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12 - Transport

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 September 2009

By
Stephen Glaister
Edited by
Anthony Seldon
Anthony Seldon
Affiliation:
Institute of Contemporary British History
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Summary

Transport was not one of Tony Blair's successes. This is illustrated by the Brief he issued in May 2007 to the Parliamentary Labour Party, plainly intended to trumpet achievements in over his ten years. There are twenty two pages in standard format and ‘Transport’ is shorter than all the others save ‘Arts’ and ‘Africa’.

The biggest single failure of transport policy was nicely summed up by Blair himself on 1 March 2007. He had invited Richard Hammond of TV's Top Gear fame into No. 10 to give an interview about road pricing which was published verbatim and as a podcast on the offcial website with the populist heading ‘“Hamster” tackles PM on road pricing’. During the course of this he said:

I can see a huge problem looming up ahead … the amazing thing is that there are 6 million more cars on the road since we came to office, almost 7 million actually from 26 million to 33 million I think it was, someone was telling me, and over the next 20 years there are going to be I don't know how many millions more.

Although this problem was obvious to many commentators ten years earlier, Blair did not see it then. He showed little interest in transport and delegated the topic to John Prescott, Deputy Prime Minister and then Secretary of State for the Department for Environment and Transport.

Type
Chapter
Information
Blair's Britain, 1997–2007 , pp. 241 - 272
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2007

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