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Sky High Snobbery
Anatole Kaletsky launches an attack on the "left-wing radicals" who want to see air travel restricted with punitive taxes.
Kaletsky, a self-confessed "carbon criminal", probably had the Guardian's resident eco-loon George Monbiot in mind when he wrote his column. Last week, Monbiot stepped up his campaign against air travel, arguing "For the sake of the world's poor, we must keep the wealthy at home."
Back in 1999, Monbiot famously claimed that "flying across the Atlantic is now as unacceptable as child abuse." Monbiot must inhabit some strange circles.
Kaletsky complains that protestors continue to view the world through a Marxist prism. This obsolete outlook limits their range of solutions to a tax on air travel, which Kaletsky argues wouldn't work, to an outright ban on flying, which is too absurd to even consider. Instead, he says, they should pay more attention to carbon trading regimes and technological innovation, which will, it is hoped, make flying cleaner.
Indeed, he continues, they may not even care that much about the environment at all. Far left activists, he says, see air travel as a luxury of the prosperous. Like their comrades in the anti-hunting fraternity, the focus of their passion isn't so much the welfare of the planet or the pursued animal, but those who indulge their pleasures. Like Macaulay's Puritan, and his opposition to bear baiting, he isn't offended by the suffering of the bear so much as the pleasure of the spectators.
These new protest movements, he concludes, seem "primarily a way of expressing contempt for the rich and privileged, showing solidarity with the poor and downtrodden and creating an imaginary vanguard for a 21st-century version of Marxist class war."
Yes and no. EURSOC wouldn't dispute Kaletsky's hunch that many anti-air travel campaigners are driven by Marxist class hate - tellingly, it's always the London-New York link they affect to despise most. Not only is this the world's main road for money, it's also a link between the UK and the US, which bothers leftists no end. You never hear anyone comparing travel between London and Brussels to child abuse, do you?
And what about flights between London and the developing world? Many Londoners would be all-too-happy to see an end to flights between the UK and the religious schools of Pakistan, for example, but no Guardian columnist is ever going to attack this axis - even if third world aeroplanes are likely to be a lot more polluting than those that fly between the UK and New York.
However, where we think Kaletsky misses the point is where the growth in air travel is occuring. New technologies allow businessmen to cut out travel altogether: In a few years, you won't need to fly first class to JFK because videoconferencing brings the international boardroom to your office. You can live in a tent on a mountain and still run an international company via broadband and satellite communications - though George Monbiot has also praised the people of southern Ethiopia, who with their lack of electricity and mod cons seem so much happier than us, so broadband might be out too.
No, the real targets of the anti-air travel crusade are the cheap seat flyers. In the UK and Ireland alone, Easyjet and Ryanair have revolutionised air travel by reducing the price of seats to below-the-bargain-basement levels. Big airlines have seen their monopolies challenged, while in turn, governments have complained that national champion airlines are threatened by the upstarts. After 9/11, when air travel almost everywhere else declined, the low-cost airlines continued to do great business.
Your correspondent has flown from Dublin to Paris for a tenner, while millions of Brits and Irish families have used low-cost travel to sidestep the monopolistic big carriers and explore parts of Europe they previously had no chance of visiting. Tourists now fly out of Glasgow and Stanstead to Stockholm, Pisa, Carcassone and Warsaw, often for under £150 per family. Flyers fill seats as quickly as Easyjet and Ryanair open new routes, bringing tourist money and prosperity to destinations as far afield as southwest France and the Baltic states.
Anyone who's ever taken an Easyjet flight will remember the boozing lads, screaming kids in football shirts, grannies taking their first trip to "the continent", alongside second home owners, backpacking students and cost-cutting business travellers. All human life is there, in other words.
Stop low-cost air travel, and you'll definitely slow down some of the damage done to the enviroment. But you'll be hitting Europe's poor more than the rich.
The Economist recently argued that cheap flights have done more to foster understanding between young Europeans than any number of EU-driven cultural programmes. It's a truly democratic revolution, and for EURSOC, that's what worries the commenting classes far more than business class travel. Their disdain is the contempt of "the traveller" for the tourist heading to the Costa del Sol - little more than snobbery.
