Long term readers will know how much I love London. The metropolis fascinates me: I adore exploring the city, going to events, finding out more about it’s history. It is far from perfect, of course, but part of the reason why I like London so much is because I can get around it. As a powerchair user, I can get on and off busses with ease; the tube network, though not without flaws, is fast, reliable, and is gradually becoming more and more accessible. As far as I’m concerned, London is one of the greatest cities in the world.

A hell of a lot of money goes into London and it’s infrastructure, obviously. Just a year or so ago, it opened a brand new, multi-billion pound tube line. Despite being obscenely late and over budget, we got Crossrail eventually, and the Elisabeth Line is now up and running. That’s why I can’t help feeling indignant that the rest of the country is not getting the same sort of treatment. I may now live in London, but I come from cheshire, and I’m becoming more and more acutely aware of the imbalance between London and the rest of the country, especially the north.

The announcement of the cancellation of the northern part of HS2 today will surely only widen that imbalance; it will also widen the social division and animosity which is opening up between north and south. How can anyone see it as anything other than grossly unfair that London gets so much investment and all the swanky new tube lines, but when it comes to updating the connections between the rest of the country, it is suddenly deemed too expensive? If I still lived in cheshire, or if I were to one day move to Manchester or Liverpool, I would expect to see the same standard of infrastructure I’m now used to here in London. But I know I wouldn’t find it: to my knowledge, public transport up in cheshire is in the same dilapidated, creaking state as it was fifteen years ago, manual bus ramps and all.

Perhaps I’m biassed, but I think I’m very lucky to live where I do, with the ability to trundle around this city with increasing ease. London is an outward looking, forward thinking world city which recognises how vital it is to invest in infrastructure which benefits all its citizens, from accessible tube lines to automatic bus ramps. If I was living anywhere else, life probably wouldn’t be so easy, largely thanks to the Tories and their reluctance to invest in anything which might make life better for anyone other than themselves and their rich friends. For all their talk of ‘alternative projects’, at the end of the day, the Tories don’t care who suffers or goes without as long as they can reduce tax for their rich friends: After all they don’t live in the North-West so why should they care what they cancel? Surely that has to stop; surely the notion of ‘Levelling Up’ has to be given some substance, and not allowed to remain the sickening joke it was turned into this morning.