The last few weeks and months have some of the gloomiest economic news, certainly since the 1970s and probably in my whole lifetime. I suppose that, for someone of my age and background, this is all a much bigger shock than all those crises in years gone by.

In those days, the unions met Harold Wilson or Ted Heath over beer and sandwiches at Number 10, and everybody got used to the idea that Britain had been pretty much of a disaster area since the War and that unless we all pulled our collective socks up we were on the road to perdition.

Somehow, this has all come as much more of a shock: what happened to all those supply side reforms of the 1980s and 1990s? Weren’t they supposed to have turned us from the Sick Man of Europe into an economic powerhouse? There was all that inward investment, in new high tech plants and all those billions spent on retraining. Surely a few bankers lending too much money couldn’t wreck all that, could it?

Well, depending on who you listen to, apparently either the transformation didn’t really happen at all, or if it did it has all been squandered again over the last 10 years, or in fact it was the transformation itself that was to blame and we should go back to having fantastically inefficient car builders called British Leyland and coal mines and huge steel works that make a loss, all in the name of keeping the unemployment figures down.

Anway, this is all rather a long-winded way of saying that it has all been a bit of a shock for many of us, and we don’t quite know what’s going to happen next (“is it the plague of frogs that comes after the swine flu, George, or the locusts now, with the frogs next month?”).

The immediate future, therefore, is looking pretty grim – and I tend to follow the logic of those who say that recovering from this lot is going to be a long job, and won’t really come right for three or four years at least.

For those of us in transport, it is pretty clear that whatever party has been going on for the last few years is coming to a fairly rapid end. The sort of publicly funded (or guaranteed) splurge of investment that has been going on over the past decade or so is almost certain to be cut back, or stopped altogether. The huge sums of ongoing subsidy that have been poured into transport services will also be subject to critical review, and in that phrase beloved of all politicians at the moment, “tough choices will have to be made”. Which in our industry is shorthand for higher fares or service cuts or both.

And all this even though by common consent there is much more work to do, especially in the context of equipping our public transport industries to carry large increases in demand that will follow serious action to tackle climate change.

For anybody who has studied the history of our industry, there is going to be a certain eerie familiarity about the statements and exhortations we are going to be subjected to over the next few years. The need for efficiency and belt tightening, all pulling together for the sake of the industry, and the need to recognise that there are many other calls on the public purse, and that we cannot necessarily afford everything you need, desirable though it may be, and so on and so forth.

Which reminds me, just in passing, that one of the other problems of today’s crisis compared with the those of our youth is that in those days we did (perhaps naively) believe in the competence and good faith of at least some of our political leaders. I doubt that this is true of many people today – and quite how this will play out is anybody’s guess.

Back to those exhortations. Boring and familiar they may be, productive of cynicism they certainly will be, but sadly they will also be inescapable. Because the fact is, as Alistair Darling was known for reminding people in his days at Transport Secretary (and how he must now sigh and long for those halcyon days when we were all younger and quantitative easing sounding like something to reduce congestion on the M25), there are only two sources of funds for transport industry – the farepayer and the taxpayer. And if neither is willing or able to come up with the cash, then the project, service or whatever cannot happen.

As an industry, therefore, we should brace ourselves once more for austerity, and the spirit of make do and mend that kept our industries going in the 1950s and 1960s. Just thought I’d cheer you all up.