Running the numbers

This week: how Rishi Sunak turned HS2 into a symbol of his terrible government; some notes on house numbering; and an act of diplomatic trolling.

“The Democrats,” the US satirist PJ O’Rourke once commented, “are the party that says government will make you smarter, taller, richer, and remove the crabgrass on your lawn. The Republicans are the party that says government doesn’t work, and then they get elected and prove it.” In other words, the right, among whose ranks O’Rourke cheerfully numbered himself, have a pretty big advantage in politics: “the government sucks” is a promise it’s relatively easy to keep.¹ 

The UK Tories are not the US Republicans, despite the frequent attempts to make them so, but O’Rourke’s maxim to some extent applies here, too. The left’s case has historically been that the state can make your life better, whether through local government, state education or NHS. That, though, takes vastly more effort than proving the right’s case that it probably can’t and might actually make things worse. After all, if your pitch is that state-run healthcare is bad, and once you’ve been in office for a few years it starts looking like you were right, it’s easier to make the case for the private sector involvement you always favoured in the first place. If it’s that local government is flabby and incompetent, then it’s fine to both cut it and point out it doesn’t work very well afterwards. It is vastly easier to be the guys who specialise in breaking things than the ones who have to put them back together again. 

I sometimes wonder if all this was on Rishi Sunak’s mind when he came up with his cunning plan to deal with HS2. A quick history lesson, for those with short memories. The project as proposed in the last days of New Labour, and legislated for by the Conservative-LibDem coalition, would originally have seen a Y-shaped high speed rail network: a single line from London to Birmingham, where it would split, into an eastern arm heading to the East Midlands and Yorkshire, and a western one to Manchester, Liverpool and points north west. At the other end, the HS1-HS2 link would connect the new high speed route to the existing one from London to the Channel Tunnel. All this would cost an estimated £36bn, which, ouch – but it’d make it possible to get high speed trains from most of the country’s biggest cities to both London and the continent. It would also – the bigger but less well-known benefit – free up capacity on the existing rail network, by separating fast and slow trains, making it possible to run many more services to destinations a very long way from the new line. It would have been great.

What might have been. Image: Cnbrb/Wikipedia/CC BY-SA 4.0. 

Gradually, though, this grand plan has been whittled away. The HS1 link – barely a mile of new track across north London – was scrapped in 2014, before Rishi Sunak was even an MP, so we probably can’t blame him for that one. But the Prime Minister’s hatred of capital spending is matched only by his pathological fear of trains, so after he became chancellor in 2020 he set his mind to dismembering what was left: amputating the eastern arm in 2021; scrapping the Golborne link, which would have allowed trains to Scotland, in 2022. Throw in the fact his predecessors had agreed to route large chunks of the London to Birmingham stretch through tunnels, in a doomed attempt to placate the NIMBYs of Buckinghamshire, and the inevitable result was a project whose predicted costs had tripled, even as it had started to look vastly less useful.

All of which gave Sunak cover to announce in Manchester, last October, that he was cutting everything north of Birmingham, on the grounds the project was no longer economical. “I always said the state wasn’t up to this,” the obvious subtext ran. “Look! I was right.”

This, though, has proved as much of a vote-winner as, well, anything else Rishi Sunak has done lately. And the absurdity of going to Manchester to announce you were scrapping a rail link to Manchester has been topped only by reports in the Financial Times last week that panicked officials had just realised that the rescoped project would actually result in fewer seats every hour between London and Manchester. The problem seems to be that trains on the new line will be smaller than the ones that currently use the West Coast Main Line. The proposed solution would involve scrapping first class in favour of more standard seats, which is very egalitarian, but will eat into the financial case for the project yet further. 

All of which means that the government is spending literally tens of billions of pounds on a project that, thanks largely to the interference of Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, will be very slightly worse for the north of England than the status quo. You’d struggle to find a better symbol of this government’s record. 

Sunak seems bafflingly to have believed this hard-headed approach to the nation’s finances would win the thanks of a grateful nation. But it seems that O’Rourke’s maxim has its limits, and “We told you things were shit” isn’t always a vote-winner. There is a difference, in turns out, between saying something doesn’t work, and being caught red-handed smacking it with hammers.

A brief commercial break

My third book, A History of the World in 47 Borders, is out in less than three months, and my first reviews are in! The first is from a 12 year old boy who apparently won’t stop telling his mum about the Mongol Empire, which is delightful, but whose name, alas, I cannot feature on the cover. The other is the excellent Dorian Lynskey, who I can exclusively reveal has described it as a “witty grand tour of the fascinating, disturbing and downright bizarre decisions that made the world what it is today”, and thus earned my eternal gratitude. If you would like that too, why not pre-order? It helps.

Hey, I’ve not written about something that sounds really boring but turns out not to be² in ages, have I? So:

Some notes on house numbering 

Street signs in Valentine, Nebraska. Image: Wikipedia/public domain.

In all likelihood, your home has a number. Your office, should you have one, probably does too, and so does the little cafe you pop by every morning. 

The idea that places should be numbered, that the built environment should be legible in this way, is so universal these days that it passes unnoticed, and likely doesn’t strike you as something that someone had to invent. But they did, and surprisingly recently, too. House numbering – not just houses, obviously, but I’m going to call it that just to make life easier – has its roots in the Age of Enlightenment, the same broad intellectual trends that gave us the Metric System, Napoleonic rationalisation and the modern state. 

Once upon a time, if you didn’t know where someone lived, you had little choice but to ask around. Businesses, meanwhile, would identify themselves with certain widely understood symbols, in a manner that persists outside barbers or pawnbrokers shops or in pub names today. All this only began to change in the 18th century. House numbers were recorded on Prescott Street in Goodman’s Fields (today’s Aldgate) in London as early as 1708. Sixty years later and one narrow sea away, King Louis XV decreed that all French houses outside Paris must be assigned a number – if only to make it easier for the army to work out where it was billetting its soldiers.³ 

Initially, though, such schemes were neither comprehensive nor, necessarily, rational. An article on the website of London’s fantastic Postal Museum tells the story of Rowland Hill, postal reformer and all round Victorian do-gooder, coming across a street where the house numbering ran 14, 95, 16. On asking the occupant of the middle house how her home came to be so out of place, “she said it was the number of a house she formerly lived at in another street, and it (meaning the brass plate) being a very good one, she thought it would do for her present residence as well as any other”.   

There were other problems with the address system, too. The same street could have multiple sets of numbers; the same city could have multiple street names. (The London of 1853 had 35 King Streets, 27 Queen Streets and, in a sign of the times, 25 Albert Streets and Victoria Streets apiece.) There was also no standardised way of describing a location, meaning that postmen found themselves trying to deliver post to such delightfully esoteric addresses as (a real one, cited by that same article), “To my sister Jean, Up the Canongate, Down a Close, Edinburgh. She has a wooden leg.”

So as the 19th century ground on, nations and cities began to rationalise their addresses and standardise their house numbering systems, in a manner that made it much easier to deliver post (or, come to that, conscript an army)⁴. But they did not all do so the same way. And around the world today you’ll find a number of different house numbering systems in use.