Revisiting the Better Buses for Greater Manchester campaign

 I first became involved with the Better Buses for Greater Manchester campaign in late 2018. 

I'd become aware of the campaign via Twitter, but hadn't made it to their first meeting in Manchester because I'd got cold feet about going to it. I hadn't been sure what to expect and, anyway, it was horrible weather that night and I didn't feel very inspired at the prospect of traipsing into central Manchester on the 192.

Thankfully, hundreds of other people made the opposite choice and attended.

That first meeting was filmed and shown as part of the Association of British Commuters documentary The Fight for Greater Manchester's Buses, which you can watch below.

A few months later, I joined Pascale Robinson and a number of other activists in St Peter's Square to drum up numbers for Better Buses for Greater Manchester's petition to have the buses taken back into public control. I had originally planned to go in order to write about them but, inevitably, I was always going to be in the activist rather than journalist camp. 

It has been the continuous theme of my work as a journalist writing about BB4GM that I have been writing from within, not objectively, in the main and - given the remit of the publications who accepted my work - this felt highly appropriate at the time. 

I wrote up the experience in St Peter's Square as part of my piece for Four Goods which, thankfully, is still up online. I then went on to write about Ellie Harrison's Bus Regulation: The Musical for the New Statesman's Cities blog, City Metric, which was my first piece for them under editor Jonn Elledge. City Metric shuttered at some point during the pandemic, so you can't find my article online anymore but you can watch the Manchester edition (and it's sibling productions in other cities) online.

Over the next week I intend to re-publish some of the campaigning journalism about bus re-regulation that I wrote between 2019 and 2021. Not because I intend to stop talking about the reality of bus re-regulation in 2025, but because I think it's worth stopping to remind myself and others of why we wanted re-regulation in the first place.