I sincerely hope you’re not reading this on a holiday flight that’s sitting on the tarmac with no indication as to when it might take off – or a sad train home after your flight was suddenly cancelled. Brace for three-hour delays at security, we’re told; don’t even try checking bags in, and at worst, as happened to Tui passengers at Manchester who thought they were going to Kos, watch out for a text after you’ve boarded telling you you’re going nowhere at all.
How and why? When the pandemic set in, airlines and airports – thinking, not unreasonably, that their industry was doomed – made mass redundancies rather than keeping sufficient staff on furlough. Now the industry is 100,000 staff short (10,000 at Heathrow alone), labour is scarce everywhere, rehiring is delayed by ‘airside security pass’ checks, and the Unite union is rubbing its hands at the scale of wage offers needed to address the problem. And as pay surges, so holiday prices will become unaffordable to those already skewered by cost-of-living rises.
Should the industry have started rehiring months ago? Should transport ministers have made it easier for them to do so? Of course. But they didn’t – and this is beginning to look like the summer for a quiet, Spectator–reading staycation.
Nothing like the 1970s
‘How many of you actually remember the 1970s?’ the Prime Minister asked his cabinet last week. Few hands went up, we’re told. But mine certainly would have done. Because I’m sure I have a more vivid recall of that dismal decade than does the then short-trousered Johnson, ten years my junior.
I remember, for example, the ‘three-day week’ provoked by miners’ strikes that blighted my first winter at Oxford. I won’t forget the day in 1975 when my father said we had to move house because, even though he was a top City executive, raging inflation and punitive tax rates meant he could no longer afford the outgoings on our London flat; nor the week in November 1976 when I was on a junior bankers’ training course at the Bank of England while Labour’s Chancellor, Denis Healey, was busy at the Treasury negotiating an emergency rescue loan from the IMF.
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