Britain’s cities are desperate for better transport. Why is Westminster derailing our plans in Leeds? | Thomas Forth

A long-promised tram network has been pushed back to the late 2030s – unless we build local, northern growth will be snuffed out‘As an unabashed socialist, I am concerned with the distribution of wealth, but if you don’t create any in the first place it is a bit of an empty discussion.” For a decade I’ve repeated those words of Richard Leese, who was for 25 years the leader of Manchester city council, in policy discussions across northern England. I have never slammed them down while shouting, “This is what we believe” as Margaret Thatcher did with Friedrich Hayek’s The Constitution of Liberty, but I might start.Greater Manchester, a city region with a population of nearly three million people, generates far too little wealth to make its redistribution a meaningful discussion. Unusually for a rich country, the taxes raised in Greater Manchester, just as in other city regions such as West Yorkshire, Merseyside and the West Midlands, do not meet the cost of providing local public services. Taxes raised in the south-east of England cover the gap.Thomas Forth is a co-founder and the CTO of The Data City, a 35 person tech company in central Leeds Continue reading...