The price of privatising airports in the UK

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If you are flying off on holiday the airport is now, in all probability, the worst part of the experience (except the flight!).  Profit is the motivation of the airport management, rather than security. Misery is the result.

1. More than half UK international airports lack free drinking water. Water fountains have been removed, forcing travellers to buy expensive bottled water instead. As people have wised up to the rules and brought empty plastic bottles through security, the airports started to remove or hide their water fountains.  Where water fountains still exist the water barely dribbles out, raising the suspicion that the water pressure has been set deliberately low.

2. So- called  ‘Dutyree’ is a rip- off

A survey this week of retailers in Heathrow by price comparison site PriceSpy found that a Samsung S7 phone in the Samsung store was £559; on Amazon it was £452. A Fitbit selling for £134.99 at Dixons, was £128 in Debenhams. A £319 Sony Camera at its Heathrow shop was £309 at Argos. This should come as no surprise, given the extraordinary rents retailers must pay to be in the airports.

3. The insanely bad currency rates

One airport, Cardiff, is offering just 88 cents for every $1 of a holidaymaker’s cash. Given that the market rate is around €1.11 to £1, it means the exchange bureau is pocketing around a 20% profit. Even the big names, such as Moneycorp and Travelex, will take a 10-12% cut.

4. The VAT trick
When you are forced to show your boarding pass at the till – with the implication that it is a legal requirement – the truth is that it is merely so that the shop can pocket the VAT on purchases made by customers flying to non-EU destinations. Boots and WH Smith now promise to hand the VAT back on purchases over £5-£6, but other retailers carry on regardless.

5. Charging for wifi
Manchester airport actually crows about the fact that it has extended its free wifi from 30 minutes to one hour, before then stinging you for £5 an hour. In Amsterdam, Copenhagen, Dublin, Frankfurt, Istanbul, Munich, Paris, Rome (the list goes on and on), airports give free unlimited access. Not in Britain.

6. Inadequate seating
It is evidently a far more profitable use of the precious floor space for a maze of over-priced shops than giving passengers sufficient seating.

7. The drop-off/pick-up charge
At one airport a brief pause while picking someone up costs £3 for 10 minutes, then £1 a minute thereafter.  All this for foreign owned companies operating airports.  Nothing is now owned by the British taxpayer.  (adapted from an article in The Guardian, 5 August 2017 by Patrick Collinson).

Why do we have to endure all this?  Because the government, which used to run it all, decided to privatise it.  Who benefits?  Well, it is not the travelling citizen.  Could it be associated with any possible corrupt goings-on in the murky world of political funding, or simply neoliberalism run riot?  Is there another government in another country quite so ideological and quite so stupid?  Epicurus, who advocated moderation, would have concluded that we have gone crazy.

 

When will we stop kow-towing to the abominable Saudi regime?

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Kosovo has become a hotbed of Islamist extremism.  The tiny Balkan country, whose population is largely comprised of Muslim ethnic Albanians, is studded with mosques that preach the Salafist strain of militant Islam, shared by al-Qa’eda and Isis. Hundreds of Kosovars have gone to Syria and Iraq to join extremist groups. Yet Kosovars also admire the US. There’s a statue of Bill Clinton in the capital, Priština, a mark of gratitude for the 1999 Nato bombing campaign that drove Serbian forces out of Kosovo, and resulted in it gaining independence from Serb-dominated Yugoslavia, of which it was formerly a province.

So why are so many Kosovars being radicalised? The short answer is Saudi Arabia: it has poured money into Kosovo, spreading its radical version of Islam by building schools and mosques and importing Salafist clerics. In a few short years, previously secular Kosovo “was transformed into a Salafist stronghold in Europe”. Muslims in Kosovo had been barely observant for centuries, and “their ignorance about Islam made them more vulnerable to indoctrination”. Now the imam in Priština’s largest mosque is facing prosecution for promoting jihad. Many have already done so. “The threat they pose extends beyond Kosovo’s borders.” (Krsto Lazarevic, Die Welt, Berlin)

I mostly comment on American. and British affairs, but I have an interest in Kosovo, having spent time there in 1965.  At that time it was like stepping back 500 years. The wagons had solid wooden wheels and the houses had straw roofs, upon which storks nested. The inhabitants, were helpful, open and friendly, if dreadfully poor, and only the presence of mosques betrayed the fact that they were nominally moslem.  Now the Wahabis have apparently subverted them.

Saudis are a menace. We bow before them because of their oil, but my personal experience of Saudi Arabia, as a result of visiting on business (oh, dear!)  is of a prevailing arrogance and spoiled ignorance.  No, we are limited in what we can do about the Saudis while oil  remains king. But all decent people should get on board with climate change and return the Saudis to tents and camel trains.

 

Poverty and old age

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The New York Times of February 24th carried an article about behavioural economics. The article states that since defined- benefit pensions disappeared in the private sector, only 40% of American families in the bottom half of the income distribution have any form of retirement savings plan. Even among those who do have a plan, their total savings are, on average, $40,000. They don’t save because they have no money to save. Of all the advanced economies, the US had the worst poverty rate and the worst infant mortality, obesity and diabetes rates. The death rate from drug overdoses among young white adults is as high as the death rate used to be of AIDS at its peak. Government savings schemes haven’t worked, nor has making saving simpler.  (Based on a New York Times article)

Epicurus might well judge this situation, in an otherwise rich country, to be a disgrace. There are those who say the government’s role is to reduce dependence on public support, and that the poor should “get on their bikes”, find a proper job , and support their families. The fact is that under current conditions, with wages falling or stagnant,  any incentive to save for old age is overwhelmed by the need for food on the table this week. What is needed is a living wage that gives poor people the opportunity to make choices. One of those choices would be to save for retirement. This is absolutely not the message that resonates with corporations, their political hangers- on, or the heartless religious Right.

How can anyone justify this or think it acceptable?   Historically,  one could, not unreasonably, forecast an eventual uprising and violence, given desperation and the obscene number of guns owned by the public.  The reader will probably think this to be alarmist, but the French and Russian revolutions came as a surprise to the super-rich in both countries, spurred by such desperation and a non-responsive elite.   In America? Well, I believe in moderation, and hope Congress, before they vote their backers even more riches, stops and ponders history.  A dystopian point of view, I know, and I apologise, but historians are there partly to point out parallels.  This cannot – will not – go on indefinitely.

Walt Whitman on the Democratic Party

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Nowadays it is the Democrats who are (ahem!) the high- minded crowd, compared with their competition, the Republicans. Times change. This is Whitman ‘s take on the Democratic Party Convention in the US in the 1850s:

“The members who composed it were, seven-eights of them, the meanest kind of bawling and blowing office-holders, office- seekers, pimps, malignants, conspirators, murderers, fancy- men, custom house clerks, contractors, kept-editors, spaniels well-trained to carry and fetch, jobbers, infidels, terrorist, mail-riflers, slave-catchers, duellists, carriers of secret weapons, deaf men, pimpled men, scarr’d inside with vile disease, gaudy outside with gold chains made from people’s money and harlots’ money twisted together; crawling, serpentine men, the lousy combings and born freedom-sellers of the earth. And whence came they? From back yards and bar-rooms; from out of the customs-houses, marshals’ offices, post offices and gambling hells; from the President’s house, the jail, the station-house; from un-named by-places, where devilish disunion was hatch’d at midnight.

“Such, I say, formed…the entire personnel, the atmosphere, nutriment and chyle of our municipal, State, and national politics – substantially. permeating, handling, deciding and wielding everything – legislation, nominations, elections, “public sentiment” etc, while the great mass of the people, farmers, mechanics and traders, were helpless in their gripe”.

Like Epicurus, Whitman seemed to have a thing about politicians.  We no longer have writers who have the command of English that enables them to  pour out such vivid vitriol onto paper. However, were he alive today Whitman might have admitted that Democrats had become a much more respectable lot, if somewhat devoid of effective ideas to regain power, and would turn his attention, shall we say, elsewhere.  American political life has not changed that much.  Lack of lnowledge seems to be power.

Winning by exhausting the opposition

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This has never previously been seen anywhere else, and in any era, and is truly historic: subversion- by- exhaustion.

I refer to the White House strategy of disgusting and exasperating all normal, decent supporters of thoughtful, informed and grown-up government, with the objective of getting them to stop paying attention to the daily, endless, infuriating and stressful American news. The succession of tweets and leaks, ad hominem attacks, bullying and ignorant comments remove all oxygen from public discourse. Responsible opposition is rendered ineffective and falls upon deaf ears. Tweet by tweet people are stopping paying attention, and are reading a book instead. Public servants are already demoralized. The objective? The sidelining of the Constitution, the end of checks and balances and the introduction of a Putinesque grabitariat.

Watch carefully as Trump subverts a whole country, not by military coup or even economic cataclysm, but by sheer disgust. Steve Bannon- no fool – is winning. We are witnesses to a clever and sophisticated strategy.  Only his own Party can stop this. Will they?

Epicureans believe in peace and calm and the reduction of stress. It is for this reason that Epicurus disdained party politics. But is this instance we cannot stand back and shrug our shoulders. We have to hold our noses and keep opposing. Let academics sniff at Epicureans who follow and discuss the political news. So be it.