AVIATION BOSSES Willie Walsh and Michael O’Leary are unlikely bedfellows, but yesterday they united in calling for the scrapping of UK air passenger duties, claiming that they are discouraging millions from flying into and out of the United Kingdom.
Joined by the heads of Virgin Atlantic and Easyjet, the two rivals came together at the London Stock Exchange: Walsh dressed in a suit, carrying a briefcase; O’Leary in jeans and a jacket and sporting a Christmas coffee cup.
Air passenger duty on flights will this year raise £2.1 billion for the cash-strapped chancellor of the exchequer, George Osborne, but the airline bosses urged him to look behind the figure and see the damage inflicted on tourism and industry.
In the role of chairman, and controlling the only working microphone, Walsh, who now heads the International Airlines Group – the merger of British Airways and Iberia – highlighted his own long-standing battles with the Ryanair chief executive.
For good manners, Walsh occasionally implied that Easyjet’s Carolyn McCall and Steve Ridgeway from Virgin Atlantic were equal partners in the league of rivals, but the press publicity to be won came from the Walsh-O’Leary “face-off”, as everyone in the room knew.
“It is a critical issue that goes beyond the fierce rivalry, some might say hatred, that exists between the four of us at this table and that surely is the message: how often do you see four bitter rival who are often abusive towards one another – both personally and in business.”
“No, surely not,” interjected O’Leary, with a laugh, after he had earlier jested that there “isn’t much that we agree on. I think that British Airways’ prices are too high and he thinks Ryanair‘s service is too low”.
So far, Mr Osborne has refused to bow to the airlines’ demands, leading O’Leary to accuse him “of lacking courage and balls” and warning that the charges are cutting tourism jobs, “the very jobs that people get when they are starting off. I was a hotel porter, for God’s sake.”
The air passenger duty was introduced in 1994, but the real damage was done by Labour’s then chancellor and later prime minister Gordon Brown in 2006 when he seized on it as “a revenue-raising opportunity”, Walsh said. “Since that happened, it has driven down traffic. I am amazed the chancellor is perpetuating a failed policy of the former PM and former chancellor.”
O‘Leary said that Ireland had “stupidly” followed Brown before deciding this year to cut the duty to €3 per passenger. The Dutch had abandoned the tax after a year, because, while it raised more than €300 million, it cost the economy more than €1 billion.
Saying that UK airports have lost 29 million passengers as a result of the charge, O’Leary said that Mr Osborne has a choice, but so, too, do the airlines.
“If it is not reversed, we will continue to cut flights and cut traffic and the UK’s tourism jobs will be lost as a result,” insisted the Ryanair chief.
The two reacted with scorn when a Guardianjournalist wondered if the UK economy was better off having its citizens stay at home, rather than flying to Spain, with Walsh declaring that "holidays are a right, not a privilege".
" The Guardianmay take a view that people shouldn't have the opportunity to visit their friends, their relatives, to experience the value of a foreign holiday, to get away sometimes from the miserable weather we have here, but we believe that they do."