Few outside Keir Starmer’s family know what his father did for a living, and fewer still must know how Starmer senior used to get to work. My father was a bus driver, my maternal uncle was a conductor, and my nephew has resumed the family tradition by qualifying as a bus driver this week. For me, buses are an unalloyed social good, except perhaps when someone is listening to music without headphones,  

We have to ask why Starmer so hates people who use and need buses that he is determined to make them unaffordable for many with his announcement that tickets that used to cost £2 will now cost £3. For a man who gets thousands of pounds of free glasses that doesn’t sound like much. For someone on benefits or the minimum wage a £6 return fare is an awful lot of money. It’s likely to be what they spend on food for a couple of days. 

Starmer is effectively putting buses outside the reach of significant numbers of the people who most need them. He is condemning the poorest to isolation and lack of mobility. He is depriving them of access to services which require travel and is making them even poorer. 

Setting aside the self-evident ecological, mental health and every other positive aspect of cheap bus travel, it is just astonishingly stupid politics. A relatively modest amount, estimated to be £350 million by the super snide New Statesman in a piece approving of the fare increases, could be used to do something that tangibly improves people’s lives. Instead, Labour are opting to impose a financial penalty on public transport users of a sort that they wouldn’t dare impose on motorists.  

Labour owes its election victory to the Tory meltdown and the ascent of the far right rather than any wave of enthusiasm for its ideas. Starmer and Reeves are doing something that is going to add to the sense of grievance in those towns and communities which are already blighted by poor and expensive transport links.   

Fifty European cities already have free public transport, and it is hard to find anywhere in Europe where fares are more expensive than they are in Britain. For all its platitudinous rhetoric about improving people’s lives, Labour has just committed itself to making things worse for hundreds to thousands of people who are seeing it commit to an austerity programme. You would think they want to lose the next election.