SNP’s £2 bus fare bribe can’t hide nineteen years of failure

JOHN SWINNEY wants Scots to believe that a £2 bus fare cap is the answer to the country’s transport woes. It is the latest shiny election giveaway from a party that has spent nineteen years papering over failure with headline-grabbing freebies.

But voters should ask one simple question: what use is a £2 fare when the bus never turns up?

After nearly two decades in power, the SNP has become addicted to handouts funded by taxpayers. Free tuition. Free prescriptions. Free bus travel for under-22s. Baby boxes. Child payments. Ferry subsidies. Council tax freezes. Endless grants, schemes and gimmicks designed to buy goodwill rather than fix the basics.

Yet while ministers chase applause lines, Scotland’s transport system has been left to rot.

Across towns and suburbs that once thrived, residents have watched routes disappear, services cut back and timetables become a joke. Evening buses vanish. Weekend links are slashed. Journeys that should take minutes now take hours.

In many communities around larger west of Scotland towns, places only a short drive apart are now effectively cut off from one another by public transport. What should be a 10-minute drive or a short walk can become a two-hour ordeal by bus thanks to disjointed routes and poor connections.

That is not progress. That is managed decline.

The human cost is obvious. Families see less of each other. Pensioners become isolated. Young people struggle to get to college or work. Shoppers stay away from town centres already fighting for survival. Once-busy high streets become ghost towns.

And still the SNP thinks the answer is another giveaway.

Because make no mistake: someone always pays. If fares are forced down without proper long-term funding, bus companies will cut elsewhere. Less profitable routes will go first. Smaller communities will be abandoned. Reliability will worsen. Investment will stall.

That means Scots could end up with exactly what the SNP always delivers: a flashy promise on paper and a poorer service in reality.

And as if that were not enough, along comes Ross Greer with the even more ludicrous idea of making buses completely free for everyone. Free for all? In a system that can barely meet current demand? Lo and behold, Mr Greer is set to benefit from the scheme after proudly proclaiming he is not a car owner following the STV debate fiasco.

If people think it is difficult to catch a bus now, just wait six months under schemes like these. Demand would surge overnight, but without the buses, drivers or infrastructure to cope. Overcrowding would become the norm. Services would buckle. Reliability would collapse even further, and frankly without robust policing and criminal justice plans they wouldn’t be able to get the drivers or keep them.

This is not serious policymaking. It is a race to the bottom between politicians more interested in headlines than reality.

Even the basics are failing. In some areas, buses passing schools do not start until after 9am. How would a £2 cap or free fares help parents or pupils when the service is useless to begin with?

Cheap fares are meaningless without dependable buses.

What Scotland needs is not another Swinney stunt or Green fantasy. It needs buses that run on time, routes that connect communities, and transport policy based on common sense rather than election panic.

After nineteen years, the SNP cannot dodge responsibility. They broke the system. Now they want applause for discounting it.

Scots should see this £2 fare cap for what it really is: an election bribe designed to distract from years of failure.