Too Many Mayors
This week: Liverpool Labour at it again, a great big roundabout beneath the Isle of Man, and a rail map of the world.
Some things I am worrying about this week
The Labour party. Plus ça change.
The specific bit of the Labour party that is worrying me this week is the Liverpool bit. If you’ve missed this story, a brief précis. Last December, the city’s mayor Joe Anderson was arrested on suspicion of conspiracy to commit bribery and witness intimidation. The BBC reports that, “after he was re-bailed on New Year’s Eve, Mayor Anderson said he accepted he would not be Labour’s candidate for the mayoral election” this May, which was pretty big of him I’m sure you’ll agree.
Anyway, the Labour party has been looking for a replacement candidate, and since this is Liverpool we’re talking about here, the Labour selection basically is the election. The party had narrowed its shortlist down to three, re-interviewed them on Friday, and then yesterday, just when party members were expecting their ballot papers, they instead got an email announcing that the process was being paused and the application process re-opened. None of the three shortlisted candidates, all of whom are women, will be allowed to stand again. The party has not explained why. (More from the Guardian here.)
All this has been widely interpreted as an attempt to stop the frontrunner – the current lord mayor of Liverpool Anna Rothery, who is quite a lot further to the left than Anderson – from actually clinching the selection and thus becoming mayor. As former shadow chancellor John McDonnell tweeted: “Is the problem the socialism of a possible winner?”
This is plausible: such stitch ups are hardly foreign to Labour, and bring to mind the party’s attempt to prevent Ken Livingstone from becoming its candidate for London mayor in 2000. (Result: Labour’s Frank Dobson lost the election, Ken Livingstone became mayor anyway.) But without claiming any knowledge of Liverpool Labour kremlinology, I wouldn’t rule out there being an entirely different motive. To be blunt: local politicos don’t need ideological divisions to want to stitch one another up, and were doing it long before anyone had much of an opinion on Jeremy Corbyn to tweet about of a morning.
At any rate, the party is now reported to be considering scrapping the elected mayoralty altogether, and reverting to the traditional leader-and-cabinet model. (More on that from Rachel Wearmouth of the Huffington Post.) This would be, IMHO, A Very Good Thing. Liverpool has a city mayor, a city region mayor – Steve Rotheram, elected by Liverpool and five outer boroughs – and a purely ceremonial lord mayor. This is, on any sensible definition, too many mayors. Getting rid of the elected city mayor would clear the decks a bit to enable Rotheram to become the unchallenged figurehead for his conurbation, just as Sadiq Khan or Andy Burnham are for theirs.
Two brief notes before we continue...
1. There are actually quite a lot of mayoral elections next May, which I would like to know more about. Please tell me things about them.
2. In just a couple of weeks, I’m going to switch the free newsletter to being an occasional service, and keep the reliable weekly one for paying subscribers only. Want to make sure you still get it? You know where the subscribe button is. (Less than £1 a week! Ah, go on, I’m great value.)
Some things I am delighted by this week
1. This amazing TikTok account from a girl named Louisa who is absolutely consumedby hatred for the swaying, toothpick-like residential tower that stands at 432 Park Avenue, New York City. She has made SO MANYvideos on the subject, and they are all amazing.
2. This wonderful story in the San Francisco Chronicle about a green Victorian house, whose new owners moved it a quarter of a mile from 807 Franklin St. to 635 Fulton St. at a cost of $400,000. (If you can just move houses about, then why is San Francisco housing so expensive, I hear you ask? To which I reply: because you can’t just move land to put them on, can you? At least not deliberately.) Anyway, there’s a lovely Twitter thread about it here.
3. Lastly: this magnificent and oddly soothing game in which you design an iceberg, and then the game shows you how it would float. Here’s what happened when I tried to draw a boat.
Every question I have a Boris Johnson’s plan to build three undersea tunnels and a massive roundabout beneath the Isle of Man
Look, I don’t have the graphics budget the Sunday Times does, okay? Image: Google Maps and Microsoft Paint.
Why four tunnels, exactly?
Is it because there are four countries in the United Kingdom?
In which case, why doesn’t one of the tunnels go to Wales?
Is a 45 mile tunnel from Anglesey to the Isle of Man actually going to make this look any sillier?
It’s 80 miles from the Isle of Man to Liverpool – why on earth would you start a tunnel there?
Why would you suggest Heysham (where?) to the Isle of Man either, come to that, when if you’re going to even pretend you’re thinking about this very silly thing it’d make more sense to start in Barrow-in-Furness? (At 50 miles from the Isle of Man, that’s verging on plausible, without being in any way actually plausible.)
Is there not a way of achieving at least some of the benefits on offer here without digging around 200 miles of undersea tunnels?
Why, exactly, do we need a roundabout beneath the Isle of Man?
Since the Isle of Man is, y’know, an island, couldn’t we just do that bit on top of the ground?
Come to think of it, since the Isle of Man is not actually part of the UK, does the UK actually have the right to put infrastructure under it?
Has anyone even asked the Manx what they think?
"The tunnel scheme is regarded as “bats**t” by several of Johnson’s senior aides," reports the Sunday Times. Does that “several” imply that there are some senior advisers who actually think this is a go-er?
"’People think this is all a joke but it’s much more likely to get the go-ahead than people think,’ another Whitehall official said." Is this merely a demonstration of the mathematical fact that any probability, however tiny, makes an event infinitely more probable than an event that has no chance of happening whatsoever?
Has Boris Johnson not taken any hint from the fact that his previous proposed grands-projets – to whit, a Channel Bridge (impossible because it would clog up one of the world’s busiest shipping lanes), and a direct route from Stranraer in Scotland to Larne in Ulster (impossible because would have to cross Beaufort’s Dyke, a massive trench filled with over a million tonnes of actual, World War Two weaponry) – both turned out to be deeply, hilariously ridiculous?
We’ve all heard of Lynton Crosby’s dead cat strategy. Is Boris Johnson the first world leader to try the dead infrastructure project strategy?
If we’re going to waste all this energy discussing this ridiculous thing that is obviously never actually going to happen, is there a reason we can’t at least pretend we’re going to do it with trains?
Why does this remind me of the Wembley Stadium lasagna?
Map of the week
OpenRailwayMap is exactly what it sounds like, and if you’re the sort of person who subscribes to this newsletter, then there is hours of fun to be had. You can see, for example, quite how little of Ireland’s 19th century rail network survived the 20th century purge:
You can colour code the map by maximum speed, and immediately see that Britain is behind France when it comes to high speed rail, but not by nearly as much as most of central Europe:
You can even – it was professional northerner Tom Forth tweeting about this that tipped me off to the map’s existence – see which bits of the world’s railways are now electrified (though this, we are warned, is only in beta, which is why I can’t now tell you what pink means):
You can see, however, that – in England – railways that go to London are a lot more likely to have been electrified than those that don’t. Funny, that.
Links and housekeeping
Some other things I have done this week:
My NS column last week was on my favourite train journey in the world, the increasingly obvious inconveniences of Brexit, and why I suspect that this is as far outside the EU’s orbit as Britain is actually going to get; and...
...well, not a lot else, actually. I built some Ikea furniture and finished a chapter for a book that hasn’t been announced yet, but that’s about it. Oh well, good a time as any to remind you that you can re-order the book that has been announced here.
In the mean time, if you are looking for something to do, why not forward this email to a friend?
Sorry for all the schoolboy French. I’ve been watching Call My Agent.
Questions? Comments? Suggested topics? Email me.
Reasonably sure the pink on the map refers to the 750V DC third rail electrification used in the Southern region vs the overhead lines used elsewhere.