Rishi Sunak is promising to change Britain. He starts with railway cuts and a crackdown on smoking

abcnews.go.com:

U.K. Prime Minister Rishi Sunak has told his Conservative Party he's not afraid to make tough decisions for long-term change

MANCHESTER, England — Battling gloomy opinion polls and mounting doubts, U.K. Prime Minister Rishi Sunak on Wednesday promised skeptical voters, and his own Conservative Party, that he would make tough choices to «fundamentally change our country.”

Two of his boldest plans in a speech to the party's annual conference — canceling a railway project that has already cost billions and proposing to ban smoking for the next generation — definitely caused ripples. Whether they translate into success for the right-of-center party in an election next year is another question. Opinion polls in recent weeks have put the left-of-center opposition Labour Party 15 to 20 points ahead.

Sunak told hundreds of party members packed into a Manchester conference hall that he's not afraid to make big decisions that will deliver “long-term success” rather than “short-term advantage.”

He said proof was his decision to curtail the embattled High Speed 2 project — an overdue, overbudget high-speed railway line that was planned to link London and Manchester.

“The economic case has massively been weakened by the changes to business travel post-COVID,” Sunak said, arguing it would be an “abdication of leadership” to continue.

Some Conservatives said the decision was a bad move — and doing it at a conference in Manchester was disastrous.

Andy Street, the Conservative mayor of the West Midlands region, called it “an incredible political gaffe” that would leave the party’s opponents saying “the Tories have come to Manchester to shaft the North.”

Once billed as Europe’s largest infrastructure project, HS2 was meant to slash