LBC’s James O’Brien Slams Tory Cuts to Public Transport: ‘You Could Go To The Moon And Back 32 Times!’

LBC host James O’Brien unleashed on the Conservative Party after revelations that public transport routes cut since 2010 total a staggering 16 million miles.

Analysis by the i newspaper in late March found that since the Tories took power over 90 percent of bus services have been slashed by financially beleaguered councils in England, leaving millions without public transport. These cuts, the investigation found, have resulted in a total loss of 16 million miles of bus routes across the ten most affected regions.

Cities like Nottingham, Cumbria, and Portsmouth now offer only a fraction of the bus services they once did, with local officials attributing these reductions to decreases in funding from the central government.

During his show on Thursday the host blasted what he sees as a drastic erosion of public services essential to everyday life, repeatedly recontextualising the sheer distance of routes axed in disbelief. O’Brien did not hold back:

“[You could go] 32 times to the moon and back! You could go to the moon and back 32 times on the amount of bus routes [axed]… Obviously, you can’t catch a bus to the moon. Well, not yet, although I think, is Elon Musk working on it? Yeah, 32 times you could go to the moon and back… Mike says you could go around the world 666 times! That’s the number of the beast. That’s got me a little bit worried. So you could go from Land’s End to John O’Groats and back 9,558 times. And you thought buses weren’t interesting. You could go to the moon and back 32 times. Or you could go around the world, like Phineas Fogg, 666 times – give or take. And the Tories have axed it all.”

Watch above on LBC.