What a year 2017 turned out to be, both politically and, but to a lesser extent, for the coach and bus industry.
For the Conservative Party, 2017 was something of an annus horribilis, to put it mildly. It started quite well, with a strong showing in the local elections in early May, only for it to see its leader, Theresa May, crash the car in a spectacular fashion during an unnecessary general election. Actually, it wasn’t a car crash. It was a monumental motorway pile-up.
And, things have not improved that much since, if at all.
The Brexit negotiations have been tortuous to say the least, and the year ended on a decidedly bad note, with 11 Tory MPs defying the whip and causing the government to be defeated on an amendment to the EU Withdrawal Bill forcing it to hold a vote in parliament on the terms of the final Brexit deal.
Then there was ‘that’ party conference speech, and all those accusations of senior ministers behaving improperly, and two resigning in quick succession. And as I write, the future of Damien Green, the First Secretary and effectively Deputy Prime Minister, remains very uncertain.
This was about a bad a year for the Conservative Party as I can recall. Still, at least Theresa May can take some crumbs of comfort from three things.
First, it can’t get much worse than this, can it? Surely ‘things can only get better’! Second, the other 27 EU leaders have agreed that the Brexit negotiations can move on to stage two over the terms of our future trade deal with the EU. So that’s progress of a kind.
And third, I think the Conservative Party can take considerable comfort from the fact that for all of the difficulties engulfing it, Labour is totally unable to pull ahead in the opinion polls.
This should be a matter of real concern to the Labour Party. Here we have a government that is about as incompetent as it is possible to be, but the Opposition seems quite unable to take full, if any, advantage.
What is striking about Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership in these circumstances is just how quiet and under the radar he is. I would expect the Leader of the Opposition to be all over the media, knocking seven bells out of Theresa May on a daily basis.
But he isn’t. I’m mystified and can only offer two explanations. Either he has a cunning plan up his sleeve to come out all guns blazing in the New Year, or those who claim that Labour’s performance in the June general election was the peak of Jeremy Corbyn’s support may well be right.
Either way, Labour should be miles ahead in the polls, and it isn’t. If I was a Labour MP, I would be as worried as if I was a Conservative MP. For sure, politically speaking 2017 has been an extraordinary year.
For the industry, 2017 may have been less of a roller-coaster, but it’s been an important year nonetheless.
The Bus Services Bill finally became an Act, putting to bed a long-running debate about bus policy that George Osborne in his infinite wisdom, ignited in November 2014. The bus industry may have recoiled in horror when the Greater Manchester Combined Authority was given powers to introduce bus franchising via its devolution deal.
But this has all ended up as a bit of an anti-climax, so far.
While 2017 was the year when the franchising powers finally passed into law, the world hasn’t stopped turning just yet, and Greater Manchester, as I suggested last week, seems about as far away from introducing bus franchising as it ever was.
The bus industry comes out of 2017 pretty much unscathed from a policy perspective. It has every opportunity to put its best foot forward, take the initiative on a number of issues, and consign the debate about the merits and benefits of franchising to the place where it belongs – the dustbin.
I hope it takes the opportunity and that come the end of 2018 it will have moved significantly in this direction.
For the coach industry, from a domestic policy point of view it remains, thankfully, largely untouched by government interference.
It may have material concerns over the implications of Brexit, but it remains in the fortunate position where the government pretty much leaves it alone.
There are rules and regulations to comply with, of course, as in any industry, but at least it doesn’t have the dead hand of government constantly trying to tell it how to run its affairs. Long may that continue.
