OPINION
Richard Tide proves Reform don't understand the North (Image: PA)
I write to you this week from a bumpy East Midlands Rail train somewhere between Sheffield and Manchester. The Wi-Fi is non-existent, the plug socket doesn’t work, and the carriage smells faintly of scorched coffee and damp coats. Outside, deindustrialised Britain slides past the window; shuttered mills, rusting warehouses, hollowed-out towns that once built the world. A living museum of what we used to be, and a reminder of how badly we’ve been failed. This is Britain in 2025, a country that once invented the railways, now limping along on a system held together by hope, extortionate prices, and pure denial.
And yet days ago, Richard Tice, Nigel Farage’s sidekick, decided that Northern Powerhouse Rail, the long-promised east-to-west high-speed link, isn’t worth the bother. Too expensive, he says. “Insanity,” he calls it, somewhere from the comfort of his Dubai flat, or perhaps it was one of the lovely houses in his extensive property portfolio.
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There’s something about posh southern men in shiny shoes telling northern towns they don’t deserve better that genuinely agitates me. The honourable members for Boston and Clacton swagger about like anti-establishment warriors, pint aloft for the cameras, but when the mask slips, the contempt for the working class pours out.
Tice and Farage aren’t champions of the people. They do not understand us. They do not fight for us. And make no mistake: this isn’t about saving money, they’ve already pledged billions of unfunded spending commitments, this is about geography, class, and power.
If this were a high-speed line from Guildford to Waterloo, they’d be cutting ribbons on the first train. But because it’s Liverpool to Hull, Manchester to Leeds, Sheffield to Newcastle, the industrial backbone of Britain that was abandoned by people like them, we’re told to make do with “upgrades” to tracks designed when Queen Victoria was still mourning Albert.
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Manchester Council leader Bev Craig got it absolutely bang on: these people “fundamentally misunderstand” what Northern Powerhouse Rail is actually about.
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This isn’t just shaving a few minutes off of journeys, its actually about capacity, ambition, and potential. NPR could pump ￡50 billion into our economy by 2040, transforming jobs, growth, and lives.
But, of course, right-wing populists like Reform UK aren’t interested in building anything. They’re not here to upgrade the parts of the country Westminster has neglected for decades.
They’re here to pit town against city, region against region; just trying to start another cheap culture war dressed up as fiscal prudence.
Across Europe, high-speed rail connects cities to towns like arteries. Paris to Lyon in two hours. Milan to Rome before your cappuccino cools. Barcelona to Madrid faster than most of our trains leave the station.
But back here in Old Blighty you would be a lottery winner to get from Liverpool to Hull in under four hours. Sheffield to Manchester? Just under an hour if you’re lucky, twice that if the weather so much as sneezes.
But down in our capital you can zoom across tens of miles in the better part of half an hour. And yet Tice wants us to believe investing in fixing these fundamental inequalities “doesn’t make sense.”
This isn’t financial discipline. It’s betrayal. Every minute lost on clapped-out rolling stock is a minute of lost productivity, lost investment, lost dignity.
Farage and Tice don’t understand the North because they’ve never had to. Their Britain begins in the Cotswolds and ends somewhere in the City of London. Beyond that lies a mythical land of “Red Wall voters” they occasionally parachute into for a photo op, before retreating to the Home Counties to sneer about “levelling up”.
They’ve never known the humiliation of sitting on trains older than you are, praying the doors don’t jam so you can make it to a job you hate, working for a boss who hates you back.
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They don’t understand the crushing frustration of watching opportunity drain away because you can’t move people, goods, or ideas quickly enough.
I’m done being told to settle for scraps. The North isn’t a museum and it isn’t a charity case, it’s a powerhouse waiting to be revived. And if Farage and Tice think we’ll sit quietly while they leave us behind yet again, they can come up here and explain it in person.
Preferably on a Northern Rail service, wedged shoulder-to-shoulder with the rest of us, clutching a ￡6 coffee from the trolley, as the train lurches to yet another unexplained halt. Assuming, of course, it’s even running that day.
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