IN 2007, the county council was promised funding of £62m: some was to be spent on extending and improving Oxford railway station with £47m earmarked for improvements to ease congestion on the A34.

This would have been the largest project of its kind in the history of Oxfordshire.

In June 2010 however, the new government abolished the Regional Transport Board, which was to oversee the project.

Well, luckily enough for the average MP, it doesn’t take very many brain cells to figure out that if you improve the quality of rail transport then more people will use it, which will result in less congestion on the roads.

The proposed new slip lanes and bus lanes on the A34 would also have improved safety as well as access into the north and south of the city.

And the reason for the cancellation? Nothing more original than the lame excuse of blaming the previous government for over-spending.

It’s the same old worn-out smokescreen used by each successive bunch of incompetent MPs – whenever they decide to cut essential funding they whine about the mismanagement of budgets by the previous lot.

So maybe we should cut funding a little closer to their hearts? We could start with the heavily subsidised 24-hour boozer in Westminster where they obviously spend a lot of time before coming up with bright ideas like this.

After all, decisions like this don’t really affect a PM who spends half the time riding round his constituency on a trendy mountain bike and the rest in a chauffeur-driven limo paid for, fuelled and taxed at our expense.

And where was he when contacted for comment? On an all-expenses-paid jaunt to Brussels no less.

Probably rubbing shoulders with all the other freeloaders involved in everything from deciding how much tax we pay to organising town twinning trips to places the average citizen neither knows of nor cares about.

Other important county MPs were no better equipped to offer valid reasons for continuing the misery of motorists in Oxfordshire.

Conservative MP for Henley John Howell was a true party parrot and mimicked his boss in blaming the last government while Conservative MP for Wantage Ed Vaizey would appear to have temporarily lost the use of his ears and therefore can’t respond to messages, thereby remaining mysteriously unavailable for comment.

I wonder how important this funding would be if either of these politicians had to use the A34 on a daily basis to and from their place of work?