Since its launch last year during the TIF Referendum debate, our campaign for free public transport has grown from strength to strength, last month receiving the much welcomed endorsement of the Trades Union representing FA Premiership football stars like Cristiano Ronaldo, Fernando Torres, Didier Drogba, Wayne Rooney and Robinho - the Professional Footballers' Association (PFA).

The PFA is the first national trades union to affiliate to our campaign and we are wanting to win the support of others in the future as our campaign grows. In the meantime local branches of the National Union of Teachers, National Union of Journalists, and UNITE have already affiliated, and we are wanting to add hundreds of other trades union branches and community organisations to this growing list in the month's ahead.

ALL public transport in Wales should be free and publicly-owned to face up to the "staggering challenges" of climate change, according to Dai Davies and Trish Law, the MP and AM (Welsh 'Assemby Member') for Blaenau Gwent, who insist that their plan of free public transport for all is no pipe dream, but costed and achievable.

They set out their strategy earlier this year, in a submission to the South East Wales Transport Alliance, a consortium of 10 councils in Wales's most densely populated area, in which Mr Davies said: "Far from costing the earth it would be saving the earth. It would also end the sort of isolation many of our communities and people face and would link everyone into the opportunity for jobs, links to culture, and links to other communities so vital for the well-being of us all."

Both of them gave examples, including the free public transport system at Hasselt in Belgium which ended congestion and transformed the local economy, free public transport in France and the completely joined-up and highly efficient system in Switzerland.

Mrs Law said: "A free, efficient, fully linked-up, public transport system would put Wales at the forefront of the sort of revolution in environmental thinking and sustainability that we simply have to grasp. We cannot afford to squander five or 10 years with a halfway house set of proposals which tinker with the challenges we face."

The Blaenau Gwent representatives claim their proposals would be self-financing. Among the ideas would be communally owned and run buses, scooters and electric vehicles linked directly to efficient bus and rail links. Mr Davies said: "Tinkering at the edges simply will not work.

Needless to say, the CfFPT totally endorses what Dai Davies and Trish Law are calling for in Wales, which is very much in keeping with what we are proposing for Greater Manchester.

Indeed, in the months ahead we hope to forge strong links with them and what they are doing in Wales, and with other free public transport campaigners in Scotland and elsewhere in the UK, to create a national campaign, the breadth of support for which, will make the achievement of what we are all fighting for all the more possible.

Manchester Blackley MP Graham Stringer, North West Green Party Euro-hopeful Peter Cranie, Atherton's Independent Councillor Norman Bradbury and GMITA (formerly the GMPTA) member and Community Action Party Cllr Jack Fagan, plus local public transport workers, members of Manchester Trades Council, the Green Party, Respect Party, the Labour Party, Community Action Party, Salford Left Forum, the Socialist Party, Socialist Workers Party and the recently formed Respect Youth organisation, were amongst the 50 participants in the Greater Manchester Campaign for Free Public Transport sponsored 'Open Public Transport Forum' on 26th March at the Mechanics Institute in city centre Manchester.

The Open Forum had been organised to discuss the future for public transport in Greater Manchester in the wake of the 4-1 rejection by voters of the £2.8billion TIF proposals which were to have been partly financed by a controversial peak time congestion charge.

The forum witnessed a very lively discussion involving a wide range of contributors. 

Peter Cranie, the main Green Party candidate in the North West in the forthcoming Euro elections was the first to make a contribution and announced that he now supported the policy of free public transport on a local level as opposed to the one he and other Greens had previously supported which called for public transport to be simpy "cheap and affordable". 

He said: ".. we've looked at this issue again recently and now think this is a policy we should support and run with" but spoke against the idea being extended to nationwide inter-city public transport believing this might add to overall carbon emissions by encouraging a huge take-up, precisely because it was free.

An account of what was said and proposed by others at the meeting can be found on our CfFPT Open Public Transport Forum Report page.

Local members of the UNISON trades union, which represents NHS and local Government workers, have reported to us that there is a motion from the Glasgow City Branch to this year's National Conference which calls for the union to "....commission research on the costs for a free public transport system across the UK, where appropriate in collaboration with the PCS union, as part of a campaign of public awareness of a policy that would be the modern, radical equivalent of the introduction of the NHS"

Well done Glasgow UNISON, this is exactly the sort of radical and imaginative proposal that we want the trades unions to take up.  

If you are a UNISON member, please raise this motion in your branch and encourage your delegates to support it at your National Conference.  Other trades unionists should try to push this proposal forward within their own union as well.

On Saturday 28th March, Greater Manchester CfFPT supporters took part in the 40,000 strong "Jobs, Justice, Climate" demonstration in London, which was organised to coincide with the G20 Summit being staged in the capital the following week.

The aim of the demonstration was to demand the leaders of the world's most important economies put tackling the plight of ordinary people and especially the world's poor, alongside the fight against climate change, at the top the political agenda at the Summit, rather than making them the victims of the financial crisis and failing economic system internationally.

Our campaign banner (pictured above) and political message where well received by the G20 demonstrators, being very much in keeping with the aims of the protest in relation to the fight against climate change and the redistribution of wealth in favour of ordinary working people and the least well off.

On Saturday 7th March the CfFPT staged an open air meeting in Eccles town centre to help build support for the CfFPT "Open Public Transport Forum" on the 26th March (see Report above) as well as to win support for the campaign's growing petition, which now has over 2500 signatories.

Amongst those participating in the event (see picture above) which was the second in our Greater Manchester campaign tour, were students from Salford University, members of UNISON, UNITE, and the NUJ.

Our next (third) Campaign tour destination is Rochdale on Saturday 18th April. We'll be meeting up at around 12.30pm at Rochdale Bus Station. If you can make it, why not catch up with us there?