The future of Crossrail

Bienkov over at Tory Troll has seized on comments from Justine Greening this morning on LBC that she 'can’t give a guarantee that it (Crossrail) will continue'. Mr Troll seems to be taking this as a heavy hint that the Tories may well scrap the scheme, despite Boris' assurances (which, admittedly, aren't worth much) that Cameron has 'indicated both publicly and privately' that he likes the scheme.

The Standard is running a similar story at the mo, with slightly irrelevant picture of Cameron and missus.*

Personally, I can't see them scrapping it. Work has already gone too far (been by the old LA2 recently?) and business leaders will have a massive hissy fit if it doesn't happen. Scrapping Crossrail is exactly the sort of thing that will stop London retaining that 'business capital of the world' title politicians always like to bang on about.

The piece on Canary Wharf from the Guardian the other day made clear how vital Crossrail is going to be to expand that area - from something like 100,000 people working there to over 200,000.

No self-respecting Tory would ever sniff at that much wealth creation, particularly if we're looking to roar back from recession.

So the Solomon Grundy prediction is that the Tories will keep Crossrail. I don't tend to have much luck with predictions, so feel free to ignore it if you like.

As an aside, Mr Bienkov has asked Cameron to spell out where he stands on the project before the election. The stock Tory response to this seems to be that they won't commit to any spending until they get to have a full look at the books. This has always struck me as a very weak line. They would be advised to drop it pretty soon.


*Quite a lot of Mr Bienkov's work appears to be popping up in the Standard recently. I didn't notice which article appeared first, but there has been a lot of overlap in recent months