spasm of a chronically short-termist administration. Labour would suffer from no such temptations.In office, things have proved to be more complicated. The real test will come in the summer, when the government has pledged to lay out a ten-year infrastructure strategy alongside a spending review (in a decade-long plan there are “no hiding places”, notes Michael Dnes, until recently an official at the Department of Transport). But five months in, the signals are mixed. The government looks set to make a serious attempt at overhauling obstructive planning law and it has given itself more room to borrow for investment. Yet so far it has not prioritised the projects that would help the economy most.Most promising has been the combative rhetoric. In a speech on December 5th Sir Keir once again laid into an “alliance of naysayers”. From walking around the country, he said, it was clear that “the people who say no” had ruled too long and Britain had lived off its past when it came to basics like water and energy. He complained about the “absurd spectacle of a £100m bat tunnel”, just one of the schemes that2 Ltd, an unfortunate company, had to complete. “This government will not accept this nonsense any more,” he said.Early next year a planning-and-infrastructure bill will appear. Its aim will be to cut through a thicket of law to speed up projects. Sir Keir hopes to have 150 major projects approved during this parliament (“major” may end up doing quite a lot of work). Separately, on December 12th the government said more about how it will encourage higher levels of housebuilding, including by reclassifying low-quality land in the green belt. For infrastructure and housing alike, success will rest largely on the strength of respective bills once they have made it through Parliament. Officials fret that ministers underestimate the task. But the signs are that the government intends to put its large majority to good use.The runes are harder to read when it comes to the money. Defanging s would help bring down project costs. In her first budget, in October, Rachel Reeves, the chancellor, loosened the rules constraining borrowing for investment and announced extra scrutiny to persuade markets that money would be well spent. The effect could be transformative, says Henri Murison of Northern Powerhouse Partnership (), a think-tank. “We are no longer in a world when the British state can only do one big project at once.”Yet Ms Reeves then used the space she had created for schemes more likely to please Labour voters than boost the economy. Over the next two years extra capital spending will mostly go on green projects, hospitals, prisons, schools and defence (see chart). Spending on transport, which has greater potential to boost growth, will be cut by 3.1% a year on average. For all Sir Keir’s talk of economic infrastructure, a focus on social projects reflects Labour voters’ immediate preferences.A positive spin is that in October Ms Reeves could only make choices covering the next two years. Getting more scanners into hospitals can take months; rail and road projects take many years. Even so, a tight transport settlement forced the chancellor into exactly the kind of chopping and changing that Sir Keir has criticised. Some £67m had been spent preparing plans to widen the 1 before Ms Reeves scrapped it. A long-delayed scheme to upgrade the Transpennine railway line, linking York, Leeds and Manchester, was kicked further into the long grass.The failure so far to prioritise transport reflects a gap in Labour thinking. Labour has talked up the prospect of a British industrial revival. Most economists, however, see boosting the role of services in second-tier cities as one of the more obvious paths to higher growth. And in that, transport investment should have a starring role: cities like Birmingham, Leeds and Manchester miss out on the benefits of agglomeration because of poor transport links.What the north of England really needs, says Lord O’Neill, an economist and the ’s chairman, is its own Elizabeth line, a new 117km, London-spanning railway that ferries hundreds of thousands of workers to their offices each day. Yet if the government talks about trains, it talks about renationalising them. To some Labour s, roads are just sources of carbon. Ms Reeves has said she wants to attract private investment into big projects. But it is hard for investors to do that when there is not a clear pipeline, says Ali Miraj, an infrastructure specialist at , a bank.Without a proper plan, what remains of 2 could easily eat up the transport department’s time and money for years. The cost of the final 10km stretch of the line to London Euston, which Mr Sunak implausibly insisted should be raised privately, has already risen to £9.4bn ($12bn). Ministers are debating options for how to rescue some value from the project by completing part of the line north of Birmingham. Any solution will be complex and expensive.That will make it all the more important to hold on to a sense of what improved infrastructure can achieve. A good place to start would be those projects that help make the economy tick.
