It’s election time. And what a boring election it promises to be.

The Tories are out - corrupt, venal and more concerned with which toilets people use than running the country.

Labour meanwhile offer much of the same - just marginally less corrupt. We can expect competently managed decline from a party that sits somewhere to the right of NuLab. Starmer is a grey man who offers no vision for the country. Just bland talking points and a grossly tedious focus on “tough fiscal rules”, despite the UK desperately needing investment. As anyone with a basic background in macroeconomics will know, we need not fear the deficit if we’re spending it domestically on infrastructure investment.

Being in an English constituency, there’s no Plaid or SNP option. The rest… is there any point talking about them? Racist edgelords, parties that can’t decide what they stand for and NIMBYs who are desperate for renewable power and new public transport. Just not here.

So here’s a transport manifesto for the nation. My presumption here is that the new government will reinstate local authority funding to 2009 levels (plus inflation). If it’s more of the same, then yes… we will get more of the same. The country cannot move forward if we starve local authorities of funding. The only effect of this policy is to push work into the arms of hospitals and Police that should be handled by local social care and support services, hence the current crisis of hospital bed-blocking. It forces low-earners to take out expensive car finance that they can’t really afford, because it is impossible to operate without a car.

This manifesto sets us on a path to independent travel for the majority, including the young, the disabled and the elderly.

The Manifesto

• Announce £10Bn over 5 years for the development of urban tram and trolleybus networks. £2Bn for Leeds, £1Bn each for Liverpool, Bristol, Belfast, Leicester, Coventry, Middlesbrough, Stoke-on-Trent & Hull. These are (broadly) the largest urban areas without robust urban transit infrastructure, tweaked to account for deprivation and historic levels of underinvestment (sorry Southampton). I deliberately ignore Scotland and Wales here because they have their own governments and transport is delivered through them. Albeit I’ve mentioned Belfast because NI often gets overlooked. Plus, Edinburgh has trams, Glasgow has an underground and Wales has the South Wales Metro project ongoing. So there’s “stuff there” to some extent, which isn’t the case in Belfast.

• Pass legislation to ensure that councils are assured in their ability to nationalise bus services without having to fight costly judicial reviews as Manchester has recently had to do. Within five years, all service buses should be operated directly by the public sector, or under a TfL-style concession scheme. Privatisation has failed. Models that provide quality public services should be rolled out nationally, including single-ticketing integrated with tram and local rail schemes where applicable.

• Permit local authorities to collect a Versement Transport style tax to fund public transport provision. This helps run affordable transport schemes in the long term.

• Repeal Section 68 of the Localism Act 2011 to reinstate Business Rate Supplements. BRS was successfully used to part-fund CrossRail, but was gutted in 2011 when the newly installed Conservative government imposed a requirement to hold a referendum on schemes, with voting entitlement restricted to businesses that would have to pay the BRS, not the wider community. Unsurprisingly, not a single BRS scheme has been implemented since then.

• A High Speed Rail network from Plymouth to Edinburgh, freeing up capacity on the legacy network to reopen local stations and a renaissance in local rail travel. This will - broadly speaking - involve the reinstatement of HS2 Phase 2 to Manchester and Leeds, along with planning for a line from Leeds to Edinburgh (via Newcastle) and from Birmingham down to Plymouth, with a spur to Swansea.

• Reinstate Northern Powerhouse Rail, rebadged as HSNorth to prevent the low-speed bait-and-switch that Boris Johnson offered in the Integrated Rail Plan when he cancelled the Manchester-Leeds High Speed project in favour of a few upgrades and fiddly tweaks, whilst declaring he was “committed to NPR”.

• Rolling programme of electrification for the ECML and MML.

How do we pay for it?

With money. The overwhelming majority of this spending is domestic and will not be inflationary. The economic growth that is enabled by young people and non-drivers being able to participate in society will more than outweigh construction and running costs.

If you are still confused, then I suggest reading:

• The Deficit Myth, Dr Stephanie Kelton (Pre-owned, Abe Books), recently reported on by the BBC
• The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, John Maynard Keynes

If you still fervently believe the findings of “Growth in a time of debt” (the discredited paper on which George Osborne based his entire Austerity programme) then maybe we could also raise taxes. The recent Sunday Times Rich List identifies 39 UK fortunes over £5Bn. A one-off 3% wealth tax on those fortunes would raise £12Bn. That’s the tram schemes covered. We’re presumably not worried about someone worth £5Bn only being worth £4.85Bn. I’m pretty sure that won’t cause them too much hardship.