You frequently hear the charge today that the social contract in Britain has broken down. And there is much evidence to support this accusation. The epidemic of shoplifting, the tacit acceptance of fare evasion, rampant mobile phone-snatching in the capital, and most seriously of all, the fragmentation of our once much-vaunted multicultural society into a hotch-potch of mutually-suspicious and resentful ethnic and religious groupings: empirical research and personal testimony points to a society undergoing a process of disintegration.
The demeanour of London bus drivers today perhaps reflects how fed up they are of having to deal with members of the public
For many people, nowhere is this development more evident than in the normalisation of incivility on public transport. According to a report issued this week, this is why the general public are now no longer using buses when possible. As an essay by the shadow transport secretary, Richard Holden, for the campaign group the Conservative Environment Network argues, increased and persistent levels of anti-social behaviour are driving people away from using buses altogether.
As he states: ‘More often than not this is not serious criminality, but rather the irritation caused by loud music, vaping and rowdy, inconsiderate behaviour – such as shoes on seats – all of which erode passengers’ sense of comfort and security’.
Referring to the ‘everyday reality of anti-social behaviour’ on buses, which rose by 24 per cent from 2024 to last year, Holden points to a 12 per cent decline in people using them over the past 20 years, a trend also aggravated by route cuts, reduced frequencies, unreliable services, a lack of visible staff patrols and dearth of real-time arrival information.
Most people who rely on our threadbare and sporadic bus network, particularly outside our big cities, will know what Holden is talking about. Great swathes of those who habitually use public transport in general will recognise these all-too-common displays of selfish and inconsiderate behaviour. They would no doubt like to add many more examples of their own, which support a consensus that using buses and trains these days has become an intolerable experience: fellow passengers incessantly talking loudly on mobile phones (the human brain is incapable of ignoring a dialogue in which it can only detect what one person is saying), playing videos and computer games, thoughtlessly leaving baggage on adjacent seats, and the omnipresence of surly and taciturn bus drivers – especially in London. The graffiti, begging and open drug-taking on the Underground hardly makes that option appealing either.
The now customary rudeness of bus operators in the capital is striking to me, as someone who habitually took these vehicles in the 1990s, when some routes still had conductors, yet also when those which were operated by one man didn’t have such consistently moody men behind the wheel. That change may reflect a particular London malaise, a place whose problems are overplayed by those who only get an impression of it via their social media feeds, but which has unquestionably got issues nonetheless. The demeanour of London bus drivers today perhaps reflects how fed up they are of having to deal with members of the public who now feel no compunction in behaving badly or insulting and abusing them.
The fact that all bus drivers now double up as fare-collectors, and that tap-in devices also perform this function, points to one reason for this societal fraying: the increased automation of everyday life and the withdrawal of a human presence in the customer and passenger experience. No-one is surprised that fare-dodging has risen exponentially at the same time that there are fewer staff from whom to purchase tickets, check fares, deter would-be evaders or collar those who push their way through gates. The same development in supermarkets, where self-service checkouts have replaced tills manned by people, has also enabled a rise in shoplifting, especially when the machines don’t work and when there are rows of empty tills designed to be manned but seemingly never are. Many customers also resent the unpaid labour they are expected to perform at automated tills.
Similar technological developments, most consequentially the now ubiquity of mobile phones, have also had a deleterious effect on behaviour. Their omnipresence has greatly aggravated a feeling alienation in society in general and the lessening of human interaction and basic decency on public transport in particular, with many passengers now cocooned in their own hermetically-sealed personal universe, unconcerned and unaware to the fate of their fellow human beings.
All such behaviour is indeed symptomatic of a breakdown in the social contract, a trend that the Labour government has done little to stem. We still await its crackdown on shoplifting and fare dodging, pressing matters of which we have heard nothing from our prime minister presumptive Andy Burnham. But it’s time he did speak up, because anti-social behaviour on buses and trains in Britain today is what broken windows were to New Yorkers in the 1990s: a deceptively simple indication that something is seriously amiss.
