Moor Lane Bus Station: Public transport facility or commerical money spinner? MRS B Stuart of Bromley Cross (Your Views, July 10) is only too correct about the private transport operators running our so-called public transport services, and doing very nicely out of it too.

However, I very much hope she is wrong in saying that re-regulation (let's call it what it is -- re-nationalisation) is a foreign word to the three-year-old Blair administration.

What hamstrung an incoming Labour Government was:

The vicious determination of John Major's discredited lot to get the whole transport set-up in private hands before they were forced out of office -- the people didn't want it, but the Tories did;

Unfortunately it was legally done, and countless thousands of people with a bob or two were inveigled into buying cheap shares they could re-sell at a quick profit. Ergo, most shares are now in very few private hands.

An incoming Labour Government had, and still has, a whole raft of priorities to tend to -- they've been in power only one sixth of the time the Thatcher-Major disaster period ran. There was never going to be enough in Gordon Brown's purse to buy out the shares of the greedy people who bought into rail and bus franchises, people who weren't bothered to look further than their snouts.

I was one of many railwaymen who tried so hard since before two general elections ago to warn people of what Mrs Stuart is fulminating about now. It needn't have happened, big business notwithstanding. Old Labour, New Labour? No Mrs Stuart, the Tories bought you this grief. Go and see John Walsh.

Douglas Darroch

Birtenshaw Crescent

Bromley Cross