A pioneering agreement in Oxford may be able to offer hope to people on Wherstead Road.  Wherstead Road is plagued by sporadic bus services, which would be far more tolerable if they were properly spaced out.  Under typically stupid European Union rules this cannot be changed because there are a number of different operators on the route they cannot get together to redraw the timetable to space out their bus times, the authorities prefering that they bunched up their services to make them “competitive”.  Why Europe needs to get involved in bus services that don’t even cross a county border, let alone an international border, is typically left unexplained.

This has meant that there is an almost two hour gap between buses in the evening on the route out of the town centre, and this starts almost exactly when the first commuter train comes in from London.  Thanks Brussels. 

Oxford has moved to stop their version of this needless, mandated competitive inefficiency by getting an agreement between the bus operating companies.  Hopefully we won’t have some European under-secretary for buses deciding that this won’t work.

In fact the minister who could decide on this would be Chris Mole.  I know that he doesn’t keep an eye on local media any more, but a couple of his tax paid staff do (even this humble site), so perhaps they can pass on the message that if he blocks the Oxford deal it will play badly on the Wherstead Road.  We’ll make sure of it.

The Council runs a bus service.  They want to sell it off.  There is a big local campaign led by the local (and under threat) Labour MP.  The government minister in charge says that while sympathetic, there’s nothing he wants to do, saying that it’s up to councils.

But it’s not Ipswich, it’s Plymouth.  And the minister who has the power to shut the whole thing down?  Chris Mole.

He could do the whole thing in Ipswich, his own patch.  He won’t.  Why?

Well if you look at the speech it gives a clue, lot’s of talk about how much he likes council owned bus services and no real action to keep them council owned.

He may not exercise his power to keep the buses council owned, but at least it will get the petitions signed and the vote out.  And in the end that’s all that counts in Labour’s once proud Fortress Ipswich.

Nothing seems to go right for our poor under-secretary of state for roads, trains and drains.  When news of his announcement as minister of railways was given the good Lord showed what He thought by smiting Ipswich station with lightening.  Now he’s on the hook for the lack of rock salt.

It seems that there was a phenomenally poor prediction and calculation of the rock salt needed. While I could get out Hayek and talk about how this failure is bound to happen, why not look at something less controversial, how rubbish the Met Office proved to be?

They are continually erring on the warm side of any medium term predictions and while this is merely annoying when they predict a “barbecue summer”, people are dying because of their poor predictions this month.  Piers Corbyn, left of Labour activist and brother of ultra left wing MP Jeremy Corbyn, says that he has predicted the cold snap with far greater accuracy far in advance.

His contention is that the Met Office didn’t just believe in global warming, they really, really believed it and were prepared to predict on the basis of it.  And that’s why people are dying on the roads and we don’t know whether we’ll have to ration gas through the cold snap.

This is not to say that global warming is nonsense.  As the BBC and the government (or did I repeat myself?) have been telling us for the last week the weather is not the same as the climate.  A pity the Met Office seems to have forgotten.

(Just to cheer you all up, Piers Corbyn reckons that the cold snap will prove more than a snap and despite a couple of warm spells go well into February.)

Thank you to Andrew Coates for pointing out the Labour Party’s response.  They’re still saying “we’re against the sell off, but it’s not the right time”.  I wonder if there were heated discussions before that equivocation came up.  They must think they’ve got a chance of winning next year if they are saying “not yet” because they are going to have to do something very similar, although doubtless it will be packaged in a different way.

Let’s face it, if Labour councillors were really serious about stopping this sale they could do it with one phone call.  The junior transport minister is Chris Mole, who is in charge of encouraging councils to sell off buses.  Councils like Plymouth, Reading … and Ipswich.  Ipswich can not be won without the work of the Labour councillors. They could simply say “Look Chris, we are not going to do a lick of work for you in any safe Labour ward and instead concentrate on winning the marginal wards in Ipswich Council unless you veto this bus sell off.” He’d almost certainly lose if Labour were out canvassing in Bridge rather than Gipping, and he knows it.  And Labour could possibly win the council in May.

Instead Labour are not actually going to stop the sale, they’re going to use it to get the disgruntled and ambivalent to rally round the flag.  And it’s working well.  And then they will sell the buses off.

At last the Tories respond on the potential sale of the stake in Ipswich Buses to the Go-Ahead group.  Obviously it’s partisan, mercilessly mocking Labour on their three positions on bus privatisation (nationally for, locally both adamantly against and saying maybe but not yet).  That’s to be expected, after all with Chris Mole as the transport minister Labour can’t make much of the running on this unless Chris Mole were to veto or delay this measure.  And if he were to do that in his backyard then there would be wild fires in all these areas such as Plymouth where he’s helped to push through bus sell offs.  Expect a lot of Conservative canvassers to point out the role of the undersecretary of transport and MP for Ipswich in the bus sell off.

Labour’s best local issue has for some time been the buses, but their MP has been instrumental in the municipal sell offs.  If I were a local councillor I would be furious to see my best gun spiked.  And after the hospital.

A left of Labour candidate could clean up, although in Ipswich there’s no real action on the ground apart from a couple of blogs (Andrew Coates has written nothing since his “utter numpty” post, instead talking about the attitude of the Irish Greens on blasphemy laws, the socialist leanings of David Tenant.  No really, I didn’t make either of these two up.

Will the Greens move in with a full throated cry for municipal ownership of the buses, with public transport, anti-commercialism and local ownership it should be made for them.  If they do would they be able to get their message through to the large Estates on the outskirts where the issue could catch fire?  Even if they weren’t pushing all their troops into Norwich South at the General Election, this is probably not something they could do even if they wanted to.

I still think this is going to get the Labour vote out and could lose the Tories a knife edge seat (like Bridge) but it could have been so, so much bigger.  Oh Mr Mole, what have you done?