Over The Wall

This week: Burnham, homelessness, and the role of ambition in politics. Also: a daytrip on the new Northumberland Line to onetime pit village, Ashington; and some extra notes on airships.

The Irish writer Frank O’Conner once told a story about how, when he and his boyhood friends came to a wall they could not climb over, they’d remove their caps and throw them over, leaving them with no choice but to work out how to follow. I first heard this story on an episode of The West Wing, but it turns out its pedigree is rather better: JFK used it about the space programme in a speech in San Antonio, Texas, on 21 November 1963. Given that he was shot dead the next day, it must have been one of the last he ever gave.

The point, made by both the real president and the fictional one, is not just that stirring rhetoric matters, but that ambition does. Keir Starmer, who waited nearly two months to give his first big speech on the state of the country and then told us everything was obviously going to get worse, never seemed to get this. Andy Burnham does: before he’d even passed the front door of Downing Street, he’d said his first priority would be to end rough sleeping.

Whether he can actually do that is a matter of some debate. Yes, he found £340m for the job, presumably down the back of a sofa or something. On the other hand he did not, in fact, manage to achieve it as mayor of Greater Manchester, and while “central government wouldn’t give me the powers to do it” is an entirely plausible explanation, it’s also a convenient excuse.

On the other, other hand I have no doubt whatsoever that it is possible to end rough sleeping because we did it during the pandemic. More than that, I am old enough to remember Cardboard City in the tunnels by Waterloo, which lasted into the 1990s. By the end of that decade it wasn’t there: a Labour government addressed a huge issue of public concern so successfully that rough sleeping was all but eliminated, until some time after the Tories returned to office 2010. That this is a hugely complicated social issue taking in everything from the housing shortage to the benefits system, Home Office immigration policies to mental health provision, seems to me not an excuse for inaction, but the exact opposite. All those things are broken? Better get to work.

More than that, the growing visibility of homelessness is not merely a moral stain on the country, but a sort of psychic weight, a very visible sign that something, somewhere, has gone wrong. Fixing it thus seems like a great way of highlighting the power of government to make things better. Doing so won’t merely – merely! – improve the lives of those currently living on the streets. It might also improve the political prospects of a party elected on a promise of change.

I find myself wondering if there are other problems that have been ignored – because they cut across multiple bits of government; because they sit outside government altogether – but which would be worth tackling because of their disproportionate contribution to that crippling sense of national decline. The misery of the average high street; the precipitous decline of public toilet provision; the growing tendency for hire bikes to carelessly litter our streets – that’s just off the top of my head. Hell, a couple of extra billion – basically pocket change! – to fund more frequent bin collections and thus deal with literal litter feels like a thing that could work wonders.

Many of these problems seem to run through the decline of councils, and the near total collapse of their enforcement functions. In my more optimistic moments, I wonder if Burnham’s interest in devolution, and his promise to spend his political capital on grabbing the third rail of social care reform, are because he understands that fixing local government will fix rather a lot else.

I am under no illusion that a new prime minister inevitably means sunlit uplands. Retaining Shabana Mahmood at the Home Office suggests continuity with the Starmer regime’s horrendous immigration rhetoric (although Ian Dunt has found a more optimistic spin). Keeping Bridget Phillipson in the equalities brief suggests Labour activists will still be unable to meet their trans friends’ eyes. And the government’s financial position is no better than it was last week.

But at least we have a prime minister who thinks the purpose of the state is to make things better, not to manage decline. Making promises might be a recipe for disappointment. It’s also the first step to getting anything done.

Book, etc.

My new book, 31 Inventions That Built Our World, is currently 25% off on pre-orders from Waterstones.com. You can see me talking about the new book in this video ad that someone thought it’d be a good idea to make, and from which I have learned I have what can only be described as resting thug face. (“Why do you look so angry…?”)

This Sunday afternoon, I’m also doing my first event about the book at the Rock Oyster Festival in Cornwall. This is the second year I’ve played that particular gig – always nice to get repeat invites – and I’ll be speaking again to my sinister co-conspirator Tom Phillips.

I’m not saying this makes it worth booking specially or anything – but if you did happen to be attending, I’m told there is at least a chance there will be, for the first time, copies on sale, a whole month early. This, entertainingly, means that those who buy one will be seeing it for the first time at the same moment I do. Anyway, if you’re there, please say hi.

The day we caught the train

Skimming the 2024 Guardian story, I spot a name I haven’t heard in a very long time. Geoff Hoon was one of those ministers who was a fixture of the New Labour era, serving in multiple roles over a dozen years without ever quite coming to trouble the public consciousness – quite the feat, for the defence secretary in post for the 2003 invasion of Iraq. I’m not sure I’ve had a single thought about him since he stepped down as transport secretary in June 2009.

But it was in that role, I learn, that Hoon became the first senior minister to support the reopening of the Northumberland Line to passengers after six long decades; other transport secretaries who’d do the same would include Chris Grayling in 2019 and Grant Shapps the following year. Even so, it took until 2022 for construction to begin, and until the last weeks of 2024 before the first passenger trains actually ran. “It took 15 years to reopen this thing?” I say out loud to my companions. “Geoff Hoon supported it?” No one else seems quite as shocked by the mention of Geoff Hoon as I am.

It’s a sunny Tuesday last April, a couple of days after my afternoon watching the Greens campaign in the eastern suburbs of Newcastle, and we’re on a Northern Train heading north, somewhere between Manors and Northumberland Park. (“North” is a big theme of our day.) On the table before us are coffees and some bright pink donuts from Greggs. Underneath it, Henry Scampi seems less interested in the views or career of Geoff Hoon than he is the potential for escaping and making friends with the noisy school party just up the carriage.

There are a couple of reasons for our day trip. One is to track down the house of Ebby Edwards – the trade unionist, Labour MP and first secretary of the National Union of Mineworkers who was also, as it happened, the great grandfather of my friend and travelling companion, the writer Pete Mitchell.¹ Another, for me if not for the others, is to have an excuse to visit an actual pit village.

The third reason, though, is simply to travel on a new bit of railway, which Pete has been using to try to get me to visit Newcastle for more than a year. It’s clearly seen locally as a hugely important development: not only is the new half-hourly service shown on some versions of the Tyne & Wear Metro map, despite it being a national rail line, but it’s been integrated into the network’s fare zones and the fares kept low. At peak times, it costs just £2.40 to travel the full 18 mile route from Ashington to Newcastle Central.