One of the best-known scenes from the TV series The Inbetweeners is the four angst-ridden teenage characters shouting abuse at people queueing at a bus stop. Only losers take the bus, is the point – except they use a much ruder word. There’s also a statement, misattributed to Margaret Thatcher, that any man over the age of 26 using a bus was a loser. This idea is deeply ingrained.

But when I was an MP it became obvious that there wasn’t the same stigma attached to jumping on the bus in London as there often was in other big cities. It often wound me up that the rest of the country was expected to accept a suboptimal public transport system – so much so that it could be joked that only losers would use it – while London retained its excellent bus service, which it ran under public control.

And I remember thinking: why can’t we have something like this at home in Liverpool? Well, last weekend Liverpool city region combined authority began to roll back the Thatcherite belief that private was all good, while public was all bad. For the first time in four decades, buses in the Liverpool city region have begun to be brought back under public........

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