The normally coy Ryanair laid its cards on the table today with a series of large - full page, in some cases - ads in the national press attacking the Government's breathtakingly unpopular doubling of Air Passenger Duty. This comes the day after the budget airline announced it had one million free flights to give away to passengers who wrote to 'Greedy Gordon' and complained about the rise.
That's even cheaper than getting an unlimited quantity at two-for-one, which was the going rate last week after Ryanair's site apparently suffered a glitch.
Anyway, cop an eyeful of the Greedy Gordon ad in the Telegraph, Mail, Guardian and elsewhere.
In an unrelated matter, the highly-publicised documentary Should I Give Up Flying? airs on BBC2 tonight. Should be interesting viewing.
Nathan Midgley, Travelweekly.co.uk
It isn't surprising; Ryanair's business model is based on cheap subsidised airports cheap flights are paid for by taxpayers across the EU. Why should non fliers subsidise fliers?
How can the considerable damage to the environment that flying causes and the incredibly low fares on offer, compared with similar trips by rail which has much smaller carbon footprint per passenger be justified? By subsidising airports that no one wants to go to (except for Ryanair and the other budget airlines) in remote parts of Europe, are we not subsidising global warming? Shouldn't the price of flights rise to match the economic cost of flying and the damage which that form of transport does to the environment?
Come on travel industry how do you sleep at night.
"Come on travel industry how do you sleep at night."
Simon, your arguments address the aviation industry, and specifically budget airlines. Let's at least allow the travel agents, rail operators, cruise companies, hoteliers &c &c a good night's sleep...
(And you didn't leave your URL!)
You raise some interesting questions Simon, and no-one in the travel industry denies that aviation has harmful effects on the environment. However, it is worth putting aviation’s environmental damage in proportion with the rest of the UK’s carbon footprint. According to sustainable tourism charity the Travel Foundation, aviation accounts for 5.5% of the UK’s emissions, while the energy industry accounts for 35%, the UK’s car habit 20% and people’s homes 15%.
The travel industry would hope that in the UK’s laudable bid to cut its overall carbon footprint, other more damaging sectors are also brought to account. However, it seems the Government is far to scared to take on the car lobby (which has also benefited from Government funded road projects) and has few concerns about the energy industry while the struggle to help home-owners become more environmentally friendly looks intensely arduous.
The travel industry is also aggrieved over how revenues earnt through the APD hike will be used. While Gordon Brown is happy to give the appearance that the additional money will be used to benefit the environment, he has in fact made no such pledge. His hiking of APD to get money which will be used to wage unpopular wars, increase red tape, throw at a failing NHS and create further costly initiatives within the European Union is the true crime that should scandalise us all.
It is such nonsense to imply that paying more taxes is somehow going to restore the already disturbed world climatic system. Greedy does not care about anything except being in power. To maintain this position he needs money to pay for his previous mistakes and misadventures. In future, he will need more and more, until (in the limit) all the resources in the country will be consumed to achieve absolutely nothing. Socialism does not and quite possibly can never be made to work. The absolute reason for this being that it is based on the flawed assumption that money exists as a finite resource, rather than something that needs to be created. Before any penny can properly exist it needs to be covered by its equivalent in goods or service of equal value.
It’s about time that people woke up and stopped swallowing all this spin and profile based lies. They are slowly leading us to a fascist state worse than anything Hitler could have dreamed up.
Thanks TJ... at least you managed to get your first sentence on topic.
So who pays for action on climate change? Is it up to businesses to invest in cleaner technology?