HS2

• Greenfield Partners and existing investor Zeev Ventures co-led the Series A with participation from existing investors SquarePeg, 10D VC, JIBE and National Grid Partners.
• Exodigo continues to lead a complete reinvention of underground mapping and plans to use the new capital to further build out its global team, accelerate the development of a self-service product line, and support its expansion into new markets.
• Meanwhile, the built environment constitutes almost half of annual global CO2 emissions, making solving the underground both an economic and environmental priority.
• "Exodigo has taken the underground mapping market by storm and established its platform as the gold standard in comprehensive underground intelligence in just two short years.

• NEW YORK, Nov. 13, 2023 /PRNewswire/ - WSP, a leading engineering, environment and professional services consultancy, hired David Cochrane as senior vice president and transportation program director.
• In this role, Cochrane will be responsible for delivering emerging complex mega-projects, in response to significant congestion and growing mobility needs in the region.
• He said high-speed rail projects are part of a wider integrated transport solution that offer greater connectivity, increases capacity and decarbonizes travel choices for communities.
• Cochrane holds an honors degree in civil engineering, is a chartered engineer and a fellow of the Institution of Civil Engineers.

• It enables them to set the agenda, rally the core membership and supporters around key themes, and speak to the wider audience of electors.
• The Conservative party has now had five different party leaders giving conference speeches as prime minister at this time of year since 2015.
• This is the third party leader to give a speech in the past three years.

The optics

• After trailing the speech as a reset, Sunak continued to play the decline theme in arguing that the British political system is “broken”.
• He presented himself as the change candidate after “30 years of a political system that incentivises the easy decision, not the right one”.
• U-turns on the HS2 high-speed rail project and net zero timelines were therefore presented as a challenge to “consensus politics”.

Health and education: supply and demand

• On health, he promised a free vote in parliament on raising the legal smoking age by a year, each year.
• Sunak acknowledged that restricting choice was not conservative, but weaved it into his narrative of making hard long-term decisions.

What about the economy?

• “I know you all want tax cuts,” he told the party conference audience before insisting that at the moment, bringing down inflation represented the best “tax cut” available.
• The goal seems instead to continue on this path, claiming the UK has shown hints of a strong recovery and that growth will follow.

Values, values, values

• There was also the customary announcement of a crackdown on those claiming welfare benefits through ill-health.
• Sunak also repeatedly stressed family values and insisted that the UK was not a racist country but a multi-ethnic democracy.

Dividing lines

• While Sunak attacked the Labour party and Keir Starmer as lacking ideas, this speech attempted to create dividing lines – and not just with the opposition.
• Without mentioning his predecessors, Sunak was setting up battles with a wide range of players on both HS2 and net zero.

• Sunak recently watered down his climate change mitigation policies, and refused to “speculate” on the future of rail project HS2.
• The Sunak government is seemingly unable to reverse a harmful narrative or maintain its own.
• But political leaders are successful when they present a grand narrative and find a way to connect themselves to it.
• Simply finding a bigger narrative is not enough – political leaders must be compelling characters within their narrative.

Contradictions in Sunak’s narrative

• The audience (in this case, the voting public) must feel able to personally connect with the narrative and the narrator.
• It is difficult to align yourself with a revival narrative, or an everyman narrative, from a position of privilege.
• It’s possible that Sunak’s wealth and privilege may render him singularly incapable of connecting to a bigger narrative at this moment in British history.

A narrative of decline

• As argued in an article in The Economist: “There is just one problem with this narrative.
• He may follow the example of Thatcher: when faced with a decline narrative, she chose not to reverse it but to embrace it – and blame it on her opponents.
• Whatever Sunak decides, reversing the narrative of an impending British collapse or leveraging decline to his advantage, his search for a grand narrative is already replete with incongruities.
• In the end, the stark realities outside Westminster may force him to acknowledge decline and his role within it.