Hague calls for transport and skills boost to keep seat blue
Skills and transport are linked
THE CONSERVATIVES can maintain their grip over former Labour strongholds like Rother Valley by improving northern transport links and equipping workers with the skills they need to thrive in today’s global economy, according to Yorkshire-born Tory grandee William Hague.
The former Tory leader, who was born in Rotherham but was MP for Richmond in North Yorkshire, said the victory for Conservative Alexander Stafford in Rother Valley last week, replacing veteran Labour MP Sir Kevin Barron,
was “the ultimate definition of a new political landscape”.
The constituency, made up of the former mining villages round Rotherham, had voted Labour since 1918 but was won by Mr Stafford by more than 6,000 votes over Labour candidate Sophie Wilson.
In the Daily Telegraph, Lord Hague said he was “brought up and cut my political teeth” in the area, which “was almost a Toryfree zone, with a 32,000 Labour majority that was the largest in the whole of Britain”.
Lord Hague said that to keep the seat in five years time, “Conservatives have to be able to show that they are achieving the revival of towns in the North, as in many other places that have felt neglected, that Labour failed to bring about”.
He said the plans drawn up by Transport for the North, including the £39bn Northern Powerhouse Rail programme connecting the big cities of the North, should be “adopted wholesale”.
But he said: “There is a second crucial ingredient of boosting the opportunities and success of regions: the provision of skills. Alongside investing capital in infrastructure, we need the growth of human capital.
“Your problem, if you’re sitting in Rotherham, is not just that you can’t travel quickly to an international business based in Manchester. It is also that you probably don’t have the right expertise when you get there.”
Lord Hague wrote that in the last five years, the Conservatives had made great progress on reading ability in English schools. He said: “If this Conservative administration can achieve a comparable step change in the indispensable skills of today’s global economy, especially for the people of the North and Midlands, it can attain a vast economic and political prize.
“Britain would be much better equipped for the post-Brexit competitive world. The working lives of millions could be far more productive and fulfilling. In another 30 years there would still be a Conservative MP for Rother Valley.”
THE TORIES have come a long way since William Hague’s landslide defeat in 2001 – and Michael Howard’s belief, shortly before the 2005 election, that the North was not key to the party’s fortunes.
Now Lord Howard, he could not have been more mistaken and Boris Johnson’s 80-seat majority, exceeding all expectations, shows that no part of the country should ever be written off, or dismissed, by London-based leaders.
And it makes the intervention of Lord Hague all the more telling as Mr Johnson, and his Cabinet, look to honour the preelection promises that persuaded traditional Labour voters to vote Tory in such numbers.
Just like those families who backed Margaret Thatcher in 1979, the North is a region of aspiration – sweeping generalisations on ‘class’ can do a disservice
– and the Tories did tap into this agenda alongside Brexit. But Lord Hague, who grew up in the Rother Valley which now has a Tory MP in Alexander Stafford, makes a key point when he says that skills rivals transport for importance.
Two issues that are the cornerstones of the Power Up The North campaign being run by The Yorkshire Post, and newspapers across the region, he has now warned the Government: “Your problem, if you’re sitting in Rotherham, is not just that you can’t travel quickly to an international business based in Manchester. It is also that you probably don’t have the right expertise when you get there.”
It is argument which re-enforces the case for joined-up government, and a clear focus on the North, when Mr Johnson begins to reconfigure his government in the New Year.