Photograph courtesy of Flickr user the hanner

British Airways flight 038 has absorbed the attention of newscasters this week. It crashed or, in pilot parlance, it required an emergency landing. At any rate, they’re all heroes now: the pilot, the cabin crew, all of them. A microphone has been directed at some passengers, allowing them to hold forth as they wish. Some of them complained. Mark Tamburo asked for tea and coffee and received get this bottled water. It felt like the staff were more interested in security than our wellbeing, he opined. (Those two variables aren’t as independent as he might think). We humour these people nonetheless.

Well, let’s stop being so bright and smug about all this. Until the relevant safety bodies have a report to deliver, this has approximately zero significance to anyone who wasn’t perched on one flying machine. Furthermore, it allows us to condone and even consecrate the most indolent and lax of reporting. We are dutifully informed that the disrupted feel disrupted. Soapboxes are provided to the brash and stupid. Concern is scratched onto hackish faces. Theories are banded about. Experts proselytise. This is lazy stuff, and sinister stuff at that.

The airline industry – which takes to calling itself a ‘service’ on occasions such as these – usually commands news bulletins only when there are ‘incidents’. ‘Incidents’ are unconnected and isolated, or so the journos tells us. The journos are culpable here: in a relentlessly dumb quest for the shiny and the sensational, many have vacated the struggle to slot ‘events’ into a more appropriate context.

I don’t hesitate to foreground British Airways for a turbulent spell of criticism, since it has always been both a paragon for, and a boil on, the airline business. Its self-satisfied jingoism was engraved into the corporation from its cheap and sordid beginnings: it is the successor of Imperial Airways, a racket for imperialists and colonialists alike. Since then, it has been a home for the Conservative Party and a test centre for its ideologies. It is easily forgotten that it was a Tory government that nationalised BA in 1939, and a Tory government that installed Lord King – a grubby acolyte of Saddam Hussein – to oversee its transition from public to private.

Lord King has been the recipient of adulation from the Conservative Party ever since he made British Airways “The World’s Favourite Airline”. He achieved this faux-cosmopolitanism by eliminating 23,000 jobs (he paid many workers out of their employment, thereby ‘costing the taxpayer’ – in that phrase beloved of the Right - £545 million). He then exploited the freedom of Britain’s markets by waging an in-house agitprop campaign against Richard Branson. He remained the company’s President – because life means life in Tory circles – until his demise in 2005.

The poisonous, rather than poisoned, chalice has now been handed to Wille Walsh: a bumptious mammal whose main occupation (as Bertie Ahern phrased it) is “shafting staff interests”. This isn’t entirely even-handed. Walsh shafts customer interests too, predominantly through the practice of surcharging fuel (and, finally, being aggressively fined for it). Repentance is one practice he has yet to dabble in. The illegal measures he has pursued were, he tells us, “a legitimate way of recovering costs”. British Airways have now set aside a £350 million slush fund for legal fees and fines. Guilty, much?

His company is led by vacuoles. They issue edicts against jewellery. They do not seat adult males next to unaccompanied children, since the outcome they foresee is child rape. They censor their films, notably the segment of Casino Royale that featured a cameo appearance from their old foe Richard Branson. (When grilled about this, a BA spokeswoman said the airline didn’t want to upset customers).

The Right has only ever had one slice of beef with British Airways, and that was Margaret Thatcher’s contempt for the new Delft pottery tailfin designs. “We fly the British flag, not those awful things”. It doesn’t surprise me overmuch that Mrs. Thatcher should utter such philistinisms, and it shouldn’t surprise you that she refers to the corporation in such a familiar fashion (“we”). British Airways has been a secret annex of the Conservative Party, and a conservatory for its fetid ideology, for decades – and this minor disaster is not remarked upon once, even when the downing of a plane might warrant talk of a ‘bigger picture’. In short, British Airways has accurately decoded and adumbrated insincere talk of ‘conservative individualism’. When the individual feels, the community reels. When the customer feels, the company reels. It’s an arrangement and a maxim that we can’t afford to tolerate.

Filed under: conservatives, robertstagg, socialjustice on January 20th, 2008