Callum

The voice you are about to hear belongs to a fictional character. The events do not. They are unfolding across North West today. This is Callum's story. In transport infrastructure, where skilled engineers and construction workers sit unemployed while rail projects remain stalled, St Helens North shows how political choices masquerade as financial impossibilities. The people, the skills, and the materials exist. The decision to leave them idle traces back to Westminster offices where currency issuers pretend they must save before they spend. I grew up thinking the railway was permanent, like the hills around Newton-le-Willows or the red brick terraces where my nan still lived. My dad worked the tracks for thirty-seven years, came home every night with oil under his fingernails and stories about signal failures or broken rails he'd helped fix. When I left school at sixteen, it felt natural to follow him into Network Rail. Track maintenance engineer, they called it, though most days it was simpler than that: you spotted the problems, you fixed them, you kept the trains running. There's something honest about work where you can see exactly what you've done by the end of the day. I spent fifteen years out there in the hi-vis jacket, learning every inch of track between St Helens and Liverpool, knowing which stretches needed watching in winter, which signals threw up false warnings when the wind was wrong. I was good at it. Not just the technical side, though I could strip down a junction box blindfolded, but the thinking ahead part. You develop an instinct for where trouble will start, what needs checking before it breaks. The job made sense to me in a way school never had. Then Network Rail decided to outsource our depot. They called it efficiency savings, but what it meant was our team of twelve got replaced by a contract crew of six who'd never worked these particular tracks before. I was thirty-six years old, mortgage on a one-bed flat near where the old Pilkington glassworks used to be, daughter who stays with me every other weekend. The redundancy package lasted eight months. After that, it was the job centre and the slow realisation that fifteen years of expertise doesn't transfer easily when there's nowhere left to transfer to. The strangest thing was still wearing the hi-vis jacket to my appointments. Force of habit, I suppose, or maybe hoping someone would notice I was a worker, not just another claimant. The woman behind the desk at the job centre always called me Mr Williams and asked if I'd considered retail. I'd explain about the tracks, about keeping the railway running, about how I knew every signal post between here and Liverpool Central. She'd nod politely and print off another list of warehouse jobs in Warrington. That's when I decided to retrain. The Mersey Rail extension had been in the local paper for months, promises of new routes and investment, thousands of jobs for people exactly like me. I applied to Merseytravel for their new rail infrastructure project team in 2023, thinking my experience would count for something. The response came back within a week: "All positions are currently frozen due to Department for Transport spending constraints. We will contact you if the situation changes." I kept that letter. It was the first time someone had used the word "constraints" instead of just saying no. So I contacted the Rail Industry Skills Council about retraining for electrification work. The woman on the phone was sympathetic but clear: "The courses have been cancelled. Treasury didn't approve the funding allocation for this year. There's nothing we can do until the next spending review." When I asked when that might be, she couldn't say. St Helens College was my next try. They'd run transport apprenticeship schemes for decades, trained half the mechanics and electricians in town. I walked down there on a Tuesday morning, thinking maybe I could learn the newer technologies, the digital systems that were replacing the old mechanical signals. The receptionist looked embarrassed when I explained what I was after. "The transport scheme's been mothballed," she said. "Department for Education withdrew the grant last month. They built us a whole new workshop, then pulled the funding before we could use it." I even went direct to Liverpool City Region Combined Authority, found their offices in Liverpool and asked to speak to someone about the Mersey Rail extension plans I'd been reading about. The project manager was honest, at least. "We've got planning permission," he told me. "The contractors are interested. The engineering surveys are done. Westminster blocked the capital investment. They say the Treasury can't find the money this year." When I asked him what they were waiting for, he shrugged. "A different government, maybe. Or different priorities. It's above my pay grade." Walking past the college the next week, I stopped at the fence and looked through at the transport workshop. Brand new welding equipment still in boxes, benches that had never been used, tool racks empty and waiting. The whole building was dark, built for training that would never happen because someone in London had decided there wasn't enough money to connect the equipment to the people who needed to learn. That's when I noticed Jamie from Leigh and two other lads I recognised from the old Network Rail crew, all of them walking past the same building every morning on their way to sign on. Three experienced railway workers, one empty training facility, twenty unused apprenticeship places in the building next door. The need was right there. The skills were right there. The building was right there. But there was no money, apparently. I started asking different questions after that. Not "When will the funding come through?" but "Where exactly does the money come from when they do decide to spend it?" I knew the government could write a cheque for bank bailouts when it had to. I'd seen them find billions for wars and tax cuts and everything else that Westminster decided was urgent. But somehow, when it came to training the people who could build the railways we actually needed, the cupboard was always bare. I used to accept that excuse. It sounded reasonable, responsible even. Like a family saying they couldn't afford a holiday this year. But families don't print their own money. The government does. The Bank of England doesn't run out of pounds any more than the Premier League runs out of points to award. The constraint was never the currency. It was the decision about where to spend it. Now I understand what I couldn't see before: every time someone told me "there is no money," they were making a choice. The choice was not between spending and saving. It was between spending here, on the people and places that needed it, or spending there, on whatever Westminster had decided mattered more. The government that issues the pound chose not to issue enough pounds to connect three unemployed engineers to one empty training facility to twenty unused apprenticeship places. That's not an accounting problem. That's politics. I'm still here, still watching, still wearing the hi-vis jacket out of habit. But I hear the excuses differently now. When they say there's no money for rail infrastructure in the North West, I know they mean there's no political will to create the money and spend it here. When they say the Treasury can't find the funds for transport apprenticeships, I know they mean the Treasury has chosen not to find them. The real question was never about money. It was about whether the people existed, whether the skills could be taught, whether the materials were available. They were. All of them. In the same street, in the same building, waiting for someone in Westminster to admit that the constraint was never financial. It was always political. And that means it can be changed. What Callum experienced has a name: Logical Fallacy. A logical fallacy is when someone makes an argument based on faulty reasoning, often by comparing two things that seem similar but work in fundamentally different ways. For example, saying "fish need water to survive, so goldfish and whales must have the same needs" would be a false analogy, because a bowl and an ocean are completely different environments despite both containing water. The household budget analogy is the false analogy that underpins every excuse Callum heard. When Merseytravel said positions were "frozen due to spending constraints," they were applying household logic to a currency issuer. When the Rail Industry Skills Council said "Treasury didn't approve the funding allocation," they were treating the government like a family saving up for a purchase. When St Helens College had to mothball their transport workshop because "the Department for Education withdrew the grant," someone was pretending that the institution which creates pounds sterling had run short of them. A household genuinely cannot spend money it does not have. It must earn or borrow before it can purchase. A government that issues its own currency works the opposite way: it spends first, creating money as it does so, then manages the economic effects through taxation and regulation. The UK government does not need to find pounds before it can spend them, any more than a football league needs to find points before it can award them to winning teams. In Callum's case, the proof was visible through the college fence: the welding equipment, the unused workshop, the unemployed engineers walking past every morning. The real resources existed. The human skills existed. The materials existed. What prevented them from being connected was not a shortage of currency but a political decision dressed up as financial responsibility. The resources existed. The people existed. The decision not to connect them was political, not financial. St Helens North ranks 129 out of 543 English constituencies on the English Indices of Deprivation 2025 from MHCLG, placing it in deprivation decile 3. The constituency has 557 registered charities according to the Charity Commission Register for England and Wales. Total grants received amount to £8.6 million according to 360Giving GrantNav. All sources are published at Blocked Britain dot co dot uk. Blocked Britain tells the stories of people whose lives are shaped by the gap between what Britain needs and what its institutions choose to provide. Every character is fictional. Every situation is drawn from official statistics. Produced by Blocked Britain.