Politics

An Irish Sea bridge would be just another Boris Johnson folly | Douglas Murphy


Since Boris Johnson secured his luxurious majority, it hasn’t taken him long to get back to one of his favourite pastimes: the quixotic pursuit of novelty infrastructure. In recent weeks the prime minister has treated us to teasers of two future projects: a green light for HS2, and the announcement that serious studies are beginning into a bridge over the Irish Sea between Scotland and Northern Ireland.

HS2 was inherited from the last Labour government and has been on the agenda for a decade. Despite its controversial nature and spiralling costs, the rail network is a credible project. But the “Celtic crossing”, a proposal to link Portpatrick and Larne with a vast bridge is little more than a fata morgana, a shimmering image of a solution to a problem that is located somewhere else entirely.

Like most infrastructure projects, the idea has been around for a long time, but attention waxes and wanes depending on the political wind. In this case, the bridge reappeared in 2018 during the Brexit hiatus, landing with a splash among all the talk of confidence-and-supply agreements, backstops and borders. Its most recent sponsor, Alan Dunlop, is the Glasgow architect who told the Scottish parliament to replace Charles Rennie Mackintosh’s fire-damaged Glasgow School of Art with a new building.

The logistical problems for a road crossing are serious – the strait is extremely deep, shipping is busy, the weather is awful, and there’s the minor problem of Beaufort’s Dyke, a 300-metre-deep trench jam-packed with unexploded munitions from the second world war. Then there’s the issue of connection – there would need to be massive investment in roads, especially on the Scottish side, to stitch the crossing into the network.

Yet anything is possible at a price. Recent ballpark figures have estimated £15-20bn for the bridge, although you might as well double that number as a contingency. But this raises thorny questions. What benefits would the bridge actually bring? Would it be a trading link, a tourist connection, or social glue to prevent Northern Ireland looking wistfully across a newly hardened border with the EU? And if none of these things is sufficiently lucrative to pay back the investment, then why the hell even think of doing it?

To answer that, we need to look at Johnson, who left in his wake a trail of costly failures and unbuilt infrastructure during his eight-year tenure as mayor of London. There was his new bus for London, a nostalgic and pointless resurrection of the feted Routemaster, as well as a cable-car crossing over the Thames, and a gigantic viewing platform-cum-helter-skelter built for the Olympics. An attempt to rebuild the Crystal Palace as a Chinese-owned mall fell flat, as did Johnson’s ludicrous championing of a new airport to be built off the Isle of Sheppey.

More damaging than that was the garden bridge, a fundamentally unnecessary river crossing and corporate event space proposed for the Thames. Though the project was never delivered, it cost the public £43m in wasted fees before it was cancelled, a recurring theme for Johnson’s infrastructural schemes, which usually begin with a low-ball cost and a jolly promise of no risk to the public purse.

It’s no secret that the powerful are attracted to building monuments in their own honour, and indeed Johnson’s vanity is legendary. But the prime minister is also cunning, and he clearly grasps that big things getting visibly built make a politician look effective and virile in their exercise of power. And in his journey to No 10, Johnson has worked out that announcing something is just as good – for him – as making it happen: think of the Boris bus, Boris island, Boris bikes, and now perhaps the Boris bridge, and you get the idea.

Announcing spectacular projects satisfies Johnson’s vanity, indulges his sense of importance, and reinforces an image of him as a man of action, not to mention drawing attention away from less optimistic subjects deserving of political scrutiny, such as future trade deals. He may continue to fail, as recently when he struggled in vain to get the public to “bung a bob for a Big Ben bong” in celebration of Brexit, but it looks depressingly as though Boris the Builder is back again.

Douglas Murphy is an architect and writer



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