Everyone should have the freedom to fly

Monday February 16, 2009

Suzy Dean, co-founder of Modern Movement, sees through the environmental moralising about modern air travel

Last month, adventure holiday company, Activities Abroad, boasted that they could offer holidaymaker’s chav-free holidays by stopping individuals with names like Britney and Shannon from flying with their airline. In response, travel operator Travel Republic offered 10 percent discount on holiday bookings for anybody with one of the listed ‘chav’ names.

Aside from being a clever marketing gimmick from both companies, the chav/anti-chav holiday charade does tell us that perhaps the distaste for cheap flights is about more than saving the environment – it is as much about a dislike for the type of people taking advantage of cheap flights.

Far from celebrating the fact that so many people can fly cheaply today, there seems to be revulsion among some sections of society for the fact that this once said luxury is now available to the masses. Criticism of mass-flying has been aimed squarely at the less well off – who are likely to take a cheap flight – rather than just anybody who may be taking a flight.

This suggests that flying itself is not the problem, as environmental organisations such as Plane Stupid and Campaign Against Climate Change claim. Instead there is an unease with the fact that the common, uncouth, masses are spreading their wings and seeing the world.

Distain towards chavs has come not just from Activities Abroad but has been implicit in many of the messages from the eco-conscious middle classes; from Plane Stupid’s criticism that people are binge flying to get ‘loaded for a tenner’ to the mainstream demonisation of chav-mobil Ryanair as being “irresponsible”, as the UK Climate Change Minister Ian Pearson commented.

Increasingly, environmentalism is the prism through which social prejudices, most notably against ‘chavs’ are being filtered. This is not surprising; flying is an explicit expression of social mobility. The idea that the lower runs of society can now have the same opportunity to travel as the rest has been met with contempt.

Viewed as less deserving than the middle classes, the idea that the working class may have the chance to experience new things and enjoy a better standard of living has been met with snobbery.

Attacks on people who want to fly to go on ‘stag do’s’ is indicative of the fact that the type of people who fly are the problem, the ones who might go abroad to get drunk rather than broaden their horizons. The working class have been blamed for cheapening the experience of both flying and being abroad. Testament to that is the reporting each summer on the number of British tourists abroad that get arrested, despite being small in proportion to the total travelling, usually while in Costa del Sol or Malaga.

As Tom Hampson of the Fabien Society pointed out, the term chav suggests a degree of “class hatred” and is “deeply offensive to a largely voiceless group” yet it is banded around with ease. No more is this explicitly the case than in our broadsheets. Author Andrew O’Hagan, writing in the Telegraph, recalled his experience of being on a cheap flight with working class ‘chavs’:

“The breakfast places were piled with radioactive scrambled egg and heaps of carcinogenic sausages, but that didn’t stop people lining up with their buggies to buy them. Then you go downstairs and are kept waiting in some nylon-carpeted hellhole while a woman with a squeaky voice tells you she’s sorry for any inconvenience caused.”

O’Hagan talks about the degradation of air travel in terms of the type of people using it; those who eat a cooked breakfast, have kids and squeaky voices rather than by the quality of the airline itself. Similarly, Alistair Mclean, the managing director of Activities Abroad, argues that “everybody else in our society seems to take from us, whether it is incompetent bankers or the shell-suited urchins who haunt our street corners”, suggesting that the working class are an eyesore who should be out of sight.

Flying abroad was once a privilege that few could afford. There was a time when aristocrats complained about the middle classes affording the opportunity to fly. Today we have the middle classes complaining that the working class have the opportunity to fly. We should celebrate the fact that flying is now a cheap enough commodity that everybody can experience the world.

Furthermore, we should preserve people’s freedom to determine and define where and when they want to fly, away from the environmental moralising that seems to be taking place. Far from air travel by necessity, we should encourage it because it’s pleasurable – sometimes it broadens our mind but sometimes it simply relaxes us. This is something that no one section of society is more or less entitled to, it’s an individual choice.

Assaults on mass flying today are often dressed up in environmental clothing, but it doesn’t take much to see that behind the scientific jargon is a dislike of the fact that flying is now something that everybody can enjoy.

As Modern Movement argues, if you wanted to see the world a few generations ago, you’d have to have joined the navy. Now most of us can afford to go places that our grandparents could only have dreamed of. This is a freedom worth defending for everybody.

Suzy Dean is co-founder of Modern Movement.

Modern Movement will be running a demonstration on Thursday 19th February in support of the third runway at Heathrow. For more details please see:

Modern Movement