The 12 general December election was decisive. result on The UK has a Conservative government with a working majority, an administration likely to remain in office for a full five years.
As we commented in our December issue, this was an election fought primarily on the time and manner of the country’s withdrawal from the European Union, with the future of the National Health Service topping the electorate’s other main concerns. It was never going to be an argument about bus services.
Shapps’s ‘war on the motorist’ line jarred against the pro-bus sentiment that his party has begun to express
Yet buses figured in the campaigns of both the Conservatives and Labour, each promising imaginative ways of spending £4billion to improve the way that services operate in England. A refreshing change from the customary vacuum that ignores the most used form of public transport while focusing on roads, cars and the railways.
Since becoming prime minister last summer, Boris Johnson appears to have pushed bus policy up the government’s agenda, endorsing at least one city region’s proposals for franchising and drawing on his experience as mayor of London to say that many social problems can be addressed by the provision of a single-deck bus.
