YOUR lead story on bus services ("Anger as bus axed", February 25) rightly raises an issue that all of Gloucestershire's citizens should be deeply concerned about.

A recent report by the Campaign for Better Transport highlighted the catastrophic cuts to rural bus services, with government austerity cuts again constituting an effective attack on the poor, the elderly and the disabled.

The facts are stark – with thousands of bus services abolished across the country due to around £80 millions of cuts since 2010, with £27 millions more cuts in the pipeline, and with local councils unable to subsidise these services at the required level because of craftily targeted central government cuts cynically designed to make it look as if local councils are the ones responsible for this decimation of local services.

These calculated attacks on local council services are ideologically driven, and not in any way an economic necessity.

They expose the government’s cynical disregard for the environment (with no buses, people of course have to use cars); or are we witnessing rural gentrification, designed to drive the poor and ordinary working people out of rural communities altogether?

Is this really what we're reduced to in the world’s fifth-richest country, where tax cuts for the rich and corporations take precedence over essential local services (and with obscenely rich corporations like Google paying a pittance in tax anyway)?

Non-aligned voters with a social conscience will have the opportunity in May’s local elections to register a vote for parties other than the Conservatives, in order to at least slow down their government’s scorched-earth attack on local services.

For all those who wish to live in a Gloucestershire that is humane and cares about the less fortunate, I strongly urge them to do so.

Dr Richard House

Stroud