Driverless Trains: the quintessential Tory policy

Driverless trains are part of TfL's new settlement. It enables the government to claim they're smashing the last union with real power in the country (levelling up!), as well as claim they're at the forefront of technology (in London, though, so not really levelling up because levelling up is only allowed in Not London). 

There's several issues here, one of which is cost. TfL recently abandoned Piccadilly line signalling upgrades due to lack of funds from central government. Driverless trains, of course, would require a lot of new signalling, in order to work with the new AI-driver. TfL also recently put on hold tunneling out the Bakerloo line extension due to lack of funds from central government. Driverless trains, of course, would require the addition of safety-gates on all platforms, which means those curved-platforms of Embankment, Waterloo, and hundreds of others, would all have to straightened out by tunneling out a larger station and, for example, shifting them sideways. 

The final issue is, as London Reconnections put so succinctly -- any AI driver that is advanced enough to navigate the ancient London Underground will finish its first shift and immediately join a union. 

So it's some way off, then. Like a lot of Tory policies it's all scary and disrupting -- and then nothing happens.

In some ways, "Driverless Trains" is the ultimate post-Thatcher Tory policy. 

You could apply Driverless Trains to the entire Tory policy output. Driverless trains, on its own, is not an impossible or even a bad idea. But to achieve it, you need to either:

a) Completely replace the entire London Underground

b) Invest in an entirely new, elevated rail line, like a central London DLR, that would be built driverless from the get-go. 

Both of these are, as you can imagine, expensive, and, if done properly, would provide adequate public transport to London for decades to come. I might be cynical but neither of these are particularly Tory things to do.

It's perhaps emblematic of their entire approach. Make a claim on an endpoint, put no funds into achieving it, then claim either everyone else has failed you, or that we need to be frugal in times like these. Meanwhile, you pick up that distant carrot of Driverless Trains and hurl it into the horizon once more, for the next election. 

The Driverless Trains fallacy can be applied to Whitehall. The government has long stated its desire to cut back on Whitehall staff, or to shift civil servants to far flung parts of the country in an effort to boost those areas. Fair enough. But here comes the Driverless Train: without moving the government itself, Whitehall will never really move. Ministers won't be moved out of London, so their top civil servants won't be moved out of London. The servants directly below them won't be moved out, until eventually someone is moved out, but they're so unimportant that they're ultimately replaced, back in London, with someone else. The new regional Whitehall office becomes just that, regional, and is eventually wound up. Without replacing the London Underground, an AI-train can't run.

Levelling Up, in general terms, is about boosting England's underperforming areas. In cynical terms, is about smashing down London and allow the regions to become successful, if only in relative terms to the fall of London. In realistic terms, it should be about replicating London's success in those English regions. But here we come to the Driverless Train of Levelling Up: London's success is largely through its devolved government and its control over its own transport. Central Government has repeatedly shown it despises not just the Mayor of London but the London Assembly itself, continuing to overrule planning permissions or even the London Plan. If you were really committed to Levelling Up the English regions, you'd also be committed to devolution. There is simply no other way to achieve it, short of blasting money into the regions (another very un-Tory thing to do). Of course, they say they want devolution, that they support English devolution. But they want it without laying any of the framework for it. Just like they want Driverless Trains without spending the money on a new Underground or a new light railway, they also want to give more power to the English regions by not actually giving them any power. 

I suppose the biggest Driverless Train in the government's world right now is post-Brexit trade. They can see an endpoint in their minds that they want but they cannot be bothered working it out or spending the money or making sure it works. As a result, Northern Ireland is in crisis. And crisis is, ultimately, all that Tory policies can ever hope to achieve.