The Forth Road Bridge FAQ
Stuart Campbell, Wings Over Scotland (Dec 14, 2015)
1. The reason there isn’t already a second road bridge at Queensferry is the Labour Party. When they came to power at Westminster in 1997 one of their first acts was to cancel the building of a new bridge planned by the previous Conservative government, claiming that building it would cause traffic congestion in Edinburgh.
2. When the Scottish Parliament was restored in 1999 and Labour ran it for eight years, they continued to stall and delay and oppose the building of a second bridge, despite the increasingly urgent warnings of the Forth Estuary Transport Authority (FETA) that one was needed as soon as possible due to traffic load on the old bridge.
3. Prominent Labour figures, meanwhile, were still insisting that there was no need for a new bridge as the old one could survive indefinitely, and concentrating all their attention to building the Edinburgh trams instead, reacting with fury to any suggestion that the bridge was a greater priority.
5. Labour, still in power at Westminster, continued to obstruct and delay the bridge as much as possible, refusing the Scottish Government permission to use advance capital funding to get the crossing built quickly and suggesting that they instead save up for several years, or use cripplingly expensive PFI to finance it.
(Even though PFI was the reason they’d given for cancelling the Tory one in 1997.)
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