The late Gwyneth Dunwoody, formidable chair of the House of Commons all-party transport select committee, once famously urged an apparently meek head of First UK Bus to ‘shout like a fishwife’. The time may have come for bus users to do so too, if our favourite form of public transport is to secure any share of an apparent loosening of the government’s fiscal austerity.
The chancellor of the exchequer Philip Hammond — the mild mannered man who was transport secretary from 2010 to 2011 and some now tip to be a caretaker replacement prime minister — says the UK has grown weary of austerity.
That is the message he takes from a general election on 8 June in which prime minister Theresa May succeeded in snatching near defeat from the jaws of an allegedly assured victory seven weeks earlier, a victory that Westminster gossipers believed would remove Hammond from his charge of the Treasury strings.
Instead, the chancellor is strengthened in his post, ready to be less draconian with the nation’s finances.
Future cuts look as though they have been abandoned, as the pact between the Conservatives and the Democratic Unionist Party not only delivers an extra £1billion for Northern Ireland but preserves measures li…
