I think in hindsight there’s always been an interest in transport. I grew up in London, so I was very lucky with the access I had; it was just the norm. You could buy a travelcard at every single newsagent in London, so you’d just go and get one. Then I left London in 1998 and moved to Nottingham. I saw them building the whole of the first tram line, which was so exciting. And just before I left, the council introduced the workplace parking levy. It was only after I left that I realised Nottingham was really pioneering, not only because of the trams, but because it was the first city in the UK to introduce the levy to fund it. It’s one of the few cities in the UK that kept its municipal bus company.

But really it was only when I moved to Scotland in 2008 that I spent more time on the national rail network. I was continually frustrated by the experience of having to change between different train companies.

Public transport in general is so important to meeting carbon reduction targets. It means we have to get this system working. We have to make it cheaper than driving. But the privatisation of the railways under John Major’s government made it more difficult. So, I started up a campaign called ‘Bring Back British Rail’. It was also about reminding younger people that the railways used to be in public ownership. Meanwhile, I was just incredibly frustrated with Glasgow’s public transport system, and I wanted to do something about that as well. I started a local campaign for integrated public transport — ‘Get Glasgow Moving’. We want a world-class, fully integrated, and affordable public transport network. We want the buses, the trains, and the subway to be planned and coordinated, to work together as part of one system.

Then the musical came along in 2019. I’d just heard about the ‘Better Buses for Greater Manchester’ campaign at that time, which was actually launched by We Own It. They got funding to get a small campaign off the ground, to put pressure on Andy Burnham to make sure that he re-regulated the buses, which would then put pressure on the other city regions. We saw that if that happened in Manchester, it would really help us in Glasgow as well.

I think that if a lot of younger people aren’t turning to cars, then they’ll have expectations for public transport to provide the services that they need, which is good. You need higher expectations to actually put pressure on politicians to improve.

In just about every other country in continental Europe, they take for granted the sorts of things we are asking for; the sort of transport system that in Germany or Holland is just taken as standard. In Zurich city region, which covers a massive area around the city and lots of rural areas, every village is guaranteed by law, as a statute and a duty, a bus service at least every hour. The smallest village gets a bus service every hour, and then the frequencies go up as the settlements get bigger.

The point I’m trying to make in the musical is that we were nearly there in Britain, as a result of the Passenger Transport Executives, which were created when Barbara Castle was transport minister. In 1968, she introduced the Transport Act, and bam, the entire public transport system was integrated. By the early eighties the buses were all painted the same colour, and it was all coordinated. Then you had the cheap fares policy as well.

Exactly. So, it’s just getting there, then it just gets absolutely destroyed. Completely ideologically. In 1986 the Tories tried to create a market in buses. It was successful in that there were lots of new companies, but, of course, nobody was coordinating public transport, which meant you didn’t have a working system anymore.

In my book The Glasgow Effect I tried to make the connection between class and carbon footprint, particularly around transport, and [show] that it is wealthier people who are travelling the longest distances, so they’re the ones who need to change their lifestyles. Gustavo Petro, who’s now the president of Colombia, said: ‘A civilised society is not one where the poor have cars. It’s where the rich ride public transportation.’ That’s what all my campaigning is based around.