Former transport minister Jesse Norman.
The ruling Tory party is famously riven with splits: the latest is a little disguised attack on the U.K. government’s transport policy from a recent former minister, Jesse Norman.
The MP and former banker has written a stinging foreword to a soon-to-be-published book, calling out, among other things, conspiracy theories about 15-minute cities and the supposed “war on motorists.”
Norman was transport minister in 2023, serving under the current transport secretary, Mark Harper. (This was Norman’s second stint as a transport minister; he has also been financial secretary to the Treasury, a key pursestrings role.)
Speaking to the Tory party conference in Manchester last year, Transport Secretary Harper aired a conspiracy theory about 15-minute cities, the urban planning concept promoting proximity to shops and other amenities.
Earlier in the year, fringe conspiracists had claimed that the 15-minute city concept was an anti-motoring Stalinist climate lockdown plot to confine people to ghettos and thus easier for global cabals to control.
“Right across our country, there is a Labour-backed movement to make cars harder to use, to make driving more expensive, and to remove your freedom to get from A to B how you want,” Harper told the Tory party conference.
“What is sinister, and what we shouldn’t tolerate,” he continued, citing no real-world examples, “is the idea that local councils can decide how often you go to the shops and that they can ration who uses the roads and when, and that they police it all with CCTV.”
Cover of Laura Laker's soon-to-be-published book, "Potholes and Pavements."
In the foreword to Potholes and Pavements by cycle journalist Laura Laker, published on May 9, Norman criticizes those who spread such conspiracy theories, writing that “leaders at all levels [should] address often ungrounded public worries about such things as 15-minute cities and the so-called ‘war on drivers’.”
He also complains that the “British government... [won’t] recognize and support the health benefits of cycling.”
This “unwillingness” is “inexplicable,” says the Member of Parliament for Hereford and South Herefordshire, who resigned as a transport minister in November last year.
After narrowly winning a by-election in July 2023 in Boris Johnson’s former constituency that the Tory party thought it would lose—a by-election supposedly won on a pro-motoring ticket—the government created a “Plan for drivers,” pivoting away from Johnson’s favoring of cycling. Backpedalling, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak said his government was now “on the side of motorists.”
Earlier in the year, the government—of which Norman was then still part—made swingeing cuts to the Department for Transport’s active travel budget. Transport Secretary Harper announced a crippling cut of $452 million in March 2023.
In the foreword to Potholes and Pavements, Norman writes that “we need a significantly more serious, vigorous, joined-up and long-term strategy” for cycling.
He called for an “array of new and consistently high-quality infrastructure” for cycling, complaining that “funding and rhetoric [from government] remain patchy, inconsistent and low.”
In a resignation statement published on X, formerly Twitter, in November, Norman said he was looking forward to more freedom to campaign on “other crucial issues.”
