I found myself enjoying some free bus rides yesterday. And no, I don’t have a concessionary bus pass – I’m not that old… yet – but our local Transport Museum here in Ipswich was having a vintage running day, with a collection of vintage buses operating three routes around the town. It all seemed somehow appropriate given the controversy over bus fares this week.

In choosing to freeze fuel duty whilst partially removing the fare cap on bus journeys, Rachel Reeves made a curious choice. Whilst yes, it will be popular with motorists, cheaper bus fares have been a boon to those outside major cities where the fare cap had little or no impact – in London, for example, the flat fare is £1.75. And, by shifting the financial incentives further towards cars, it hardly sends out a message that the Government is taking Net Zero seriously.

But it’s just another clumsy move by a a government which seems capable of little else, at least as far as the media are concerned. Even setting aside the inherent bias of much of the mainstream media though, an administration which came into power offering competence and integrity has burnt through quite a lot of credibility remarkably early in the piece. And, whilst the levels of incompetence and “sleaze” are minor compared to the chaotic shambles that was the Conservative government post-2019, expectations were rather higher.

Meanwhile, the Conservatives have, as many of us suspected would happen all along, picked Kemi Badenoch to be their new leader. It seems unlikely that she’ll survive long enough to fight a General Election given the fractiousness of the Party, and without a strong policy core, she may have to be opportunistic in her approach. And given her tendency to speak first and claim to have been misrepresented second, it could be interesting to watch. Not necessarily pretty, but interesting nonetheless.

Robert Saunders has written a fascinating piece on the challenges that she, and the party she leads, face in the coming years, and it’s well worth the read. His view, and I think it’s a fair one, is that the Conservatives need to work out what they believe in and build some policy that might credibly deliver that. I’d add to that the need to rediscover unity, a task made more challenging by electing a leader with such a low level of support amongst the Parliamentary Party. And with a plethora of competing groups espousing competing and often contradictory approaches, Kemi’s silence on policy issues risks leaving a vacuum for others to fill.

All this does leave Labour some time to deliver something which might claw back public support but it also offers a space for us to influence the debate. Of course, as the third party, we do need to be a bit opportunistic too, but it would be nice if we could demonstrate something a bit more than being “nice” or “vaguely likeable”. We can, and should, be offering a truly liberal option to voters, as if we’re not doing it, nobody else will. And, with voters clearly shopping around for a party they can trust, standing for something philosophically coherent might just be a draw.

And finally, given that there’s the small matter of a US Presidential election coming up, I thought that I ought to mark the election of the first woman of colour to Congress sixty years ago yesterday. The Associated Press covered the news:

The major victory was the election of the first woman from the newest state – Hawaii – Mrs Patsy Takemoto Mink, a 37-year-old lawyer-state legislator. she is the only newcomer to join the ranks of women in Congress.

The new face – and a pretty one it is – will be that of the first woman of Oriental ancestry to serve in Congress.

The shapely Congresswoman-elect is well-known in Hawaii for her work in the legislature when the state was still a territory. She is a Democrat.

We’ve come on a fair bit since then, thanks heavens. Let’s hope that Kamala Harris can come through, and keep the madness of Trump at bay…

* Mark Valladares is the Monday Editor of Liberal Democrat Voice.