Today I’m venting huge rage on behalf of myself and every other person who is finding it hard to get  emergency healthcare or go  hospital visiting for six of the next  eleven days.

This is because of  the recent cuts imposed to scheduled bus services by the Suffolk County Council’s discredited New Strategic Direction. (One of several  ‘difficult decisions’ endorsed  by all Conservative Suffolk County Councillors, whether front- or back-bench  at full council. Cynically, one wonders whether, never personally having had to rely on such services, they voted in the happy confidence that  they would never personally suffer from the impact ).

Thank you Cllr McGregor – the man behind these cuts.

Thank you, Suffolk’s Conservative county councillors  for voting them through without a murmur.

What does this imply:

Clearly only patients who know car drivers deserve to be visited!

Clearly only people who are car drivers  deserve to access emergency care at the Ipswich Riverside clinic.

And very clearly you’re expecting only people who are car drivers  to vote for you and your party!

Cllr McGregor has told us that his ‘demand responsive’  (DRT) alternative to scheduled buses is the ‘limousine  of services’ and a fitting and adequate replacement for the  scheduled services he’s cut.

Not on a bank holiday it isn’t. On a bank-holiday, as on a Sunday, or any evening, it is a non-existent service. This is because it is  impossible to get volunteers – even paid volunteers like those who operate the CATS service – to work on Sundays and evenings and Bank Holidays.

Good news for all the other services Suffolk County Council plans to divest to volunteers.

I hope that everybody who has been involved in this shoddy piece of  decision-making will be forced some time to experience for themselves  the difficulties that I and my daughter have been in today.  That is, the experience of being  an emergency hospital in-patient or relative with no option but to travel on foot or cycle or public transport.

And for that public transport to have been cut on an ideological whim without thought for the poor, the sick and the vulnerable.

Let them experience first hand one of their so-called  ‘difficult choices’ ! Maybe with personal experience of the trouble and harm they have caused to others,  they might then consider abandoning their discredited ideology the NSD,  that has turned its back on other  – less damaging ways – to make the required  savings.