The Covid-19 aviation bailout should benefit workers, not offshore billionaires

It is an unconscionable injustice that not only is our generation trashing the climate, but we are also landing future generations with huge financial debts to pay for that destruction. The UK needs a transition towards a green recovery, not dirty brown bailouts for tax-haven-based, fossil-fuelled billionaires and their corporations.

The aviation industry has been pleading with governments across the world to bail them out, as the fossil-fuel guzzling industry has plunged, Icarus-like, to earth. European flight capacity is down over 88 per cent and passenger figures for Heathrow airport were down 97 per cent.

British Airways has over 30,000 furloughed staff, 80 per cent of whose wages, up to a limit of £2,500 per month, are being paid by the taxpayer. This alone could create public debts of up to nearly £0.5bn. Tens of thousands of other airport, aviation and cruise industry corporations are likewise getting free state grants to pay up to 80 per cent of their staff wages.

But this is not enough for their owners. The industry is looking for additional billions of taxpayer bailouts to tide them over the crisis. Their political lobbyists have ensured that the papers are full of their pleading press releases, with almost zero mentions about climate destruction.

The chancellor, Rishi Sunak, said he would consider additional aviation bailouts on a case-by-case basis “only if all commercial avenues have been explored, including raising capital from existing investors”.

Yet the major opposition party spokespersons have attacked the chancellor for not caving into Branson et al sooner. The Labour shadow transport secretary, Jim McMahon, called on the government to intervene and save the jobs of Branson’s 3,150 Virgin Atlantic employees – roughly one third of the airline's workforce – after ministers refused to sign off a bailout package.

This call provoked praise from some quarters, including Telegraph columnist and political lobbyist Tom Harris, who described air pollution as “a necessary price to be paid for the benefit of generating wealth.”

They did not mention that this price included the 40,000 premature deaths every year in the UK from air pollution, almost exactly the current death toll from Covid-19.

A Labour spokesperson told The Times that they were committed to a green economy but "Job losses in the aviation industry and its supply chain are as devastating as they are in any other sector, and we will always put workers' interests first."

Meanwhile, the Liberal Democrats, not content with all their environmental U-turns whilst in coalition including backing fracking and the eye-wateringly expensive Hinkley Point nuclear plant, have also performed a devastating U-turn on aviation.

Their transport spokesperson, Sarah Olney, was elected on an anti-Heathrow expansion ticket in her Richmond Park constituency. Despite this, she has called for the Tory government to give even more billions in massive grants or dirt-cheap loans to the aviation billionaires and corporations, in addition to the billions being handed over in non-repayable furloughing grants.The Lib Dems failed to provide a comment to this column when asked to justify their stance, given their election manifesto was to reduce aviation demand and tackle corporate tax evasion.

Easyjet, whose major shareholder Stelios Haji-Ioannou lives in Monaco, has already been given a £600m bailout and Richard Branson, who lives in the British Virgin Islands, has been pleading for £500m for his ailing Virgin Atlantic airline, which operates about 20 per cent of the transatlantic flights from the UK to the US.

This is a Thatcherite coal industry moment.

While it was right to close down that climate destroying industry, it was wrong not to bail out the resulting unemployed coal-mining communities.

It is right not to bail out the climatically genocidal aviation tax-haven billionaires and corporations. It would be wrong not to support the unemployed aviation and cruise industry employees.

What is really needed is a Covid-19 green recovery, paying unemployed workers a living wage whilst they trained or were recruited for jobs in the zero-carbon economy that is needed if humanity and what is left of nature are to survive.

It is important to remember that 70 per cent of UK flights are undertaken by just 15 per cent of the population. Just 20% per cent of flights are taken by 1 per cent.

The billions of pounds that the three major UK parties want to squander by propping up an intensely destructive industry, which mainly serves Britain’s elite, should be invested instead, at this unique moment in history, in a new green economy that will protect, rather than destroy Britain’s future.

Scientists recently reported that within 50 years, up to 3 billion people may be living in countries where the temperatures will be literally incompatible with human life. Governments must stop seeking to return to “business as usual”.

Covid-19 is a terrible threat to a small percentage of the population, and we are right to protect them, but the climate crisis terrifyingly threatens all of us.

With a severe recession now on its way, it is absolutely crucial that the massive government borrowing from the next generation is invested in building a greener, cleaner, healthier Britain for all. There should be no priority to prop up zombie industries serving privileged elites.

The terrible loss of life from the Covid-19 crisis must serve as wake-up call to humanity. Our young people deserve protection, every bit as much as our elderly. The time to act is now.