Tuesday 9 April 2013

Buses, Tories and Thatcher

Unfortunately, lots of them come along at the same time


All the right wing tweeters getting upset about the lack of respect for Thatcher reminded me of one change she helped to instigate that I noted with sadness in the 80's. Her "children" Cameron and Osborne have continued implementing such wonderful policies as destroying the public sector, privatising anything that moves and casting another generation onto the slag heap.

But it made me think of one very practical example I lived through of how Thatcher's "grand ideas" completely changed one small but important aspect of our society.

In the 80's I was commuting into Waterloo, then taking two buses to get to the school I taught in, on the Old Kent Road.

When I started doing those journeys every bus had a driver and a conductor. As the Tory cuts took effect I saw the progressively deteriorating effect on travel in London. It may be apocryphal, but the Thatcher quote about only failures needing to take a bus, seemed to be evident in their transport policies.

"A man who, beyond the age of 26, finds himself on a bus can count himself as a failure"

Slowly the friendly conductor, who helped on board the old, the infirm and the young parents with kids, was got rid of. It took longer at each stop because no-one was there to direct and the driver had to take the fares, creating long hold ups of cars behind the bus. Pretty soon the drivers alone in their cabs got frightened of the passengers and heavy duty plastic screen were put in between them and the people getting on. Queues and travel in London got slower.

Once that minimal contact between driver and passenger was eliminated with tickets bought before getting on, the driver became dramatically more distant. Old people who might have been helped by a conductor, now got thrown around as driving became more erratic and less connected to the people in the bus. I saw the service deteriorate around me.

In other words buses became much less of a service to the people who used them. Important people didn't need them anyway.

So much of what happened under Thatcher was the elimination of care and public service. It's all happening again.

"One man's overstaffing is another man's care and attention"

The public sector is again being dismantled. The teams that have grown to support the people they serve are being broken up, individuals made redundant. Things that matter to ordinary people are being scrapped because the "important" ones, the millionaires in cabinet have no need for them.

That's the way it is. Let's face it, when you next get on a bus how likely is it that George Osborne will be sitting next to you. His oyster card will only be used to buy the oysters to accompany his champagne.

1 comment:

  1. Whatever she did in London was nothing to what she did de-regulating the busses in Surrey to introduce "competition". There were 3 separate pricing structures that took all the bus stop to explain them, the busses ran completely randomly - none at non peak times. Not so much three come at once as all three operators' services come ONLY once. It was chaos. Happy days

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