Scotland has to think big on transport like Thatcher and Brunel

The SNP is failing to plan for the future, writes Conservative shadow transport minister

Acore component of any country’s economic growth is the viability of its transport infrastructure. Linking people to communities and communities to markets is common sense. The transport pioneers of bygone eras took huge, at times quite bonkers, financial risks and dedicated their lives to lay the foundations of everyday things like the London Underground and crosscountry railways.

Isambard Kingdom Brunel was looking beyond 1900 when he drew up plans for the Clifton suspension bridge at Bristol. Just as Sir Charles Bressey was looking beyond 2000 when he proposed a ring road around London. Margaret Thatcher eventually opened the M25 in 1986, when I was just six years of age. It’s also why the aforementioned prime minister and French premier François Mitterrand set about linking Britain with the Continent through the ambitious Channel Tunnel project. Some thought them both mad as a box of frogs.

David Cameron’s government gave London’s east-to-west Crossrail the green light and also laid plans to link the North and South with a high-speed rail link. Admirable and ambitious, if a tad expensive and controversial.

The key to all of this was an acceptance that what was right for today might not duly serve the people of tomorrow, an acceptance that such decisions might be unpopular and invariably prove to be costly headaches to deliver – but deliver they must.

Britain is home to some of the world’s greatest transport infrastructure but it often it feels that as we step across the border from England into Scotland we also step back in time.

The truth is that successive Scottish Governments paid little attention to tomorrow’s world. We see that in the sticking plaster approach so evident today. The odd by-pass here, the odd dual-carriageway there. Turning a two-lane motorway into a three-lane one before it goes back to two again. Playing catch-up with burgeoning infrastructure, creaking at the seams and leaking productivity like a Dickensian water pipe.

There is no doubt that the new Queensferry Crossing is a visual masterpiece. It would be churlish of me to suggest otherwise. The (partially) Scottish project is no mean feat of engineering and has captured the attention of Sydney Harbour lovers and Golden Gate aficionados. The difference of course being that the Golden Gate bridge has closed just three times in 80 years. The new Forth crossing barely reached 80 days before it had to close for “snagging” work.

At a cost of £1.35bn and with a lifespan of 150 years, it is replacing a bridge that was built just 53 years ago which failed to withstand the test of time. They both in turn sit next to a rail bridge built in 1890, which peers down its spectacles at them with a sense of Victorian smugness. “Rusted in colour I may be, but I’m still standing” says the Grande Dame of the Forth. You can stick a Saltire on the top of something but vision is not just delivering on a previous government’s earnest sweat and toil. Nor is it about delivering a project which you opposed.

Take the Edinburgh Airport Rail Link as a prime example. Holyrood gave approval for it in 2007. Then the SNP came to power and canned the project with support from the Scottish Green Party. They also tried to scrap the now iconic, if controversial, Edinburgh tram project but were defeated in Parliament.