Sunak kills the Northern Powerhouse.

And!

Apparently this is to "flush out Labour", who still have about a year to wait for an election, so are holding their manifesto promises close to their chest. Sunak knows he is not safe, as we see from the dire polls.

Sunak will talk about 30 years of inertia. That's 30 years of five Conservative Prime Minister’s an two Labour one's.

It seems real "Leveling Up" in the Midlands and the North is to be sacrificed to the great god "Power".

MrsKen33 is saying something we hear frequently here in ‘the north’. If HS2 had started in Manchester, there is no doubt it would have continued to London, no matter the cost.

Thatcher began the destruction of town and villages that built the Industrial Revolution. Mines, ship building, engineering factories all closed down with no attempt to rebuild with our infrastructures and create jobs.

Our public transport links are inadequate and expensive. I’d have much preferred HS2 not to have happened with the money invested in improving, modernising our rail and bus routes. To pull the plug on the Manchester link though, at this late stage is infuriating, insulting and wrong

The New Aristocracy Whitewave. And an Aristocracy needs surfs. It appears he will looks out on the beautiful Pickering and sees "his" country. He certainly doesn't see it as the country of those for whom the North is, and always will be "home".

True MrsKen. I am still shocked by what Thatcher did to the North, and now this.

Well I suppose he is. All eyes are now turned to the right wing populists behaving like overgrown school children. They are behaving as if they are already in opposition and are beginning to say the sort of outrageous stuff that they would normally never dare if they were part of a disciplined government.

I suppose this is what the future Tory party is going to look like. Trumpian, populist and divisive.

If they had started up north they would never contemplate stopping HS2. They would have reach London whatever the cost. Just goes to show how the Conservatives view ‘the north’

All this is happening at a Conference where many members have already left for home seeing Sunak as an irrelevance.