The media in general and the BBC in particular has lurched into full-on disaster mode for the better off. The overnight collapse of Flybe, because of a combination of a number of issues including the effects of Brexit (uncertainty, the subsequent collapse of sterling) and coronavirus, has been greeted, if that’s the right word, by the middle class ‘something-must-be-done’ brigade as a national disaster.
“And now we go to Newquay airport,” says the radio presenter, “Where there are normally three flights a day to London.” There are how many flights to London? There must be some trains, too. “Yes, there are but they cost four, sometimes five times as much as the plane.” All this is true and the problem, as things stand, is that it’s insoluble.
Then, a call from a businessman saying the government has to step in and, essentially subsidise these loss-making services and even run the services themselves, regardless of how much it costs. Almost a perverted version of socialism. An essential service for well-off people that must be preserved as a public service for well-off people.
At the heart of this is profit. Planes are run for profit, railways are run for profit, bus services are run for profit. When we refer to services, we do so in only the most general terms. FlyBe has been taken down by the market we have embraced so lovingly since ‘we’ put Margaret Thatcher in office in 1979, David Cameron in 2010, Theresa May in 2017 and now Boris Johnson in 2019. And I’ll wager that large numbers of passengers affected by the collapse of FlyBe are from that very demographic.
I’d guess that easyJet and Ryanair might pick up the profitable routes but there won’t be many of them. Moving to a new airport involves more than just flying in a plane. You also need to bring in ground crew, employ baggage handlers, check in staff and, if you store aircraft, even maintenance staff. And some of the routes operate small aircraft, far smaller than any of those used by easyJet and Ryanair. Low cost airlines make money by having flights as full as possible.
For decades – forever, I’ll suggest – we have had no meaningful public transport plan. We have left it all to private companies and some form of regulation. It is haphazard, there is little joined-up thinking and little cooperation. It’s a shambles.
Just imagine Boris Johnson’s government agreeing to subsidise business flights, but then not subsisting bus fares in sink estates? But hang on, that’s what happens anyway because aircraft do not attract fuel duty. That’s one reason why it’s so cheap to fly. All the talk on the radio was about poor rich people.
When a camera crew turns up and interviews soggy shoppers outside Lidl, sheltering from the rain, waiting for a bus that doesn’t come and bemoaning the failings of public transport, when media organisations actually realise that a bus is as luxurious as it gets for many people, I might have more sympathy for businessmen complaining about their cancelled flight from Newquay to London. Until, then.
