OPPOSITION parties who have no prospect of forming a government have one great advantage over their more powerful rivals. They can promise the earth, the moon and the stars, safe in the knowledge that they’ll never have to justify their broken promises. As a former Scottish Socialist Party MSP, I can speak with some experience on that.

I think we spent the Trident budget a thousand times over.

Sometimes things do take an unexpected turn. The LibDems went into the 2010 General Election pledging to abolish student tuition, never seriously expecting that they’d end up in government. We all know what happened next.

But I think we can safely predict that Scottish Labour won’t be returning to power anytime soon. And that leaves Kezia Dugdale free to write whatever she pleases in her manifesto. Or, perhaps more to the point, whatever she thinks will please the public.

One of her pledges is to re-regulate Scotland’s bus services. Most readers of The National will, I guess, be distinctly unimpressed, if not downright cynical. After all, the reversal of bus deregulation was an Old Labour article of faith in the 1980s and early 1990s. But then along Tony Blair and the policy was quietly taken away and buried in a shallow grave, where it remained during Labour’s 13 years in power at Westminster and its eight years in power at Holyrood.

But let’s judge the song, not the singer. Bus regulation is not a policy that belongs exclusively to Labour. The Scottish Green Party, supports it. So too have recent SNP conferences.

Rise also supports regulation as a step towards its ambitious five-year plan for a free public transport system across Scotland. That may sound far-fetched, but it’s a policy goal that’s shared by Michael Bloomberg, the former Democratic mayor of New York.

As a non-member of the SNP, I would respectfully suggest that, rather than oppose this policy because Labour supports it, the Scottish Government should bring forward its own proposal to bring our buses back under some form of public control.

Why is this important? Because standing up to the bus companies means standing up for some of the most marginalised people in our society. I drive, but there are plenty of people out there who don’t.

While 97 per cent of households with an income above £40,000 a year have access to a car, that figure is under 40 per cent for those on very low incomes and for those who live in the socially rented sector. While the more affluent travel by car and train, the young, the poor, the elderly and the disabled rely mainly on buses.

And they don’t just live in cities. Pensioners on the basic state pension, young part-time workers on extremely low incomes and people with disabilities who are unable to drive can be found in every village in Scotland, including in our most remote communities. They are being are being failed dismally by the big private companies. I live in a village in North Perthshire where the bus service to and from the central belt was recently slashed from 10 a day to just three.

The first bus south is now at 5pm, and the only bus back to the village leaves Edinburgh at 9am. It means that people can make a day trip from Edinburgh or Glasgow to Birnam/Dunkeld on the Scottish Citylink coach – but not the other way round.

Many hundreds of people in this small village have signed a petition against the service reduction. Even the intervention of the local MSP, John Swinney – who also happens to be the Deputy First Minister of Scotland – has so far failed to shift the company, which is two-thirds owned by a Singapore-based multinational corporation and one-third owned by Stagecoach.

The company says it’s no longer worth its while to stop in smaller villages. That’s because the people who do use the route are those with concessionary tickets – in other words, the elderly and the disabled. In the eyes of distant shareholders, they don’t matter. The rest of us who don’t have concession cards just can’t afford to use the service – a single ticket for the 13-mile journey from Birnam to Perth is £9.30. Compare that to London, where there’s a flat fare of £1.50 for all bus journeys – including for the 23-mile route between Heathrow Airport and Croydon.

So why are London buses so cheap? The main reason is that the city was exempted from deregulation from the start. Westminster governments – Tory and Labour – decided that the UK capital was too important to be exposed to the chaos of the free market in public transport. To this day, London’s transport systems are regulated by an independent body which includes elected politicians, business figures and trade unionists. They plan the routes, specify service levels and set the fares.

The result is that the number of bus journeys in London has doubled since 1986, which means reduced traffic on the roads, fewer accidents and lower carbon emissions. In the rest of the UK, the number of journeys has fallen by a third.

Regulation of buses should be a no-brainer. Public transport is supposed to be a public service. In Scotland, we pay the bus companies £250 million a year to provide these services. Yet we have no say over routes, we have no say over timetables, we have no say over fares. We’ve been taken for a ride.

This year marks the thirtieth anniversary of bus deregulation.

The best way to mark that anniversary would be for the Scottish Government to bring forward a Bill to reverse thirty years of failure on our roads.

You can sign the petition to save the Birnam bus service at https://you.38degrees.org.uk/petitions/save-the-birnam-bus-service