YP Letters: Minister out of touch with transport shambles

CHRIS Grayling’s perverse idea of the meaning of ‘public service’ – more specifically, transport – suggests that he is more familiar with ‘public school’.

But no, like me, he is a product of one of Mrs May’s grammar schools.

This gives him far less excuse for his chosen disconnection with the day-to-day realities of 90 per cent of us (The Yorkshire Post, March 13).

Can he accept that UK public transport is a fragmented, ill-co-ordinated, outrageously expensive, increasingly non-existent shambles?

It wasn’t always so.

Well within living memory, trains and most buses were nationally or municipally operated. Lack of investment left them behind mainland Europe, but at least they were both available and affordable

In the 1980s, Margaret Thatcher convinced many of us that stockbrokers were the right people to run energy, with transport following. We were conned, and continue to be ill-served and grossly overcharged in both fields.

Time to paraphrase that most effective 1979 election slogan “Privatisation isn’t working” perhaps?