Sunak scraps Manchester HS2 leg, plans to stop children today ever legally smoking and says A-levels to be replaced – as it happened

This is what some journalists and commentators are saying about the Rishi Sunak speech. I have not picked up any wild enthusiasm for it, and much of the reaction is hostile

From ITV’s Robert Peston

Sunak nutshell: ban smoking; abolish A levels and replace with broader qualification that gives parity of esteem between technical and academic study; cancel Birmingham-Manchester high speed rail and reallocate £36bn savings to other transport projects largely in north. These are not populist. They will upset many. Quite bold a year before election

From the Guardian’s Rafael Behr

Game unchanged.

Sunak attempting “time for a change” has whiff of Ted Heath asking “who governs Britain?”

Good point, say the voters, off you go then.

Fraser Nelson in the Spectator says it was a decent speech, but he did not like the proposals on smoking.

If it’s not necessary to ban then it’s necessary not to ban: that would be the Burkean, conservative way. So this sits ill with the rest of the Sunak agenda and ‘good conservative common sense’ he was defending earlier on in his speech. I suspect it was inspired more by Wes Streeting saying that a Labour government might do this. Is this shooting your opponent’s fox, or adopting their agenda? Before this speech, I’d have said that Sunak is a liberal. I’m not quite so sure that I’d say that now.

From Lewis Goodall from the News Agents’ podcast

I think about politics a lot. But I have to say I’m struggling to thread the eye of the needle in coming to Manchester, with a slogan of “long-term decisions”, allowing the conference to be dominated by it, and cancelling the biggest infrastructure project (to Manc) in a century.

Freddie Hayward at the New Statesman says the speech shows that Sunak cannot be a change candidate.

Sunak did not go far enough. He criticised policymaking over the past 30 years but did little to develop his argument. Wary of the disunity within the party and the influential factions surrounding Liz Truss and Suella Braverman – ever present over the past three days – Sunak avoided explicitly criticising the chaos of the Truss and Johnson years, the inertia of Theresa May and the poor policymaking of David Cameron. This was his opportunity to have done so. It was a sign of his weakness that he could not.

From the i’s Paul Waugh

Rishi Sunak pitched himself as the ‘change’ candidate.

But voters may think he encapsulates all his predecessors’ flaws: as tone deaf as Truss, as robotic as May, as penny-pinching as Cameron, as mañana in his promises of delivery

From Henry Hill from ConservativeHome

Maybe the worst bit is that the stuff about needing to do things differently is entirely true. Sunak knows what sort of man the moment demands, he just has no intention of being it.

From the writer and broadcaster Steve Richards

An effective speech needs a coherent argument running through it..R Sunak’s is all over the place..beginning vaguely with the need to break with the last 30 years …with no definition of what bound mistaken leaders spanning 3 decades..hailing tough long term decisions whike taking short term ones.. on to cigarettes ..now attacking access to universities.

From Ian Birrell, the correspondent and former Independent deputy editor

From the Mail on Sunday’s Dan Hodges

What I find staggering is that Britain is in the midst of a cost of living crisis. That’s the defining political issue. But Rishi Sunak didn’t even mention it. Or say anything significant at all about the economy or taxation or public spending.

From the FT’s Jim Pickard

an overlooked element of Sunak’s decision to kill off the northern leg of HS2 is that he promised – when running for the leadership in July 2022 – to support the scheme:

– in fact he also said he wanted to reinstate the Birmingham-Leeds leg which was axed by Boris Johnson

George Osborne, the former chancellor and a close friend and ally of David Cameron, has endorsed his old boss’s criticism of the decision to scrap phase two of HS2. (See 4.08am.) That is not surprising. Osborne (who was MP for a seat on Cheshire, in the north-westt) championed the Northern Powerhouse concept, to which phase two of HS2 was central.

Liz Truss’s team are briefing that she will vote against Rishi Sunak’s plan to gradually increase the age at which people can buy cigarettes, so that for the next generation they will be banned. In her speech at a fringe meeting on Monday the former PM said her party should “stop taxing and banning things, and start producing and building things”.

David Cameron, who was prime minister when the original Labour government plan for HS2 was confirmed and funded and when work started on the project, has issued a statement saying that cancelling phase two is a mistake and that a “once in a generation opportunity” has been lost.

He also says the decision implies Britain can “no longer think or act for the long term” – which is a particularly harsh criticism when the Conservative slogan this conference has been “long-term decisions for a brighter future”.

It also implied Britain is “heading in the wrong direction”, Cameron says – which sounds like a phrase that will turn up on a Labour party election leaflet soon.

He says:

Today’s decision on HS2 is the wrong one. It will help to fuel the views of those who argue that we can no longer think or act for the long term as a country; that we are heading in the wrong direction.

HS2 was about investing for the long-term, bringing the country together, ensuring a more balanced economy and delivering the Northern Powerhouse. We achieved historic, cross-party support, with extensive buy-in from city and local authority leaders across the Midlands and North of England. Today’s announcement throws away fifteen years of cross-party consensus, sustained over six administrations, and will make it much harder to build consensus for any future long-term projects.

All across the world, we see transformative, long-term infrastructure projects completed or underway. They show countries on the rise, building for future generations, thinking big and getting things done.

I regret this decision and in years to come I suspect many will look back at today’s announcement and wonder how this once-in-a-generation opportunity was lost.

Andy Burnham, the Labour mayor for Greater Manchester, told reporters this afternoon that the alternative transport plan announced by Rishi Sunak, as a replacement for HS2, was not coherent.

He said:

There’s a world of difference between a transport plan patched together in hotel rooms at a party conference with no input with northern leaders or mayors, and a transport plan that’s been worked on for years by northern leaders and mayors, with transport for the north, which is a coherent plan representing the voice of the north and what people here want.

What’s been announced at conference today is not that coherent plan.

Speaking in the Museum of Science and Industry, on the site of the terminus of the world’s first inter-city passenger railway, between Liverpool and Manchester, Burnham also said he suspected the Tories only promised HS2 to Manchester to win votes, and not because they intended to complete the project. He said:

You may remember, almost 10 years ago, George Osborne came to the building just beyond here to tap into that spirit that the north of England had in the 19th century of pioneering and bringing new developments to the world, to say that he would bring forward a Northern Powerhouse that would be all about that ambition again for Britain, bringing north-south lines with HS2, east-west with HS3 as he called it then, that obviously became Northern Powerhouse Rail.

You name it, we were getting it all.

It’s hard not to feel that 10 years on from that announcement the Conservative party have not shown the courage, the conviction or the capability to turn those statements into reality, to the great frustration of the people here.

I hope those statements weren’t made 10 years ago just with political intentions in mind, to try and win votes here, but it’s starting to look very much that was what it was all about.