Every passenger departing from a British airport has to pay a tax called air passenger duty. It was introduced with the justification that air transport is bad for the environment and therefore (sic) had to be taxed. It has now gone up to £11 for a flight to Europe and will go up to £12 next year; premium tickets on long-haul flights will pay as much as £170. Despite this cosmetic attempt to make it progressive in terms of distance travelled, it is a very stupid tax.
Air transport is the preferred target of the Green Stalinists*, who like telling other people how to run their lives, and of the Green puritans**, who are appalled at the idea of people doing things that they enjoy. Needless to say, there are also Green Stalinist Puritans.
Darren Johnson, from the Green Party, said it was a good thing if people were discouraged from flying. "We need to be increasing the air passenger duty," he said. "Aviation is simply not paying its way in terms of the environmental damage it causes."
Cheap air travel has had a tremendously positive effect on mobility in Europe, enabling millions of people of all ages to travel to other countries for all sorts of reasons, not only the cliché of stag parties in Riga. Nor are these travellers the stinking rich businesspeople of popular Green mythology, jetting ceaselessly around to further their international conspiracy against the working class. They are mostly perfectly ordinary people travelling on holiday, or to meet friends or lovers, or for study, or yes indeed for professional or business purposes – and why not?
I do not deny that air transport produces greenhouse gases; it is an unarguable fact of basic chemistry that burning kerosene will do so. But the extent to which air transport is responsible for overall climate change, and the extent to which it should be taxed, is another matter. The airline industry, from plane-makers to airlines to airport management, is acutely aware of environmental matters. Modern planes, not to mention the ones that will be used in the future, are not only quieter than the older ones but they produce less greenhouse gas. As it happens, I live in a city, I work at home, I rarely travel outside the city, and when I do I use public transport as I do not own a car (or even a driving licence). When I am sternly lectured about how my occasional flights are damaging the planet, I find it rather irksome.
If air travel is to be taxed, and if everything else is there seems to be no reason to exempt it, please can we have a little common sense in the debate? The idea of taxing airline fuel is barmy and has rightly been resisted. There is one very basic fact about aeroplanes: they can move around very easily and very quickly. If the UK were to tax fuel, airlines would simply refuel their planes in airports in other countries. What should be done – and easyJet support this option – is that instead of crudely taxing passengers, the airlines should be taxed on each flight that they make, with variations in the tax for the age of the plane and the passenger load. With computer records that are kept nowadays it should be quite easy to say that a flight from Barcelona to Liverpool in a certain make of plane, of a certain age, with say a 93% passenger load, will use X tonnes of fuel. It might even be possible to include in the calculation the actual flight path distance (though a nominal one could easily be assigned for each route) or even the actual quantity of fuel used on each flight. This system would place the tax in the airline’s overall accounting system, thus getting away from the very obvious fact that the UK-origin leg of a return flight costs a lot more than the flight to the UK does (bad for the country’s image) and it would encourage airlines to be fuel efficient in their choice of aircraft and in their efforts to fill their planes. easyJet supports this because it uses new planes and manages to fill them almost to capacity on every flight. It is the less efficient airlines that oppose such a tax.
*It is not often realised that Stalinism is a Great British Invention, having been invented by one O. Cromwell in the mid-seventeenth century.
** “The puritan hated bear baiting, not because it gave pain to the bear, but because it gave pleasure to the spectators.” Thomas Macaulay
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