The Conservative Party has long been regarded as having a certain nostalgic, and some would say romantic, yearning for the past. I had no idea that this included a desire to drag us all back to the 19th Century:
Harsh new taxes on air travel, including a strict personal flight “allowance”, will be unveiled by the Conservatives tomorrow as part of a plan that would penalise business travellers, holidaymakers and the tourist industry.
The proposals, to be disclosed by George Osborne, the shadow chancellor, include levying VAT or fuel duty on domestic flights for the first time as part of a radical plan to tackle global warming.
The Conservatives will also suggest – most controversially of all – rationing individuals to as little as a single short-haul flight each year; any further journeys would attract progressively higher taxes, a leaked document entitled Greener Skies suggests.
Even if this is just policy-mongering, the fact that such proposals could even be considered is per se a megaphone-warning about the true nature of the Tories and their future likely conduct.
The mobility that has been afforded to people on relatively low incomes by cheap international air travel is one of the most productive and liberating benefits of this age. By declaring war on this, Cameron and his lickspittles show themselves to be not just opportunist but also disreputable and loathsome (as is anyone who either supports them or votes for them).
As for me, I will be unaffacted. I do not intend to hang around long enough to witness the huddled masses setting sail from Southampton to seek a better life in the free world. If (God forbid) Cameron does win power in the next election, I shall utilise my air travel ‘ration’ to purchase a one-way ticket out.
They are just trying out-green the reds.
The sooner this whole Green crap is jettisoned the better. I get into no end of arguments with people about why cheap flights = good.
What amazes me is how so many of the sheeple actually agree with this, that they would apparently give up the ability to fly anywhere in Europe for the price of a London taxi fare, all for Gaea.
Scary stuff.
How many A380 flights a year would that work out to? And why is Cameron trying to kill the market for the EU’s crowning technological achievement?
Rationing air travel? This isn’t conservatism it is COMMUNISM. What with B.liar’s crowd refusing passports to those who defy the “voluntary” ID card scam, how long will it be before Brits can claim asylum in the free world across the Atlantic?
Agreed, Thaddeus, I’ll follow on your heels! And my explanation why so many people are for curbing their own rights is, that tey are used to expecting the slashes to pass above their heads!
Well, there goes the rest of the remaining Tory vote in Scotland. (Scroll down if necessary)
But doesn’t air travel have roughly the same fuel consumption/passenger/mile as with cars?How is forcing people to stop flying and making them take the road instead going to help?
Now you just have to look for the personal gain that someone like George Osborne or Steve Hilton stand to make from this – in the recent Open Source announcement they ‘forget’ to mention that Mr Hilton’s partner, Rachel Whetstone, is a senior Google UK executive. My immediate suspicion is that someone in CCHQ has invested heavily in Virgin Trains (note that they limit it to just domestic flights) or a rail contractor such as Jarvis.
Where is a reliable Al Queda suicide squad when you really need one?
When one’s ambition to be leader becomes so desperate that it exceeds one’s ability to think and act rationally, perhaps others might feel one is lacking sufficient worthiness.
Best regards
This is the future:
I pulled up at the checkpoint on the outskirts of town, waved down by the ever present uniforms.
“License, ID and travel permit please sir.” said the traffic warden after I’d wound down my window, his conspicuously armed friend wandering around my car and peering in the windows. “Travelling alone are we sir?”
“Yes, as it says on my permit.” I Reply. Travelling in general is frowned upon these days, but travelling alone in a car built to hold five is looked upon with the same disdain as injecting heroin in public.
“Says here you’re going to pick up you wife from hospital sir. Sick was she?” sneers the officer, his friend now using a mirror on a stick to check under the car.
I open my mouth, my reply forming itself before my brain can intervene. This, with hindsight, is where it all went wrong, a life destroyed because of a careless word. It was almost worth it to see the look on the officious little pricks face, I don’t think anyone has talked like that to him in a very long time. “Very, not that its any of your business. Can I go?” was my response to his disdain and what I got in return was “If you’d like to step out of the car sir, there are a couple of things we have to check.”
That was 2 years ago, as far as I know my wife is still waiting to be picked up…
Fin
Thats where we’re going, no travel without premission (unless of course you walk everywhere), every movement monitored, regulated and controlled. Usually by disgusting little bureaucrats who get their kick from making people miserable, and can manipulate the system to such a degree that revenge may mean being banged up for a totally fictitious crime. All perfectly legal of course because the system has been ‘abused’.
Its not those at the top who we have to worry most about when our country completes its transition to a totalitarian regime, its the little men with their clipboards and forms and rules. They’re the ones who can work magic with a monolithic bureacracy, and bend it to their will. All the poor sods who don’t really want to be paper pushers, form fillers, or grey men who don’t go out much and have a cat. They resent their jobs and take it out on whoever they come into contact with. We’ve all met them, we all know who they are. Imagine them with a gun and the ability to make you disappear for anything from a few days to a few years
This is where Cameron, Blair, et al, are taking us. Prompted by those empty cans who rattle at every Daily Mail headline, Guardian environmental crisis, and every shot from the air pistol of government scaremongering. It is not going to stop, there is nothing you can do to oppose it, the system will not allow it. I’m really shocked that everyone seems so surprised by the behaviour of politicians these days. Petition the Queen to dissolve parliament and start again from scratch. She can still do that can’t she?
Sorry to disappoint, but unless you’re an African, or a Muslim terrorist wanting to attend flight school, you will find it difficult to get in to the states.
Nick Kasoff
The Thug Report
Well you can always marry an American :p
Mandrill,
unless you walk everywhere as long as it isn’t in an urban area where you can be tracked by CCTV.
Nick Kasoff,
The US might not be far enough considering the noxious fumes that issue from the Gorifice these days. I suppose a flit would be a better bet than trying to blag my way into the inner party by learning their liturgy (I’m too old to re-program).
So the alternatives are sitting here with the prolefeed and the Victory gin ’till they come and get me or growing a fist-long beard, memorising a bit of the Koran and learning to fly (always wanted to be a pilot, anyway).
Goodbye Nick M! Hello Mustafa Kamel (a dromedary will soon be the only form of transport allowed anyway).
Thank you Thaddeus for a truly fucking depressing Sunday. I’ve really got the hump now. I’m now off to Sainsbury’s to buy as much air-freighted produce as I can.
Q: “What color is the sky in your world?”
A: “Green.”
There you have it, in a nut-shell.
Another piece of back of an envelope thinking from Dave and co.
Quite apart from stopping poorer people flying altogether, if this only one trip a year nonsense ever gets taken up, what happens to all those second and holiday homes that Brits own in places like Spain, Portugal, France, Italy etc.
This will cause a European housing market slump like they wouldn’t believe! Quite apart from the loss of revenue from our holiday spending, which many of those ccountries are reliant.
I thought Dave was against ID cards? They will be essential to check how many flights one has made a year!!
Can’t we all just get around this by jumping on a cheap train or boat and flying as many times as we like from, say, Dublin, Paris, Amsterdam or Brussels? I’m sure some enterprising capitalists will work out some sort of deal somehow.
Heathrow can be converted to a giant homeless shelter for all the people who’ve lost their jobs, or something.
F&W is predicting it will go down really well in Scotland and kill off any hope of a Tory revival there.
Since I would never vote for the lard faced loon anyway,this will not discourage me further,but doesn’t the idiot understand that once you start paying Dane Geld there is no end to it? The greens will drag him and the late Conservative party further down the paths of madness.
So RAB says “another piece of thinking from Cameron and Co.” Does he have any basis for the term “thinking”. I think the green moron has given his brain as a transplant organ, pity the poor b*****d who gets it.
If Mr Cameron really believes that man made C02 emissions are a problem (and, in spite of a certain C4 television programme, there are many scientists who believe this), he could support ending the regulations that hit nuclear power – for example the “planning process”. It is not in the interest of power company for its power station to malfunction (and it would be sued to bits if it did and hurt people) – and the regulations do not improve “health and safety” (rather the reverse).
This would mean that the new designs of nuclear power station (such as the one invented in this country but now bought by Toshiba of Japan – as the regulations meant there was no market for such things here) could be built – they tend to be a least twice as efficient as the old designs.
This would mean not only that gas and coal powered power stations would be outcompeted (“windfarms” offer only very limited amounts of unreliable power and, therefore, are of little importance), but that there would be power to “crack” sea water for hydrogen. This would mean, if electic cars prove inpractical, that hydrogen fuel cell technology cars could proceed.
But, no, Mr Cameron and his friends prefer gesture politics instead.
Cameron, a toff like many Greens, reminds me of the Duke of Wellington’s remark about the railways. The victor of Waterloo said he disapproved of railways as they encouraged the common people to move around.
This is the core of the issue, and one that I hope Labour could exploit. The Tories do not want the unwashed masses to travel. They want to return to the era, not of the 19th Century, but about 1955, when chaps and the gels could fly around in gleaming Stratocruisers or Comets, served chilled champagne, while the proles had to go to Skegness or, if they were really well behaved, take a day trip to Calais.
It is impossible to overstate just what a calculating wanker Cameron is. Vote for any party, please, but not the Tories. They must, as Thaddus and others have said in the past, be destroyed. If Cameron won, this shallow, not-terribly-bright man might get into his head the idea that his fuck the proles brand of Conservatism had been vindicated.
If Labour were not in thrall to the Green agenda, they would exploit this issue as a class one for all they were worth. Old-style socialists would be going on about “saving cheap flights for the workers” etc.
Canada had a Conservative party that was so bad , a new party was formed “The Reform Party”. A few years later the Conservatives won just 2 seats in the House of Commons, about 1990 this occurred. Since then the Reform Party and the rump of the Conservatives have joined forces again under a leader, Stephen Harper, who was number 2 in the original Reform Party. It looks like the old country needs to do something similar.
The concept of rationing flights is frightening in its implications.
On an on the subject of the title: at least in Sky Captains, a movie I rather enjoyed, you had Ms Jolie in a leather catsuit which is a damn site better than anything any Tory women could muster up.
This just rubs in exactly how completely disenfranchised we really are…
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sumptuary_law
Jonathan,
I was going to say something similar. You saved me the trouble and did it better than I would have done.
But it isn’t just Dave. Ever been to a dinner-party or something where somebody was wittering on about somewhere they’d been and how free from tourists it was? There are a lot of people who want travel to be made more exclusive.
To be honest, I could see Dave going further. I can imagine him dropping his monocle into a G&T whilst aboard a Zeppelin resulting in all manner of comedic misunderstandings with flappers.
Someone commented about the fuel efficiency of air-travel. Well, revenue passenger miles per gallon tripled in the US between 1971 and 2001. And stands at about 60. The A380 should get 80 and the 787 will probably be similarly efficient. Sorry, I’ve totally lost the link. Only bicycles are (arguably) as efficient but try getting from London to New York on one. If there is one industry that doesn’t deserve this opprobrium, it’s aviation.
To be honest, I could see Dave going further. I can imagine him dropping his monocle into a G&T whilst aboard a Zeppelin resulting in all manner of comedic misunderstandings with flappers.
Pardon me for coming into this thread late. I was busy eating immense amounts of meat and drinking rather aggressive red wine in a restaurant in St Jean Pied de Port, while the tables on either side of me got into some aggressively competitive renditions of Basque drinking songs, and then driving over the high Pyrenees across to Pamplona yesterday, and today I had to at least pretend to work.
I have been saying for a while that if a political party could genuinely convince me that they will not introduce ID cards and they meant it, they would get my vote. On the other hand, this is the sort of policy that makes me want to find a member of the Tory party and take them out and throttle them. We now have an ingrained ruling class that is completely separated from the rest of us like the Soviet nomenklatura. I think either Asia or perhaps even the E3 visa might beckon before too long.
Psst Michael.
I thought of you as soon as this thread opened up.
Do not, under any circumstances come back to the UK.
You have been branded a global Criminal my old son!
They have the photo’s !!!
Blair, Brown and Cameron are waiting at Heathrow to arrest you personally! Well, with appropriate backup and media coverage, whilst they wait to fly out to a Summit on Global warming in Fiji.
We in the resistance down here in Bristol (not as exotic as some of your recent locations, but nice enough) will willingly hide you out, If you make it out of the airport!
Better still buy a small viable country that we can come share with you. Then we can tell these maniacs to piss off!!!
RAB:
That can only be slightly more graceful than a spastic monkey attempting sexual congress with a greased football.
Is Sealand still for sale? Or maybe Kinakuta?
Somewhere is always for sale Sunfish.
And it looks, right now , that the UK is.
To blatent, self serving stupidity!
I just love the way these two comments turned up one after the other:
On an on the subject of the title: at least in Sky Captains, a movie I rather enjoyed, you had Ms Jolie in a leather catsuit which is a damn site better than anything any Tory women could muster up. Posted by Andrew Ian Dodge at March 12, 2007 10:31 AM
This just rubs in exactly how completely disenfranchised we really are… Posted by Phil A at March 12, 2007 10:33 AM
But on to business:
Nick M:The A380 should get 80 and the 787 will probably be similarly efficient.
I have often wondered if the £ cost of something is roughly proportional to the eventual energy cost. Not directly, as trains are efficient but very expensive, but indirectly. Think of where all the money goes. It goes, basically, on wages somewhere along the line. Engineers. Steelworkers, Ticket sales, drivers, admin, shareholders. All these people are paid. All then spend that money on energy – cars, heating, lighting and they consume goods that use energy. The footprint of a rail journey might actually be larger than the air journey…you might find there is some correlation between the true footprint and its cost.
Yes, air travel is cheaper because it has no fuel tax, but what does tax do but get paid to people who then spend it, dragging the country down in inefficiency. A tax-free flight may well result in less inefficient consumption than the highly taxed car journey or the over-manned rail trip.