THE BUS CONDUCTOR IN CHIEF DISCOVERS THE GREAT INJUSTICE OF FLYING — WHILE GOVERNMENT TAXES MAKE IT MORE EXPENSIVE.

 

 

 

You really couldn’t make it up.

Andy Burnham wants airlines to let children under 14 sit beside their parents for free and stop charging passengers for simple booking changes. Fine. Nobody sensible thinks families should be fleeced by ridiculous add-on fees.

But apparently we’re supposed to applaud this as some grand act of consumer liberation while the government turns the screws on the cost of flying through higher Air Passenger Duty.

The Treasury’s own assessment of the tax increases factors in people taking fewer flights. So the government is increasing the tax burden while explicitly accounting for the prospect that people will fly less.

And then along comes the political class, ready to pose as the champion of the hard-pressed holidaymaker because it wants airlines to stop charging parents extra to sit next to their own children.

Congratulations. You’ve made the booking process slightly less infuriating while making the actual holiday more expensive. What a triumph of joined-up thinking.

It’s the political equivalent of setting fire to someone’s wallet and then demanding a round of applause for finding them a fire extinguisher.

And let’s not pretend the wider drive towards net zero has nothing to do with the direction of travel. Aviation is being pushed towards decarbonisation through measures including the Sustainable Aviation Fuel mandate, while Air Passenger Duty adds another cost to flying.

If ministers want people to fly less for environmental reasons, have the honesty to defend that policy openly.

If they want ordinary families to enjoy an affordable holiday, visit relatives abroad or take their children somewhere beyond a wet fortnight in Britain, explain why government policy keeps adding to the bill.

What we don’t need is another politician posing for the cameras over airline admin charges while the bigger question of affordability gets buried beneath the publicity.

A few pounds saved on a seat-selection fee do not magically cancel out higher taxes on the flight itself.

This is modern political theatre in a nutshell: make the big costs harder to ignore, then announce a small concession as if you’ve personally rescued the nation.

Burnham can demand fairer treatment for passengers. That’s a perfectly legitimate argument.

But spare us the self-congratulation.

You don’t make flying affordable by celebrating cheaper seat selection while the taxman takes a bigger bite out of the ticket. That isn’t consumer protection. It’s political window-dressing at 35,000 feet.