This isn’t how investment works, no

One little factoid:

Local bus services in England still declining despite investment – report

National Audit Office questions viability of many routes, with half of all operator income from public subsidy

The thing that really grips our goat here is that idea that an operating subsidy is being called investment. It’s not investment, it’s an operating subsidy. It’s current spending upon current activities. What is being built with that money that will be of use in the future, to those future generations? Nothing - therefore it’s not investment.

But that’s railing at the general - now for the specific:

Operators took issue with the NAO’s claim that more routes were becoming commercially unviable. Graham Vidler, the chief executive of the Confederation of Passenger Transport, said: “With a level of public investment still low by European standards, passenger numbers outside London grew by 15% last year and 83% of customers said they were satisfied. We do not recognise the description of an industry with weakening commercial viability.”

The necessity - desire perhaps - for higher public subsidy is that very proof of the lack of commercial viability. Obviously. All rather looking from pig to man, from man to pig, when language becomes so violated. But then that’s rather the point in both cases. For only by this sort of obfuscation do they all gain access to our wallets.

Tim Worstall