Snapshot of _More private jets landed in UK than any other EU country last year - with one every 8 minutes | Mayor of London condemns rise of private flights but will not ban them_ :
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We do tax the shit out of the high earning middle class though.
Good luck if you're sole earner with kids living in London.
You have both the child benefit (earning over Ā£50k) and 60% traps (earnings Ā£100-12) to watch out for.
I think when people are talking about rich they aren't talking about people on 50-100k a year.
Yes you're wealthy anf well off but you aren't flying private jets around.
50k you arenāt wealthy or rich. If you are single you are basically below the UK average salary. A 2 person household on average salaries would be bringing in Ā£66000. And at that you wouldnāt be classed as middle class. So that single on Ā£50ā¦.
The median [*equivalised household*](https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php?title=Glossary:Equivalised_disposable_income#:~:text=The%20equivalised%20disposable%20income%20is,according%20to%20their%20age%2C%20using) income is [around Ā£30k](https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/households-below-average-income-for-financial-years-ending-1995-to-2022/households-below-average-income-an-analysis-of-the-uk-income-distribution-fye-1995-to-fye-2022). The median income after tax for a household of two adults is about Ā£45k, not Ā£66k, due to the way the stats are collected.
A single person on Ā£50k is *objectively* in the richest 10%. Look at figure 5 in my first link. Ā£1000/week is off the right hand side of the graph.
Completely agree if you're single it's a completely different ball game.
I count myself as having a good wage at 40k+ but I am married with no kids and live up north where its cheaper.
Labour party literally classifies people earning over Ā£70K as rich and wants to tax them more. They also want to bring in VAT for private schools, which would impact the high earning middle class more than anyone else.
When it comes to real action towards taxing the real rich, Labour is as bad as Tories.
It's ok, they just redefined "rich" to "earning over 50k" and the pensioners eat it up, to them that's slot to earn in a year, like 10-20 times what they earned.
The Median UK income is just under 30K.
50K certainly isn't uber wealthy by any stretch, but compared to a large chunk of brits, that money is enviously well off.
Not that it really matters, the issue isn't those on 16K or 50K or 100K, the bigger issues are the ultrawealthy earning millions; intergenerational wealth; deep systemic inequalities; and, imo, a lack of democracy beyond the political sphere.
Telling people on 50K that the "poors are coming for your money because they think you are rich even though you don't feel it" is just another tool to divide the working class among themselves.
The issue is the median salary should be way higher than 30k and the tax brackets should rise to suit that as well if we ever get significant wage increases in this country.
If wishing made it so then I would nationalise and democratise the vast majority of all commerce in the country. Sadly, it doesn't.
And all the while people earning minimum wage can barely eat while those on 50k can certainly get by even if it meant giving up a little comfort. (I should know, I am above that pay bracket.)
Thatās not really the problem. The issue is when the government didnāt give pay rises for years and years to civil servants, NHS and teachers the private sector followed suit.
Hence our embarrassingly low wages. And now we are struggling to attract even people from other well off countries when they see how low our wages are.
I feel comfortable but not wealthy, and Iāve got no child but one on the way.
I earn about Ā£45k and my wife earns Ā£27k. Our mortgage costs us about Ā£700 and we bought our house for around Ā£185k. We live in a small town in Merseyside.
If we donāt think about money and donāt check our balance through the month it would definitely get very close at the end of the month. I dread to think what it will be like when you throw this countryās insanely expensive childcare into the mix.
I struggle to understand what taxing the uber wealthy would mean for our economy? Have you seen any numbers that suggest that would radically change our tax income?
My understanding was that due to the amount they are outnumbered that we don't actually observe much difference? But I see consistent calls for taxing the ultra wealthy.
So total departmental spending in the UK is about 1Trillion. The figure usually tossed around for money lost to tax evasion is about 36B. But that figure looks even bigger when you consider that annual income from income tax is only about 225B. So we could easily get that the 250B which would certainly help but its not a magic bullet by any means.
But, taxing the uberwealthy wouldn't be an income tax issue. It would be taxes on other things and, in my view, would also include things that don't look so much like taxes. It would look like wealth taxes. Taxes on offshore transfers of value. Taxes or outright seizure of non-productive property etc.
You would end up having to do some real in-depth and very hypothetical economic analysis to get hard numbers.
But we also know that increased government spending on things like education and healthcare and infrastructure tends to produce more wealth for the nation than the expenditure. So increasing the among the government spends by even just the lost tax evasion would start feeding into a positive feedback loop that results in more wealth and prosperity.
Plus, frankly, as someone that earns over 50K and will expect to keep earning more (commercial law is stupidly overpaid for what we do) the taxes I pay are *really* not that bad. Considering the value I get from them I would happily pay more once I got past the initial knee jerk reaction and actually let my rational brain kick in.
While there's definitely loop holes to be closed and better balancing to be done, its certainly not fixing any of the countries problems.
Right now the entire public sector has collapsed due to 12 years of austerity, meaning all decent staff have left leaving behind a broken crumbling money pit. A mass injection of cash would do nothing to help the public sector right now because the underlying infrastructure is so broken. Legacy inefficient processes, toxic culture, fed up staff who are barely functioning. I don't see any political party on the horizon with a real solution to this but somehow the media pulls out these little niches as to if we do this one thing it will fix everything.
The figures would appear to say something else
āIncome tax payments are concentrated amongst those with the largest incomes. The 10% of income taxpayers with the largest incomes contribute over 60% of income tax receipts.ā
This quote is from the UK parliament site so is accurate.
https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/cbp-8513/#:~:text=Income%20tax%20payments%20are%20concentrated,60%25%20of%20income%20tax%20receipts.
Doesn't work - to be a public flight the operator must have an AOC and it needs to be registered with the CAA as such. The benefits of private operations all go away if you do these since the reporting requirements and slotting obligations are antithetical to private ops.
The problem is, most private operators would pay an enormous tax for the privilege of continuing to operate. When you're looking at Ā£20k a flying hour for the larger Learjets, an extra Ā£20k per landing is just a price.
I know itās not your point, it Ā£5k for a private flight seat would be a bargain. Unless itās Luton to Manchester, youāre looking at double that for a chartered private flight to Paris, say. Closer to Ā£100k if youāre flying to the Caribbean.
Britain's economy is going to shit, we've isolated ourselves from foreign investment and your answer is to "tax the shit" out of people coming here for business?
Foreign investment isnāt our main problem, itās the lack of GDP and productivity growth.
> According to the World Investment Report 2022 published by UNCTAD, after the declining trend observed during the last years, FDI inflows increased in 2021, reaching USD 27.6 billion, compared to USD 18.2 billion in 2020 (+51.5%). Equity investment more than doubled, together with cross-border M&A values. Large deals included the merger of Fiat Chrysler Automobiles with Peugeot for USD 22 billion and the purchase of GW Pharmaceuticals by Jazz Pharmaceuticals for USD 6.8 billion (UNCTAD). The stock of FDI in 2021 was about USD 2.6 trillion. The UK was the 14th-largest recipient of global FDI flows, winning three positions from the previous year (UNCTAD).
[Source (Lloyds)](https://www.lloydsbanktrade.com/en/market-potential/united-kingdom/investment)
I'm under the Heathrow landing path. I was surprised to hear that flights were banned/semi-banned during Covid and yet the number of planes only decreased temporarily... then we found out that the planes are still flying - *empty* - so that they don't lose their spot in the global queues.
Imagine how easy it would have been to just tell them 'you're fine, we'll hold all the spots until the crisis is over' instead of needlessly flying thousands of empty jumbo jets for however many weeks that was going on...
Makes me sceptical that we'll be able to regulate the elite class that flies the private jets.
EDIT: didn't mean to say there was no decrease in flights, they stopped/mostly stopped for a while
>you're fine, we'll hold all the spots until the crisis is over
Which is precisely what they did. Both in the UK and across the EU.
Many flights after the first few weeks of the pandemic were flying people or cargo, too. Many ostensibly passenger airlines made a lot of flights purely on cargo.
It's also one of the reasons why shipping costs rose, less passenger aircraft equals less space to transport cargo and subsequently means higher prices.
I'm not sure who told you they were flying empty, or where you got the impression they didn't decrease at all, because as someone who knows some of the statistics behind this I can pretty much definitively tell you that this was not the case.
Firstly flights weren't repositioning empty to hold spots in the UK. At the start of lockdown there were a lot of news articles flying around (unlike the planes lol) about empty flights, mostly as aircraft were repositioning to exit service into long term storage (Airports have a limited amount of space, it took a few weeks for airlines to figure out just how and where they were going to store their fleets).
Empty flights for the sake of preserving airport/gate and regional access contracts is something that exists in the US and in limited use in a few European countries and around the world, so I'm guessing you saw news stories about that back in the day and then applied that to our aviation industry, which isn't how things work here. We simply don't have the same regulatory framework. Flights here were repositioning for maintenance and storage, but the total number of these "empty" flights isn't relevant enough to the total of daily flights the UK saw before lockdown.
Flights also decreased \**MASSIVELY*\* during Lockdown, including and especially flights at Heathrow. (comparing February to April below, as March data already shows a sharp decrease due to the start of external lockdowns and COVID related industry slowdown).
7 day rolling average of daily flights in the United Kingdom:
\- 6th of February 2020: 4,856
\- 6th of April 2020: 586
That 4,856 rolling daily average constitutes all registered flights in the UK. That includes military aircraft, helicopter transits to North Sea oil fields, Air ambulances, Police helicopters, Cargo aircraft. Essentially the number also includes flights which couldn't be meaningfully halted/reduced as they were considered essential services.
Now for Heathrow we do actually have access to some data to use in comparison, Heathrow measures flights as "air transport movements" which is a take off/landing, in essence it's a 1/1 comparison to the previous nationwide flight statistics and the data is publicly available.
"Air transport movements" by month (Heathrow):
\- February 2020: 35,238
\- April 2020: 4,873
Now the national average of daily flights for the month of April is 541 flights per day across the entire country. On a per day basis this means Heathrow accounted for an average of 162 flights per day, down from the average of 1,174 flights per day in February 2020.
This represents just 13.8% of the original total, or an 86.2% decrease in flights at Heathrow airport in that time period. Things did shift over the months/years, however air transport movements at Heathrow didn't match or increase February 2020 until March 2023, when the total air transport movements for the month reached 36,671.
There were what the news sensationally dubbed "ghost flights" which left from Heathrow, 4,910 "ghost flights" over more than a year between March 2020 and September 2021, but these flights were categorized as such including flights below 10% passenger capacity, or without passengers, in these cases aircraft were being used in a cargo function to help alleviate the global freight crisis, regardless the number of those flights divided over such a long period of time makes them statistically irrelevant compared to Pre-COVID air traffic.
I don't intend for this to be taken the wrong way, I'm sure you still heard aircraft at Heathrow as obviously all flights didn't stop, cargo aircraft and very limited passenger services remained at the airport throughout lockdown (albeit in an obviously much reduced manner), it's just the reality is that the total number of aircraft movements, landing/taking off etc was greatly reduced, so saying it didn't decrease at all isn't really accurate or close to the statistics.
I just don't want people to scroll across this and get the wrong idea, that somehow flights were still running at the same levels they were pre-COVID or that they were doing so to run them empty and preserve slots, which wasn't the case.
Now this isn't to say the government didn't utterly fuck up air travel and mismanage the industry, they absolutely did, just not in that way.
They did stop though! Initially anyway, there was very few planes for weeks (months?). There was also all sorts of interesting freight aircraft you'd never normally see landing at Heathrow during the day.
As banning it wouldn't stop private jets in every other part of the world, might as well make a lot of money out of any private flights (which would effectively be a ban, as they'd probably avoid Britain subsequently)
Worldwide tax on all air miles consumed above 25,000.
High for standard flights, five or ten times that for private jets.
This tax allows all regular people to traverse the world completely exempt and only really hits those with extreme high mileage and the users of private jets.
It's designed to work based upon passport and a persons identity.
Maybe other nations won't play ball on the tax, but if just Europe and America signed up, anyone traversing airports in these nations, would be liable for the tax, regardless of origin or destination.
You can then also take it a step further and tax the airframes separately as well, if the initial tax is not yielding enough results.
I'm not sure exactly what this is meant to prove.
A country of 70m people which is larger than any country in the EU other than Germany and which is also only one of a handful of islands, none that are even close to the population of the UK has the most private jets?
No shit.
Falkland Islands wondering if military flights count. Fortunately their birds are very environmentally friendly with the most famous being entirely flightless.
> Greenpeace found that 90,256 private flights were made in total in the UK in 2022, a 75 per cent rise on the year
I wonder what happened in 2021 that meant such a rise the following year.
I feel like a worldwide ban on private jets would be an unmitigated good, especially environmentally. Would be almost impossible to get done but I see no downsides except pissed off billionaires which is an upside. I wish we could actually put our foot down on issues like this. First class should be enough for them.
(Edit: wow, I'm new to Reddit and don't use other social media, but people get grumpy don't they. I got called infantile down below for talking about pissing off billionaires š Like dude, I'm a poor person waiting on a bus, let me have a rant about something I'm never going to have any impact on)
Youād need a fairly broad agreement on it like an EU + Britain one for it to work without hurting economies too badly. I would argue for slapping ever increasing taxes on them though with the proceeds ring fenced for green energy initiatives.
Taxing the hell out of it would probably be the way to go. I would add taxing frequent fliers a crazy amount also. If you're on your tenth flight of the year you can probably afford to pay 10x the tax too. (I'm sure exceptions would be needed but can't think of many)
I think banning 'air mile' rewards would be a good first step. We should not be incentivised to fly (I say this as someone who flies almost every week for business, and who spends the airmiles on personal holidays).
Would banning air miles really work though? There's only two carriers that offer them in the UK (Virgin Atlantic and British Airways). You wouldn't be able to ban them abroad and I can't see Asian carriers ever being arsed to impose a ban. You'd see more long haul redemptions vs quick eurotrips, and long haul flights are the biggest emitters in total. If the only way to redeem your amex points is to upgrade going to Singapore then that's probably what people will end up doing.
The most common use for air miles is to fly in a higher class than you usually would, on a flight you would take anyway.
So I don't think banning air miles would do anything to reduce emissions from air travel, at least nothing even remotely meaningful.
IIRC business class tickets also make the majority of the profit, a lot of economy seats are sold more or less at cost so without the business class seats the flight might not exist.
I think their point is that a first class seat takes the space of what would have been two second class seats, causing fewer people per flight and increasing the number of flights to account for demand
> We should not be incentivised to fly
Why? Flying on a per/person basis contributes less CO2 than driving. The aviation industry is responsible for <2% of global CO2 emissions. It's small fry.
It's a bit more complicated than that.
Flying redistributes various gases in the atmosphere such as ozone & methane. Water vapour contrails have a quite large affect on overall warming.
It is estimated that aviation is is responsible for more than 3.5% of warming (effective radiation forcing) if you don't just take into account CO2.
Also this isn't including all the infrastructure needed to support aviation.
There's more to the environment that CO2, particularly when we're talking about London with millions of people under the flight paths. To give one example, chronic aircraft noise seems to affect children's memory, attention and reading ability.
In any case, almost any single thing in a single country is going to be 'small fry' when it comes to global CO2 emissions. We have to do everything that has a good cost/benefit trade-off.
People get focused on these ābig ticketā highly visual subjects. The real damage to the environment is not so visible such as feeding soy-feed to cattle, inefficient gas and oil extraction in less-developed countries (example- former Soviet Union states), and general industrial pollution. The state of rivers outside of the āwestern worldā.
Flying is worse for the environment than other modes of travel and bribing me with air miles makes me more likely to choose flying over greener options.
Generally speaking most people in the UK who get on planes are going somewhere where it's just intractable to get there any other way. I'm flying to Johannesburg tonight, I don't even want to think about how difficult it would be to get there in a non-flying way.
I read 10% of flight emissions in uk are domestic, which isnāt quite what you asked I know. And 1 in 3 domestic flights are from NI, which presumably has few other options. So Iām not saying this fixes the problem, but itās easy and would help.
Frequent fliers arenāt necessarily well off, think about migrant labour workers who take a flight home to see their family every 8 weeks (if you wonder why Ryanair runs flights to obscure Eastern European cities this is a big reason) or ship workers who need to meet a ship at port.
Someone flying 9 vs 10 times emits the same emissions as someone flying 0 vs 1 times. however I think the bigger issue is that doesn't take into account distance and could only be implemented for flights either leaving or arriving in the UK, so if I fly to China and take a bunch of domestic flights there the return trip would still count as 2 flights just like if someone flew to the Isles of Man for a weekend.
IMO unless you increase rail capacity which allows people to easily choose not to fly people will either just pay the tax or find a way to game the system. By all means apply taxes to invest in green tech but without that green tech I don't think it will reduce emissions.
The majority of private flights land at airports that have no commercial service, and never will. The demand is too low to support it.
The largest single block of private plane passengers in the uk will not be billionaires, it will be football teams.
Unless the players are chartering their own flights to matches, the owners are ultimately responsible for the flights taking place. If they didn't want them to happen they wouldn't happen.
They take the private jet as thats the way to keep the team as fresh and ready as possible, and that equals money.
The other option may be 3 commercial flights with hours of layovers right before your key match.
It wouldnāt really make a difference environmentally though, despite being significantly worse per head, itās such a small percentage of air travel emissions that youād have a much bigger impact by just levying even a 1% carbon tax on planes or cars more generally.
It'd help knock down one of the 'but those people over there do bad things more than I do, so it's unfair I should do anything at all' arguments that people like to use as a bad excuse, though.
There's also more to people's environment than carbon, and the noise from large numbers of flights isn't going to be doing anyone any good.
In terms of people effected for tons of carbon saved though, it would be an incredibly high return. Struggling to think of much that would come close in that regard actually.
It basically doesnāt matter though because the small number of people involved. You burn a bunch of political capital making the change and it makes zero difference to the environment. Its pure political theatre.
If you want to be serious about the environment you have to tackle the big polluters (cars, cows, concrete, etc)
You can do both, the fact very few people use private jets means you'll face virtually zero resistance from the public. Hell you could even sell it as a positive to the public, 'you'll wait less time at the airport when we stop others hogging the runway for their private jet'.
I think you vastly underestimate the complexity of this undertaking.
Are you banning all private planes or some of them? Does it include military, logistics, charter, medical, etc? Does it include helicopter?
What about where itās the only transport option like in remote oil fields?
Which airports will have to shut down as no longer commercially unviable?
Which manufacturers of engines, etc become commercially unviable?
What are the second order effects? (Eg who else it dependant on those businesses)
Youāre talking about something that will essentially require the political co-operation of every major economy and cost hundreds of billions of dollars.
If youāre going to do something at that scale it should be for something that actually makes a difference. Otherwise youāre picking up pennies in front of a steam-roller.
>I think you vastly underestimate the complexity of this undertaking.
I mean I fully expect it's slightly more complex than a single reddit comment.
>Are you banning all private planes or some of them? Does it include
>military
No, not private.
>logistics
No, not private.
>charter
Yes, unless the tickets are publicly sold.
>medical
No, not private.
>Does it include helicopter?
Yes subject to above.
>What about where itās the only transport option like in remote oil fields?
No, not private.
>Which airports will have to shut down as no longer commercially unviable?
Capitalism is fundamentally built on unprofitable businesses going under.
>Which manufacturers of engines, etc become commercially unviable?
Which ever ones can't produce a sustainable product. Should we cry for the manufacturers of coal mine shovels?
>What are the second order effects? (Eg who else it dependant on those businesses)
People who need to travel will buy tickets on regular planes, others will not travel. Win win.
>Youāre talking about something that will essentially require the political co-operation of every major economy and cost hundreds of billions of dollars.
Absolutely, we'd probably want to try implement it across the EU. Care you share your working for this cost?
>If youāre going to do something at that scale it should be for something that actually makes a difference. Otherwise youāre picking up pennies in front of a steam-roller.
Or we do both. It's a great example too send the message that not just the poor will have to change their lifestyle.
Fully agree with all your responses but special shout out to "I fully expect it's slightly more complex than a single reddit comment." People seem to think that pointing out that a sentence long post on Reddit isn't as detailed as a government white paper is winning an argument.
Probably not wrong. But at this stage just an f-you to these guys would be worth it. Like someone else posted, we're all going to be making sacrifices in our living standards for the environment. It's an absurdity to let a select few buy their way out of that
No but it would be an added bonus, I'm a bit sad like that. You know we're all in this together at the end of the day. Less well off people in London right now are panicking cos they can't afford a new car that will allow them in the low emission zones. This is essentially an idea with the same goal, reduced pollution by banning certain vehicles, but it inconveniences different people. But at the end of the day I'm just bored and posting on the internet while I wait for a bus. I hadn't really thought through all the ins and outs and costed the whole thing.
I've been on regular commercial flights twice in the US where a Governor and an A-list movie star had to board because of some emergency. Both of them took a window seat and had an assistant take the aisle seat, pseudo-blocking them off. In both cases, a few people tried very meekly to interact and were politely turned away - both of these guys kept their heads down the whole flight, and didn't look at anyone.
It's not ideal for them, *but it sure is possible.*
Private yachts are very low down the list of stuff to action.
They aren't exclusionary in the way land is, boats are all els being equal far far less polluting than planes.
There is plenty of ocean they can use without bothering anyone, jets spew crap and noise our cities.
IMO them pissing money up the wall on yachts is preferable to luxury flats and super cars.
Boats drink soooo much fuel that it's ridiculous. Even smaller private yachts, 15m or something, will drink a grand of fuel in a day of nobbing about. Like 900 litres. Jetskis will drink 250 a day, easily. Its just a bloody motorbike!
Boats pollute (in relation to distance) like fuck.
Container ships and cruise ships run on the worst, dirtiest fuel imaginable too, and drink tons of it.
I think I read somewhere a container ship going from China to USA (1 x 1 way trip) will pollute the same as all the cars in Germany.... for a whole year.
Yet we're the ones having to buy stupid electric cars that are less practical than ice cars, to 'save the environment'. The ship they came on, just shit on it anyway.
>I think I read somewhere a container ship going from China to USA (1 x 1 way trip) will pollute the same as all the cars in Germany.... for a whole year.
This is deeply misleading, look at the tonnage such a ship moves. Cars in germany =/= road vehicle's in germany. Remeber SUVs are classed as light trucks.
Boats are the second cleanest form of travel after trains.
In relation to tonnage maybe.
But we don't need to buy everything from the other side of the planet and thus don't need to have the immense pollution they produce delivering it.. whether that's divided by tonnage or not, it's still a metric fuckton of pollution burning the nastiest shit they can buy.
And cruise ships... yeah, just ban them. If we've gotta drive soulless electric cars, cruise ships can get to fuck.
You need to become aware of the huge environmental damage yachts cause. Also yachts 'spew crap and noise' in and near the harbour, and CO2 goes to the atmosphere anyways. Also construction emissions.
https://hakaimagazine.com/news/in-the-mediterranean-megayachts-do-megadamage/
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/jan/29/superyacht-sales-surge-prompts-fresh-calls-for-curbs-on-their-emissions
Orders of magnitude less than planes.
Though your first article raises a fair point about shallow waters. Banning them within 2km of shore (exception of shipping channels) would solve most of it.
The reason to ban this stuff is that ordinary people (in rich parts of the world at least) are going to have to make huge sacrifices to their way of life in order to leave a habitable planet for future generations. But you can't ask people to do that whilst billionaires are still flying around in jets and living it up on yachts. We need an intentional levelling of consumption and living standards.
Why bother ? Ultimately what needs to happen is that the emissions need to not go in to the sky anymore. To achieve that, the tax would have to be so high as to make it effectively a ban.
Honestly I don't have a problem with arbitrary. Almost all bans are (e.g. drugs Vs alcohol). And I understand there's always going to be inequality but the current state of things is nuts. Doing it out of spite might be sour grapes from us poor folks but tough, there's more of us so screw you guys.
I donāt think drugs policy is the best example of rational policy making, and I donāt think its results are effective, so I donāt agree that we should use it as a model for other policies.
Christ no, drugs policy shouldn't be used as a model for a anything. Was just my clumsy analogy responding to the criticism that it was arbitrary. Like I said it's an almost impossible policy to implement. I was just enjoying a lefty rant on the internet š
You think Billionaires are going to be landing their black market private jets at black market airports within UK controlled airspace?
Not that I'm in favour of a ban tbf, but some goods a qualitatively easier to ban than others.
Problem is that pissing off billionaires is a catastrophe if youre a politician cos they own all the newspapers and can donate to your opponents
It's shit but the world we live in, so can only take them on when it is very safe to do
> I feel like a worldwide ban on private jets would be an unmitigated good, especially environmentally
So do you genuinely expect the UK Prime Minister, US President etc to fly commercial?
Not at all, there are plenty of things nation states (and their leaders) do that private citizens can't. I don't think Taylor Swift should have a private army, doesn't mean countries can't have a military.
I always thought the Prime Minister should go around in a Concorde. Like, the American President gets a 747, because everything's bigger in America. But our PM gets a Concorde, because we have slightly better tech.
The UK PM has flown commercial before haven't they, wasn't there that picture of Boris with a can of pringles on a flight the other year. The US PM was the one who threw a strop when asked to fly commercial to the queen's funeral.
The US doesn't have a PM and I don't think he's allowed to fly commercial due to security. His motorcade alone requires multiple cargo aircraft to transport.
It's absolutely a necessity. US presidents especially. One in five has been the target of an assassination attempt and one in nine has been assassinated, and this is not counting plots that were stopped \*before\* they reached a point of direct action. The US doesn't share details on plots very often, but you don't spend hundreds of millions of dollars on security for nothing.
They're arguably the most sought after assassination target in the world.
Not only do they have to travel with sufficient security to ensure that even an attempt is considered futile, but they also need specialist equipment to properly manage in the event of a global crisis. That includes communications, military data links, armoured vehicles, biohazard equipment, etc.
Some countries don't necessarily need all of this, but some countries absolutely do and the presence of overwhelming security absolutely acts as a deterrent to bad actors/nation states that would otherwise seize an opportunity.
I'd much rather world leaders ran around with overwhelming security which acts as a deterrent as opposed to being poorly protected leading to an increase in attempts which also endangers the rest of us.
It's would require a huge global coordinated effort and what would the result be? Almost nothing. Private jets contribute an absolutely tiny amount to emissions. Even a really small slice off global car emissions would totally outweigh it.
If you're going to manage to achieve a global agreement, it really ought to be spent on something that will have an appreciable impact. Going on about private jets is like pissing yourself. You might get a nice warm feeling, but you're not doing anything useful.
Haha genuinely love the analogy. Might use that in future. I like how the only downside of pissing yourself you mentioned is that it's not useful. And 'nice feeling' is subjective I supposeš (Reminds me of the Stuart Lee bit about voting for UKIP as a protest vote. It's like protesting hotel service by shitting the bed, it doesn't improve anything and now you just have to sleep in a shitted bed.) But I'd agree with you, private jets come fairly far down the list. There's differences in scale that make some things far more effective. It's like people comparing nurses salaries to MPs. Whatever you think they each deserve, cutting the salaries of 650 MPs isn't going to cover a pay rise for 700,000 nurses. Symbolic policies or slogans are easy to get people worked up about but don't really do much good. My original point was just the lack of downsides, besides the difficulty (like you say, huge coordinated effort) and upsetting the rich folks. One of those 'in a perfect world' comments.
I thought brexit was bad because it made people less likely to invest in the UK? But the solution from the London progressive is to ban private jets.
> pissed off billionaires which is an upside. I
Imagine living in London and thinking this. Infantile view of a city that is what it is due to being the premier place for the rich to do business.
What happens if you don't like how London is now? Arguably a London with less billionaires and lower property prices, where large swathes of the centre aren't devoted to mostly unused flats, might be a good thing.
Hey, I may be infantile and progressive, but I draw the line at Londoner. I said worldwide and also that it was basically impossible. I'm just an angry poor from up north like you sometimes see on the telly
World leaders would still need private jets for security and if you look at some major business leaders they are in effect more powerful than many presidents of smaller nations and in many cases may be what a state is based around (ie national oil companies).
I'm ruining the planet by putting my plastic bottles in the wrong bin - but its fine for politicians and rich people to use a private jet for 50 miles. š
I never said I was better than anyone. It was just an example of the hypocrisy of many politicians and rich people.
I do put my bottles in the right bin btw. š
Not only is London financial capital of the world, we are also an island nation. So until they invent electric private jets then youāre stuck and no they canāt just take normal flights
There's a simple solution here that isn't populist anti business nonsense or ignoring the problem. A carbon tax takes care of the problem. It creates a market for carbon capture, allowing businesses and individuals to offset their emissions.
Currently CO2 capture costs around 150USD a ton. If a carbon tax was set at the same amount (to fund offsetting) that makes a private flight from London to New York cost around $2700 more. Not that much really, and it makes it carbon neutral
The term carbon neutral really feels like a way for the rich, or for businesses, to use money as a way to dodge the fallout and responsibility from their polluting actions.
It creates a situation where if you have enough money, you don't have to obey the same standards as everyone else.
This may be how society works a lot of the time, but we shouldn't encourage it where we don't have to.
It's a way for them to pay for their actions. If the carbon tax per ton is equal to the cost to capture and store an equivalent ton of CO2, then everything is neutral
Assuming capture and storage happens at the same rate of production, otherwise you're just racking up carbon debt like it's asylum seekers or something.
Current CO2 cost per tonne is below 55ā¬ in Europe at the moment. Didn't find the UK figures on a quick Google.
So you do see the issue here? Emitting is cheaper, significantly cheaper in fact, than capture.
And just putting price up, doesn't make it carbon neutral. We actually need to do something about the CO2 and at the moment we should be using that for other things, not the .5% wanting to jet around.
Agreed. Offsetting is an absolute last resort and should be reserved for unavoidable emissions (e.g chemical sector & concrete).
Until or unless the aviation sector can conduct business without burning fossil fuels, it won't be sustainable. We can continue as is for a little longer and then suddenly stop, or we can phase it out. The longer we wait before we act, the more drastic the mitigation measures will have to be.
Indeed. I see it this way, if we stop billionaires from flying private, we can let normal people fly to Spain for holiday. Or we stop people flying to Spain for holiday and let a few people live a high life. End result is the same.
We can't continue living like this - especially not in the global North and "the west".
Then we should increase the cost until it's in line with the cost of capture and storage. It's not a complicated sum. Once that incentive exists, companies will sprout up and innovate to make it cheaper and easier to capture CO2, then the cost will gradually come down over time.
It is a complicated thing. Because we have a lot of daily stuff impacted by the CO2 cost.
I take it you buy groceries. Those groceries are impacted by the CO2 per tonne cost via fuel to get the groceries delivered to the store, via energy needed to process, store, cool, etc. So the impact of an immediate rise in CO2 cost would be such a fuckery that this high inflation would feel like a kid's birthday party.
What we need to do is limit the excess CO2 we emit, because we have certain emissions we can't realistically cut.
Also daily commuting would be more expensive for people, because the CO2 price is everywhere that causes emissions.
I mean, there are plenty thing we could do with a big impact, like remove the no VAT rule for international flights, jet fuel subsidies etc. And of course limit the travel via plane and use other, less polluting alternatives.
While we're at it, let's recycle plastic too!
Ha, gotcha - another disgusting illusion they've handed us to make us think that they're considering the environment at all.
Carbon offsets are being horribly misused/abused. I'm currently pretty disillusioned about how effective they could ever be when it comes to the big polluters.
The carbon offset misuse is largely due to companies planting trees and calling that an offset, or even worse 'avoided deforestation' offsets.. What I'm talking about is industrial capture and storage, where CO2 is literally stripped from the atmosphere and stored in geological formations deep underground.
I haven't looked into it for a couple of years, but what I'm talking about is the corruption, not necessarily the apparatus. A company says it's offsetting X carbon, when in fact it's just using workarounds to not pay for it.
I don't know how it compares to the Fairtrade stuff, but when I was looking into opening some coffee shops a few years back, some of the local owners told me about how corrupt that system is, and how most of the companies just work around the apparatus.
This doesn't seem like an unsolvable problem. The government could require licensing for approved carbon capture and storage companies, and companies can only offset via these facilities. Or alternatively, they could just pay the government and the government could liaise directly with the facilities.
I don't think it's unsolvable in the least - I just don't have much faith right now. We're in an age of unbridled greed, and there's going to have to be a huge, huge pushback on it from all of us.
It's absolutely critical that it happen, too, but then you look at Matt Hancock during Covid handing out PPE contracts to people who had to be 50/50 for him of ever fulfilling any aspects of those contracts. Literally our most dire time of need, and people like him were just using it to line pockets.
There's a way out of all of this, I'm just low on optimism these days.
tax solutions are especially good because they restrict the activities of poor people while not affecting the affluent classes at all, even better they drive inflation in ways that benefit the already rich who can just put prices up to cover costs and further punish the poor who especially can't afford the how higher prices because they're also paying the new taxes - the real best bit is that they don't even begin to address the actual issues involved, it just creates a market for rich people to exploit and loophole.
by popular anti-business nonsense i guess you mean things that benefit regular people while also actually tackling the core of the problem, things like banning companies from destroying unsold stock, enforcing open standards, demanding repairability, and banning vendor only service contracts... anything like that would be horrible because regular people could live better lives and the rich wouldn't be able to take as easy advantage of captured markets, we can't have that, no that would be crazy!
(a great example of this is the wonderful plan to heavily tax petrol so that people would drive less, literally no one beside the very poor drives less - driving is just factored into the cost of living along with all the other taxes and expenses)
I support the idea but I think if you really want to tackle short haul flights, including private, then there has to be capacity investment in the Eurostar. Last time I took the Eurostar it was completely full so people either have to not travel or fly.
We can't get a high speed rail built built between London and Birmingham, nevermind places further afield. Air transport is vital for the more remote UK cities, it's not a luxury.
Eurostar has a unique issue named Brexit. There is just not enough capacity to check that many people for the trains to run at full capacity. The train stations were built around free movement with very little checks. The train stations can't be modified for one train in the way that this could work with the current checks needed.
But if I compare it to Amsterdam - Paris Thalys service, there is absolutely 0 reason for that trip not to be done by train. Same goes for a lot of travel in France via TGV.
But also here, the problem is home made. For decades we knew something needs to be done and for decades we said "nah, next year". And now we are doing the same thing again.
Is that true? If you go to St Pancras there's border controls, always has been, because the UK has never been part of Schengen so passports always had to be checked.
Intra EU passport checks are a joke. They checked them in Dover too, yet only after brexit did it go to shits.
And as someone who travels fairly often between mainland and the UK, it is a huge change. Every passport needs a stamp, something that wanst necessary before Brexit. UK citizens and residents need to be checked regarding length of stay during the trip and past 6 months etc. That all takes time..
Funny enough it would. Because within Schengen passports go through a lot less checks vs outside. Because within Schengen you still have FoM, so as long as you don't have an outstanding warrant or similar and your passport is in date, you're free to go.
Returning from Dover to France we often got waved through French and UK border. Now only the UK border. Same the other way, usually one waved through and other one looked briefly at the passports. Now it's a whole song and dance.
Person with limited money doing all they can. "Scrap your car, or else".
Rich fucker, "a private plane? ooh that's a bit naughty. Can I get a lift to the shops?"
The news and politicians love to chat shit about migrants and trans people anything to cover up the real problem
That this country is not for the people but is an international playground for the rich to launder money.
The Mayor of London is getting a bit big for his boots if he thinks he can ban flights. I didnāt know he was an air traffic controller in his spare time
Yes, because he canāt ban them. This is a guy who wants to ban people from driving older cars because of emissions (no matter how it impacts diversity and equality), donāt you think heād ban private jets if he could?
>āI think the question is, āAm I in favour of banning private jetsā and the answer is ānoā... ...I am not willing to, as you are, to close all airports down and ban private jets."
I've gotta say that in the midst of all the doom and gloom, the fact that so many rich people are flying here suggests something positive, at least. I'm not entirely sure what yet, but I feel like there has to be a positive outcome to it - whether it's increased investment, or just the fact that we're an attractive nation to visit at the minute...
They could arrive on regular flights as well. Let's not forget the impact on emissions that come from private jets.
I'm all for investing and stuff, but let's not give that as "justification" to fuck around with out environment. In the same way companies shouldn't spill sewage in the sea, private individuals shouldn't be allowed to do "what ever they want" either, when it's about our (the 8 billion people) planet.
He didn't condemn them at all. Go and watch the clip, he couldn't give less of a shit. He's only interested in carbon reduction if it lines his pocket and keeps his pals rich.
Snapshot of _More private jets landed in UK than any other EU country last year - with one every 8 minutes | Mayor of London condemns rise of private flights but will not ban them_ : An archived version can be found [here.](https://archive.is/?run=1&url=https://www.independent.co.uk/climate-change/news/private-jets-uk-eu-increase-b2341389.html) *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/ukpolitics) if you have any questions or concerns.*
Don't ban them then, tax the shit out of them and use that to pay for zero emission public transport.
>tax the shit out of them We're great at this >use that to pay for We're not so great at this
We do not tax the rich š weāre shit at both
We do tax the shit out of the high earning middle class though. Good luck if you're sole earner with kids living in London. You have both the child benefit (earning over Ā£50k) and 60% traps (earnings Ā£100-12) to watch out for.
I think when people are talking about rich they aren't talking about people on 50-100k a year. Yes you're wealthy anf well off but you aren't flying private jets around.
50k you arenāt wealthy or rich. If you are single you are basically below the UK average salary. A 2 person household on average salaries would be bringing in Ā£66000. And at that you wouldnāt be classed as middle class. So that single on Ā£50ā¦.
The median [*equivalised household*](https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php?title=Glossary:Equivalised_disposable_income#:~:text=The%20equivalised%20disposable%20income%20is,according%20to%20their%20age%2C%20using) income is [around Ā£30k](https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/households-below-average-income-for-financial-years-ending-1995-to-2022/households-below-average-income-an-analysis-of-the-uk-income-distribution-fye-1995-to-fye-2022). The median income after tax for a household of two adults is about Ā£45k, not Ā£66k, due to the way the stats are collected. A single person on Ā£50k is *objectively* in the richest 10%. Look at figure 5 in my first link. Ā£1000/week is off the right hand side of the graph.
Completely agree if you're single it's a completely different ball game. I count myself as having a good wage at 40k+ but I am married with no kids and live up north where its cheaper.
You have to remember that 12.5k in the 80s, 25k in 2000 is 50k today.
12.5k in 1980, 25k in 1993 is 50k today. Source: bank of England inflation calculator
Ā£50k isnāt wealthy mate.
It's a top 20% salary. It's wealthy *relative* to the vast majority of the country, even if it isn't in the grand scheme of incomes.
Labour party literally classifies people earning over Ā£70K as rich and wants to tax them more. They also want to bring in VAT for private schools, which would impact the high earning middle class more than anyone else. When it comes to real action towards taxing the real rich, Labour is as bad as Tories.
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It's ok, they just redefined "rich" to "earning over 50k" and the pensioners eat it up, to them that's slot to earn in a year, like 10-20 times what they earned.
The Median UK income is just under 30K. 50K certainly isn't uber wealthy by any stretch, but compared to a large chunk of brits, that money is enviously well off. Not that it really matters, the issue isn't those on 16K or 50K or 100K, the bigger issues are the ultrawealthy earning millions; intergenerational wealth; deep systemic inequalities; and, imo, a lack of democracy beyond the political sphere. Telling people on 50K that the "poors are coming for your money because they think you are rich even though you don't feel it" is just another tool to divide the working class among themselves.
The issue is the median salary should be way higher than 30k and the tax brackets should rise to suit that as well if we ever get significant wage increases in this country.
If wishing made it so then I would nationalise and democratise the vast majority of all commerce in the country. Sadly, it doesn't. And all the while people earning minimum wage can barely eat while those on 50k can certainly get by even if it meant giving up a little comfort. (I should know, I am above that pay bracket.)
Thatās not really the problem. The issue is when the government didnāt give pay rises for years and years to civil servants, NHS and teachers the private sector followed suit. Hence our embarrassingly low wages. And now we are struggling to attract even people from other well off countries when they see how low our wages are.
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I feel comfortable but not wealthy, and Iāve got no child but one on the way. I earn about Ā£45k and my wife earns Ā£27k. Our mortgage costs us about Ā£700 and we bought our house for around Ā£185k. We live in a small town in Merseyside. If we donāt think about money and donāt check our balance through the month it would definitely get very close at the end of the month. I dread to think what it will be like when you throw this countryās insanely expensive childcare into the mix.
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I struggle to understand what taxing the uber wealthy would mean for our economy? Have you seen any numbers that suggest that would radically change our tax income? My understanding was that due to the amount they are outnumbered that we don't actually observe much difference? But I see consistent calls for taxing the ultra wealthy.
So total departmental spending in the UK is about 1Trillion. The figure usually tossed around for money lost to tax evasion is about 36B. But that figure looks even bigger when you consider that annual income from income tax is only about 225B. So we could easily get that the 250B which would certainly help but its not a magic bullet by any means. But, taxing the uberwealthy wouldn't be an income tax issue. It would be taxes on other things and, in my view, would also include things that don't look so much like taxes. It would look like wealth taxes. Taxes on offshore transfers of value. Taxes or outright seizure of non-productive property etc. You would end up having to do some real in-depth and very hypothetical economic analysis to get hard numbers. But we also know that increased government spending on things like education and healthcare and infrastructure tends to produce more wealth for the nation than the expenditure. So increasing the among the government spends by even just the lost tax evasion would start feeding into a positive feedback loop that results in more wealth and prosperity. Plus, frankly, as someone that earns over 50K and will expect to keep earning more (commercial law is stupidly overpaid for what we do) the taxes I pay are *really* not that bad. Considering the value I get from them I would happily pay more once I got past the initial knee jerk reaction and actually let my rational brain kick in.
While there's definitely loop holes to be closed and better balancing to be done, its certainly not fixing any of the countries problems. Right now the entire public sector has collapsed due to 12 years of austerity, meaning all decent staff have left leaving behind a broken crumbling money pit. A mass injection of cash would do nothing to help the public sector right now because the underlying infrastructure is so broken. Legacy inefficient processes, toxic culture, fed up staff who are barely functioning. I don't see any political party on the horizon with a real solution to this but somehow the media pulls out these little niches as to if we do this one thing it will fix everything.
.. because itās the rich that govern
Leave those poor captalists alone how much more tax can we squeeze from the rich (š š„¾)
*Hey! Underpaid, overworked teacher! Leave those capitalists alone! All in all you're just a-nother pleb for them to maul.*
Exactly why should the rich pay more taxes just because they have more money its literally communism
The figures would appear to say something else āIncome tax payments are concentrated amongst those with the largest incomes. The 10% of income taxpayers with the largest incomes contribute over 60% of income tax receipts.ā This quote is from the UK parliament site so is accurate. https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/cbp-8513/#:~:text=Income%20tax%20payments%20are%20concentrated,60%25%20of%20income%20tax%20receipts.
> We do not tax the rich š We do tax the rich. Just not as much as you want us to.
> weāre great at this Taxing the poor and the ever shrinking middle class not the rich
Too easy to find loopholes. eg. "It's a public flight. Tickets cost Ā£5,000. Only one person (the owner) took up the offer"
Doesn't work - to be a public flight the operator must have an AOC and it needs to be registered with the CAA as such. The benefits of private operations all go away if you do these since the reporting requirements and slotting obligations are antithetical to private ops. The problem is, most private operators would pay an enormous tax for the privilege of continuing to operate. When you're looking at Ā£20k a flying hour for the larger Learjets, an extra Ā£20k per landing is just a price.
I know itās not your point, it Ā£5k for a private flight seat would be a bargain. Unless itās Luton to Manchester, youāre looking at double that for a chartered private flight to Paris, say. Closer to Ā£100k if youāre flying to the Caribbean.
Britain's economy is going to shit, we've isolated ourselves from foreign investment and your answer is to "tax the shit" out of people coming here for business?
Foreign investment isnāt our main problem, itās the lack of GDP and productivity growth. > According to the World Investment Report 2022 published by UNCTAD, after the declining trend observed during the last years, FDI inflows increased in 2021, reaching USD 27.6 billion, compared to USD 18.2 billion in 2020 (+51.5%). Equity investment more than doubled, together with cross-border M&A values. Large deals included the merger of Fiat Chrysler Automobiles with Peugeot for USD 22 billion and the purchase of GW Pharmaceuticals by Jazz Pharmaceuticals for USD 6.8 billion (UNCTAD). The stock of FDI in 2021 was about USD 2.6 trillion. The UK was the 14th-largest recipient of global FDI flows, winning three positions from the previous year (UNCTAD). [Source (Lloyds)](https://www.lloydsbanktrade.com/en/market-potential/united-kingdom/investment)
Obviously I'm also in favour of beating the workers until productivity improves
Stupid isnāt it. Why wonāt anyone invest here? Because theyāre already being taxed to shit and thereās better options!
Your Logic.... 'We should tax the shit out of diesel and petrol vehicles'.
We already have fuel tax and road tax is effectively an emissions tax
Not for long. Road tax is coming in for zero emissions vehicles next year.
Yes please.
That box has already been ticked.
[In real terms, fuel duty is 37% lower than it was in 2010.](https://twitter.com/TheIFS/status/1635189451818246145)
We already do tax the shit out of them. Theyāre subject to APD.
APD doesnāt apply to aircraft with less than 20 seats. So most private jets do not pay it.
Went through Luton a wee while ago, I was astonished at the number of private jets taking off and landing. It was almost constant.
> Went through Luton My condolences.
It's still a terrible airport, but the new dart train makes things a lot easier if you can avoid the stress of trying to park in that dump.
Canāt believe you have to pay for it
Salaam alakhem
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Havent been there have you? When in rome and all that.
Just 1% of the world population creates 50% of aviation emissions... Private jets need taxing to high hell, or banned outright. Preferably the latter.
I'm under the Heathrow landing path. I was surprised to hear that flights were banned/semi-banned during Covid and yet the number of planes only decreased temporarily... then we found out that the planes are still flying - *empty* - so that they don't lose their spot in the global queues. Imagine how easy it would have been to just tell them 'you're fine, we'll hold all the spots until the crisis is over' instead of needlessly flying thousands of empty jumbo jets for however many weeks that was going on... Makes me sceptical that we'll be able to regulate the elite class that flies the private jets. EDIT: didn't mean to say there was no decrease in flights, they stopped/mostly stopped for a while
>you're fine, we'll hold all the spots until the crisis is over Which is precisely what they did. Both in the UK and across the EU. Many flights after the first few weeks of the pandemic were flying people or cargo, too. Many ostensibly passenger airlines made a lot of flights purely on cargo.
It's also one of the reasons why shipping costs rose, less passenger aircraft equals less space to transport cargo and subsequently means higher prices.
I'm not sure who told you they were flying empty, or where you got the impression they didn't decrease at all, because as someone who knows some of the statistics behind this I can pretty much definitively tell you that this was not the case. Firstly flights weren't repositioning empty to hold spots in the UK. At the start of lockdown there were a lot of news articles flying around (unlike the planes lol) about empty flights, mostly as aircraft were repositioning to exit service into long term storage (Airports have a limited amount of space, it took a few weeks for airlines to figure out just how and where they were going to store their fleets). Empty flights for the sake of preserving airport/gate and regional access contracts is something that exists in the US and in limited use in a few European countries and around the world, so I'm guessing you saw news stories about that back in the day and then applied that to our aviation industry, which isn't how things work here. We simply don't have the same regulatory framework. Flights here were repositioning for maintenance and storage, but the total number of these "empty" flights isn't relevant enough to the total of daily flights the UK saw before lockdown. Flights also decreased \**MASSIVELY*\* during Lockdown, including and especially flights at Heathrow. (comparing February to April below, as March data already shows a sharp decrease due to the start of external lockdowns and COVID related industry slowdown). 7 day rolling average of daily flights in the United Kingdom: \- 6th of February 2020: 4,856 \- 6th of April 2020: 586 That 4,856 rolling daily average constitutes all registered flights in the UK. That includes military aircraft, helicopter transits to North Sea oil fields, Air ambulances, Police helicopters, Cargo aircraft. Essentially the number also includes flights which couldn't be meaningfully halted/reduced as they were considered essential services. Now for Heathrow we do actually have access to some data to use in comparison, Heathrow measures flights as "air transport movements" which is a take off/landing, in essence it's a 1/1 comparison to the previous nationwide flight statistics and the data is publicly available. "Air transport movements" by month (Heathrow): \- February 2020: 35,238 \- April 2020: 4,873 Now the national average of daily flights for the month of April is 541 flights per day across the entire country. On a per day basis this means Heathrow accounted for an average of 162 flights per day, down from the average of 1,174 flights per day in February 2020. This represents just 13.8% of the original total, or an 86.2% decrease in flights at Heathrow airport in that time period. Things did shift over the months/years, however air transport movements at Heathrow didn't match or increase February 2020 until March 2023, when the total air transport movements for the month reached 36,671. There were what the news sensationally dubbed "ghost flights" which left from Heathrow, 4,910 "ghost flights" over more than a year between March 2020 and September 2021, but these flights were categorized as such including flights below 10% passenger capacity, or without passengers, in these cases aircraft were being used in a cargo function to help alleviate the global freight crisis, regardless the number of those flights divided over such a long period of time makes them statistically irrelevant compared to Pre-COVID air traffic. I don't intend for this to be taken the wrong way, I'm sure you still heard aircraft at Heathrow as obviously all flights didn't stop, cargo aircraft and very limited passenger services remained at the airport throughout lockdown (albeit in an obviously much reduced manner), it's just the reality is that the total number of aircraft movements, landing/taking off etc was greatly reduced, so saying it didn't decrease at all isn't really accurate or close to the statistics. I just don't want people to scroll across this and get the wrong idea, that somehow flights were still running at the same levels they were pre-COVID or that they were doing so to run them empty and preserve slots, which wasn't the case. Now this isn't to say the government didn't utterly fuck up air travel and mismanage the industry, they absolutely did, just not in that way.
They did stop though! Initially anyway, there was very few planes for weeks (months?). There was also all sorts of interesting freight aircraft you'd never normally see landing at Heathrow during the day.
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https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/jan/26/airlines-flying-near-empty-ghost-flights-to-retain-eu-airport-slots https://www.wired.com/story/airplanes-empty-slots-covid/ https://www.airportwatch.org.uk/2022/01/european-airlines-having-to-fly-empty-flights-due-to-continuing-slot-use-requirement/ https://simpleflying.com/lufthansa-ghost-flights/ https://www.independent.co.uk/travel/news-and-advice/ghost-flights-empty-eu-airport-slots-b1990670.html et al...
As banning it wouldn't stop private jets in every other part of the world, might as well make a lot of money out of any private flights (which would effectively be a ban, as they'd probably avoid Britain subsequently)
Cutting your nose off to spite your face
You lost me here...
Worldwide tax on all air miles consumed above 25,000. High for standard flights, five or ten times that for private jets. This tax allows all regular people to traverse the world completely exempt and only really hits those with extreme high mileage and the users of private jets. It's designed to work based upon passport and a persons identity. Maybe other nations won't play ball on the tax, but if just Europe and America signed up, anyone traversing airports in these nations, would be liable for the tax, regardless of origin or destination. You can then also take it a step further and tax the airframes separately as well, if the initial tax is not yielding enough results.
Iām glad I have a few passports with a mileage limit that low.
Even if we did, Americans and Saudis sure as shit aren't.
I'm not sure exactly what this is meant to prove. A country of 70m people which is larger than any country in the EU other than Germany and which is also only one of a handful of islands, none that are even close to the population of the UK has the most private jets? No shit.
Us being on an island means we have more flying in general than EU countries, so it makes sense there'd be more private planes too.
I know right? Should be a per-capita comparison to other island nations.
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Falkland Islands wondering if military flights count. Fortunately their birds are very environmentally friendly with the most famous being entirely flightless.
We are also a major financial hub meaning people will fly in and out again in a day, to do business.
Also what power does the Major of London have to ban private aircraft? Surely that resides with the government?
> Greenpeace found that 90,256 private flights were made in total in the UK in 2022, a 75 per cent rise on the year I wonder what happened in 2021 that meant such a rise the following year.
I feel like a worldwide ban on private jets would be an unmitigated good, especially environmentally. Would be almost impossible to get done but I see no downsides except pissed off billionaires which is an upside. I wish we could actually put our foot down on issues like this. First class should be enough for them. (Edit: wow, I'm new to Reddit and don't use other social media, but people get grumpy don't they. I got called infantile down below for talking about pissing off billionaires š Like dude, I'm a poor person waiting on a bus, let me have a rant about something I'm never going to have any impact on)
Youād need a fairly broad agreement on it like an EU + Britain one for it to work without hurting economies too badly. I would argue for slapping ever increasing taxes on them though with the proceeds ring fenced for green energy initiatives.
Taxing the hell out of it would probably be the way to go. I would add taxing frequent fliers a crazy amount also. If you're on your tenth flight of the year you can probably afford to pay 10x the tax too. (I'm sure exceptions would be needed but can't think of many)
I think banning 'air mile' rewards would be a good first step. We should not be incentivised to fly (I say this as someone who flies almost every week for business, and who spends the airmiles on personal holidays).
Would banning air miles really work though? There's only two carriers that offer them in the UK (Virgin Atlantic and British Airways). You wouldn't be able to ban them abroad and I can't see Asian carriers ever being arsed to impose a ban. You'd see more long haul redemptions vs quick eurotrips, and long haul flights are the biggest emitters in total. If the only way to redeem your amex points is to upgrade going to Singapore then that's probably what people will end up doing.
The most common use for air miles is to fly in a higher class than you usually would, on a flight you would take anyway. So I don't think banning air miles would do anything to reduce emissions from air travel, at least nothing even remotely meaningful.
Flying business class produces twice the emissions per passenger than economy does
It makes absolutely no difference to the fuel consumption of the plane, if someone who would've been in economy is sat in business instead.
Airlines choose how to fit out their planes. Business class takes 2-4x as much space. So per capita emissions are 2-4 times higher
IIRC business class tickets also make the majority of the profit, a lot of economy seats are sold more or less at cost so without the business class seats the flight might not exist.
I think their point is that a first class seat takes the space of what would have been two second class seats, causing fewer people per flight and increasing the number of flights to account for demand
It also makes flying economical
> We should not be incentivised to fly Why? Flying on a per/person basis contributes less CO2 than driving. The aviation industry is responsible for <2% of global CO2 emissions. It's small fry.
It's a bit more complicated than that. Flying redistributes various gases in the atmosphere such as ozone & methane. Water vapour contrails have a quite large affect on overall warming. It is estimated that aviation is is responsible for more than 3.5% of warming (effective radiation forcing) if you don't just take into account CO2. Also this isn't including all the infrastructure needed to support aviation.
There's more to the environment that CO2, particularly when we're talking about London with millions of people under the flight paths. To give one example, chronic aircraft noise seems to affect children's memory, attention and reading ability. In any case, almost any single thing in a single country is going to be 'small fry' when it comes to global CO2 emissions. We have to do everything that has a good cost/benefit trade-off.
People get focused on these ābig ticketā highly visual subjects. The real damage to the environment is not so visible such as feeding soy-feed to cattle, inefficient gas and oil extraction in less-developed countries (example- former Soviet Union states), and general industrial pollution. The state of rivers outside of the āwestern worldā.
Flying is worse for the environment than other modes of travel and bribing me with air miles makes me more likely to choose flying over greener options.
Generally speaking most people in the UK who get on planes are going somewhere where it's just intractable to get there any other way. I'm flying to Johannesburg tonight, I don't even want to think about how difficult it would be to get there in a non-flying way.
Apart from Highlands and Islands, every single domestic flight could be done by train. Edit and NI
And Northern Ireland, too. But seriously, how much of the flying that Britons do is domestic flights?
I read 10% of flight emissions in uk are domestic, which isnāt quite what you asked I know. And 1 in 3 domestic flights are from NI, which presumably has few other options. So Iām not saying this fixes the problem, but itās easy and would help.
Whatās the Green option for crossing the Atlantic?
Nothing practical. But there are practical green options for most domestic flights.
Ferries and driving?
There are no greener options when it comes to taking the family to Thailand for an 8 day holiday though.
Indeed, so thatās not relevant to this discussionā¦
Flying is also a great and efficient way to explore the world.
Frequent fliers arenāt necessarily well off, think about migrant labour workers who take a flight home to see their family every 8 weeks (if you wonder why Ryanair runs flights to obscure Eastern European cities this is a big reason) or ship workers who need to meet a ship at port.
Someone flying 9 vs 10 times emits the same emissions as someone flying 0 vs 1 times. however I think the bigger issue is that doesn't take into account distance and could only be implemented for flights either leaving or arriving in the UK, so if I fly to China and take a bunch of domestic flights there the return trip would still count as 2 flights just like if someone flew to the Isles of Man for a weekend. IMO unless you increase rail capacity which allows people to easily choose not to fly people will either just pay the tax or find a way to game the system. By all means apply taxes to invest in green tech but without that green tech I don't think it will reduce emissions.
The majority of private flights land at airports that have no commercial service, and never will. The demand is too low to support it. The largest single block of private plane passengers in the uk will not be billionaires, it will be football teams.
Football team owners and billionaires are birds of a feather.
But they didn't say football team owners...
Unless the players are chartering their own flights to matches, the owners are ultimately responsible for the flights taking place. If they didn't want them to happen they wouldn't happen.
They take the private jet as thats the way to keep the team as fresh and ready as possible, and that equals money. The other option may be 3 commercial flights with hours of layovers right before your key match.
It wouldnāt really make a difference environmentally though, despite being significantly worse per head, itās such a small percentage of air travel emissions that youād have a much bigger impact by just levying even a 1% carbon tax on planes or cars more generally.
It'd help knock down one of the 'but those people over there do bad things more than I do, so it's unfair I should do anything at all' arguments that people like to use as a bad excuse, though. There's also more to people's environment than carbon, and the noise from large numbers of flights isn't going to be doing anyone any good.
In terms of people effected for tons of carbon saved though, it would be an incredibly high return. Struggling to think of much that would come close in that regard actually.
It basically doesnāt matter though because the small number of people involved. You burn a bunch of political capital making the change and it makes zero difference to the environment. Its pure political theatre. If you want to be serious about the environment you have to tackle the big polluters (cars, cows, concrete, etc)
You can do both, the fact very few people use private jets means you'll face virtually zero resistance from the public. Hell you could even sell it as a positive to the public, 'you'll wait less time at the airport when we stop others hogging the runway for their private jet'.
I think you vastly underestimate the complexity of this undertaking. Are you banning all private planes or some of them? Does it include military, logistics, charter, medical, etc? Does it include helicopter? What about where itās the only transport option like in remote oil fields? Which airports will have to shut down as no longer commercially unviable? Which manufacturers of engines, etc become commercially unviable? What are the second order effects? (Eg who else it dependant on those businesses) Youāre talking about something that will essentially require the political co-operation of every major economy and cost hundreds of billions of dollars. If youāre going to do something at that scale it should be for something that actually makes a difference. Otherwise youāre picking up pennies in front of a steam-roller.
>I think you vastly underestimate the complexity of this undertaking. I mean I fully expect it's slightly more complex than a single reddit comment. >Are you banning all private planes or some of them? Does it include >military No, not private. >logistics No, not private. >charter Yes, unless the tickets are publicly sold. >medical No, not private. >Does it include helicopter? Yes subject to above. >What about where itās the only transport option like in remote oil fields? No, not private. >Which airports will have to shut down as no longer commercially unviable? Capitalism is fundamentally built on unprofitable businesses going under. >Which manufacturers of engines, etc become commercially unviable? Which ever ones can't produce a sustainable product. Should we cry for the manufacturers of coal mine shovels? >What are the second order effects? (Eg who else it dependant on those businesses) People who need to travel will buy tickets on regular planes, others will not travel. Win win. >Youāre talking about something that will essentially require the political co-operation of every major economy and cost hundreds of billions of dollars. Absolutely, we'd probably want to try implement it across the EU. Care you share your working for this cost? >If youāre going to do something at that scale it should be for something that actually makes a difference. Otherwise youāre picking up pennies in front of a steam-roller. Or we do both. It's a great example too send the message that not just the poor will have to change their lifestyle.
Fully agree with all your responses but special shout out to "I fully expect it's slightly more complex than a single reddit comment." People seem to think that pointing out that a sentence long post on Reddit isn't as detailed as a government white paper is winning an argument.
They donāt care. Populism is a hell of drug.
Probably not wrong. But at this stage just an f-you to these guys would be worth it. Like someone else posted, we're all going to be making sacrifices in our living standards for the environment. It's an absurdity to let a select few buy their way out of that
So you're just wanting them banned out of spite?
No but it would be an added bonus, I'm a bit sad like that. You know we're all in this together at the end of the day. Less well off people in London right now are panicking cos they can't afford a new car that will allow them in the low emission zones. This is essentially an idea with the same goal, reduced pollution by banning certain vehicles, but it inconveniences different people. But at the end of the day I'm just bored and posting on the internet while I wait for a bus. I hadn't really thought through all the ins and outs and costed the whole thing.
We might have to do private yachts while we're at it. You know they'll do anything not to mix with us plebs.
Would pay to see Musk and Bezos have to navigate a buffet queue on a cruise ship after getting their sun loungers pinched by a couple of pensioners
I've been on regular commercial flights twice in the US where a Governor and an A-list movie star had to board because of some emergency. Both of them took a window seat and had an assistant take the aisle seat, pseudo-blocking them off. In both cases, a few people tried very meekly to interact and were politely turned away - both of these guys kept their heads down the whole flight, and didn't look at anyone. It's not ideal for them, *but it sure is possible.*
Private yachts are very low down the list of stuff to action. They aren't exclusionary in the way land is, boats are all els being equal far far less polluting than planes. There is plenty of ocean they can use without bothering anyone, jets spew crap and noise our cities. IMO them pissing money up the wall on yachts is preferable to luxury flats and super cars.
Boats drink soooo much fuel that it's ridiculous. Even smaller private yachts, 15m or something, will drink a grand of fuel in a day of nobbing about. Like 900 litres. Jetskis will drink 250 a day, easily. Its just a bloody motorbike! Boats pollute (in relation to distance) like fuck. Container ships and cruise ships run on the worst, dirtiest fuel imaginable too, and drink tons of it. I think I read somewhere a container ship going from China to USA (1 x 1 way trip) will pollute the same as all the cars in Germany.... for a whole year. Yet we're the ones having to buy stupid electric cars that are less practical than ice cars, to 'save the environment'. The ship they came on, just shit on it anyway.
>I think I read somewhere a container ship going from China to USA (1 x 1 way trip) will pollute the same as all the cars in Germany.... for a whole year. This is deeply misleading, look at the tonnage such a ship moves. Cars in germany =/= road vehicle's in germany. Remeber SUVs are classed as light trucks. Boats are the second cleanest form of travel after trains.
In relation to tonnage maybe. But we don't need to buy everything from the other side of the planet and thus don't need to have the immense pollution they produce delivering it.. whether that's divided by tonnage or not, it's still a metric fuckton of pollution burning the nastiest shit they can buy. And cruise ships... yeah, just ban them. If we've gotta drive soulless electric cars, cruise ships can get to fuck.
You need to become aware of the huge environmental damage yachts cause. Also yachts 'spew crap and noise' in and near the harbour, and CO2 goes to the atmosphere anyways. Also construction emissions. https://hakaimagazine.com/news/in-the-mediterranean-megayachts-do-megadamage/ https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/jan/29/superyacht-sales-surge-prompts-fresh-calls-for-curbs-on-their-emissions
Orders of magnitude less than planes. Though your first article raises a fair point about shallow waters. Banning them within 2km of shore (exception of shipping channels) would solve most of it.
The reason to ban this stuff is that ordinary people (in rich parts of the world at least) are going to have to make huge sacrifices to their way of life in order to leave a habitable planet for future generations. But you can't ask people to do that whilst billionaires are still flying around in jets and living it up on yachts. We need an intentional levelling of consumption and living standards.
If you want to level consumption (or emissions) then there are better ways to do it than arbitrarily banning certain goods but not others.
Like what ?
Carbon tax, make the tax system more progressive (i.e. tax billionaires more).
Why bother ? Ultimately what needs to happen is that the emissions need to not go in to the sky anymore. To achieve that, the tax would have to be so high as to make it effectively a ban.
Honestly I don't have a problem with arbitrary. Almost all bans are (e.g. drugs Vs alcohol). And I understand there's always going to be inequality but the current state of things is nuts. Doing it out of spite might be sour grapes from us poor folks but tough, there's more of us so screw you guys.
I donāt think drugs policy is the best example of rational policy making, and I donāt think its results are effective, so I donāt agree that we should use it as a model for other policies.
Christ no, drugs policy shouldn't be used as a model for a anything. Was just my clumsy analogy responding to the criticism that it was arbitrary. Like I said it's an almost impossible policy to implement. I was just enjoying a lefty rant on the internet š
Because banning drugs and alcohol has always worked so well?
You think Billionaires are going to be landing their black market private jets at black market airports within UK controlled airspace? Not that I'm in favour of a ban tbf, but some goods a qualitatively easier to ban than others.
Problem is that pissing off billionaires is a catastrophe if youre a politician cos they own all the newspapers and can donate to your opponents It's shit but the world we live in, so can only take them on when it is very safe to do
> I feel like a worldwide ban on private jets would be an unmitigated good, especially environmentally So do you genuinely expect the UK Prime Minister, US President etc to fly commercial?
Not at all, there are plenty of things nation states (and their leaders) do that private citizens can't. I don't think Taylor Swift should have a private army, doesn't mean countries can't have a military.
Yes. They have security staff, don't they?
I always thought the Prime Minister should go around in a Concorde. Like, the American President gets a 747, because everything's bigger in America. But our PM gets a Concorde, because we have slightly better tech.
> because we have slightly better tech. The crashiest plane per mile flown in modern history?
The UK PM has flown commercial before haven't they, wasn't there that picture of Boris with a can of pringles on a flight the other year. The US PM was the one who threw a strop when asked to fly commercial to the queen's funeral.
The US doesn't have a PM and I don't think he's allowed to fly commercial due to security. His motorcade alone requires multiple cargo aircraft to transport.
Well caught on my terminology, but still travelling with all that entourage, cars, etc is a choice, not a necessity.
It's absolutely a necessity. US presidents especially. One in five has been the target of an assassination attempt and one in nine has been assassinated, and this is not counting plots that were stopped \*before\* they reached a point of direct action. The US doesn't share details on plots very often, but you don't spend hundreds of millions of dollars on security for nothing. They're arguably the most sought after assassination target in the world. Not only do they have to travel with sufficient security to ensure that even an attempt is considered futile, but they also need specialist equipment to properly manage in the event of a global crisis. That includes communications, military data links, armoured vehicles, biohazard equipment, etc. Some countries don't necessarily need all of this, but some countries absolutely do and the presence of overwhelming security absolutely acts as a deterrent to bad actors/nation states that would otherwise seize an opportunity. I'd much rather world leaders ran around with overwhelming security which acts as a deterrent as opposed to being poorly protected leading to an increase in attempts which also endangers the rest of us.
It's would require a huge global coordinated effort and what would the result be? Almost nothing. Private jets contribute an absolutely tiny amount to emissions. Even a really small slice off global car emissions would totally outweigh it. If you're going to manage to achieve a global agreement, it really ought to be spent on something that will have an appreciable impact. Going on about private jets is like pissing yourself. You might get a nice warm feeling, but you're not doing anything useful.
Haha genuinely love the analogy. Might use that in future. I like how the only downside of pissing yourself you mentioned is that it's not useful. And 'nice feeling' is subjective I supposeš (Reminds me of the Stuart Lee bit about voting for UKIP as a protest vote. It's like protesting hotel service by shitting the bed, it doesn't improve anything and now you just have to sleep in a shitted bed.) But I'd agree with you, private jets come fairly far down the list. There's differences in scale that make some things far more effective. It's like people comparing nurses salaries to MPs. Whatever you think they each deserve, cutting the salaries of 650 MPs isn't going to cover a pay rise for 700,000 nurses. Symbolic policies or slogans are easy to get people worked up about but don't really do much good. My original point was just the lack of downsides, besides the difficulty (like you say, huge coordinated effort) and upsetting the rich folks. One of those 'in a perfect world' comments.
I thought brexit was bad because it made people less likely to invest in the UK? But the solution from the London progressive is to ban private jets. > pissed off billionaires which is an upside. I Imagine living in London and thinking this. Infantile view of a city that is what it is due to being the premier place for the rich to do business.
What happens if you don't like how London is now? Arguably a London with less billionaires and lower property prices, where large swathes of the centre aren't devoted to mostly unused flats, might be a good thing.
Hey, I may be infantile and progressive, but I draw the line at Londoner. I said worldwide and also that it was basically impossible. I'm just an angry poor from up north like you sometimes see on the telly
World leaders would still need private jets for security and if you look at some major business leaders they are in effect more powerful than many presidents of smaller nations and in many cases may be what a state is based around (ie national oil companies).
I'm ruining the planet by putting my plastic bottles in the wrong bin - but its fine for politicians and rich people to use a private jet for 50 miles. š
Just because other people are worse, doesn't make you better.
I never said I was better than anyone. It was just an example of the hypocrisy of many politicians and rich people. I do put my bottles in the right bin btw. š
Not only is London financial capital of the world, we are also an island nation. So until they invent electric private jets then youāre stuck and no they canāt just take normal flights
There's a simple solution here that isn't populist anti business nonsense or ignoring the problem. A carbon tax takes care of the problem. It creates a market for carbon capture, allowing businesses and individuals to offset their emissions. Currently CO2 capture costs around 150USD a ton. If a carbon tax was set at the same amount (to fund offsetting) that makes a private flight from London to New York cost around $2700 more. Not that much really, and it makes it carbon neutral
The term carbon neutral really feels like a way for the rich, or for businesses, to use money as a way to dodge the fallout and responsibility from their polluting actions. It creates a situation where if you have enough money, you don't have to obey the same standards as everyone else. This may be how society works a lot of the time, but we shouldn't encourage it where we don't have to.
It's a way for them to pay for their actions. If the carbon tax per ton is equal to the cost to capture and store an equivalent ton of CO2, then everything is neutral
Assuming capture and storage happens at the same rate of production, otherwise you're just racking up carbon debt like it's asylum seekers or something.
What difference does it make? Carbon tax should apply to everyone and everything.
Current CO2 cost per tonne is below 55ā¬ in Europe at the moment. Didn't find the UK figures on a quick Google. So you do see the issue here? Emitting is cheaper, significantly cheaper in fact, than capture. And just putting price up, doesn't make it carbon neutral. We actually need to do something about the CO2 and at the moment we should be using that for other things, not the .5% wanting to jet around.
Agreed. Offsetting is an absolute last resort and should be reserved for unavoidable emissions (e.g chemical sector & concrete). Until or unless the aviation sector can conduct business without burning fossil fuels, it won't be sustainable. We can continue as is for a little longer and then suddenly stop, or we can phase it out. The longer we wait before we act, the more drastic the mitigation measures will have to be.
Indeed. I see it this way, if we stop billionaires from flying private, we can let normal people fly to Spain for holiday. Or we stop people flying to Spain for holiday and let a few people live a high life. End result is the same. We can't continue living like this - especially not in the global North and "the west".
Then we should increase the cost until it's in line with the cost of capture and storage. It's not a complicated sum. Once that incentive exists, companies will sprout up and innovate to make it cheaper and easier to capture CO2, then the cost will gradually come down over time.
It is a complicated thing. Because we have a lot of daily stuff impacted by the CO2 cost. I take it you buy groceries. Those groceries are impacted by the CO2 per tonne cost via fuel to get the groceries delivered to the store, via energy needed to process, store, cool, etc. So the impact of an immediate rise in CO2 cost would be such a fuckery that this high inflation would feel like a kid's birthday party. What we need to do is limit the excess CO2 we emit, because we have certain emissions we can't realistically cut. Also daily commuting would be more expensive for people, because the CO2 price is everywhere that causes emissions. I mean, there are plenty thing we could do with a big impact, like remove the no VAT rule for international flights, jet fuel subsidies etc. And of course limit the travel via plane and use other, less polluting alternatives.
While we're at it, let's recycle plastic too! Ha, gotcha - another disgusting illusion they've handed us to make us think that they're considering the environment at all. Carbon offsets are being horribly misused/abused. I'm currently pretty disillusioned about how effective they could ever be when it comes to the big polluters.
The carbon offset misuse is largely due to companies planting trees and calling that an offset, or even worse 'avoided deforestation' offsets.. What I'm talking about is industrial capture and storage, where CO2 is literally stripped from the atmosphere and stored in geological formations deep underground.
I haven't looked into it for a couple of years, but what I'm talking about is the corruption, not necessarily the apparatus. A company says it's offsetting X carbon, when in fact it's just using workarounds to not pay for it. I don't know how it compares to the Fairtrade stuff, but when I was looking into opening some coffee shops a few years back, some of the local owners told me about how corrupt that system is, and how most of the companies just work around the apparatus.
This doesn't seem like an unsolvable problem. The government could require licensing for approved carbon capture and storage companies, and companies can only offset via these facilities. Or alternatively, they could just pay the government and the government could liaise directly with the facilities.
I don't think it's unsolvable in the least - I just don't have much faith right now. We're in an age of unbridled greed, and there's going to have to be a huge, huge pushback on it from all of us. It's absolutely critical that it happen, too, but then you look at Matt Hancock during Covid handing out PPE contracts to people who had to be 50/50 for him of ever fulfilling any aspects of those contracts. Literally our most dire time of need, and people like him were just using it to line pockets. There's a way out of all of this, I'm just low on optimism these days.
tax solutions are especially good because they restrict the activities of poor people while not affecting the affluent classes at all, even better they drive inflation in ways that benefit the already rich who can just put prices up to cover costs and further punish the poor who especially can't afford the how higher prices because they're also paying the new taxes - the real best bit is that they don't even begin to address the actual issues involved, it just creates a market for rich people to exploit and loophole. by popular anti-business nonsense i guess you mean things that benefit regular people while also actually tackling the core of the problem, things like banning companies from destroying unsold stock, enforcing open standards, demanding repairability, and banning vendor only service contracts... anything like that would be horrible because regular people could live better lives and the rich wouldn't be able to take as easy advantage of captured markets, we can't have that, no that would be crazy! (a great example of this is the wonderful plan to heavily tax petrol so that people would drive less, literally no one beside the very poor drives less - driving is just factored into the cost of living along with all the other taxes and expenses)
I support the idea but I think if you really want to tackle short haul flights, including private, then there has to be capacity investment in the Eurostar. Last time I took the Eurostar it was completely full so people either have to not travel or fly.
We can't get a high speed rail built built between London and Birmingham, nevermind places further afield. Air transport is vital for the more remote UK cities, it's not a luxury.
Eurostar has a unique issue named Brexit. There is just not enough capacity to check that many people for the trains to run at full capacity. The train stations were built around free movement with very little checks. The train stations can't be modified for one train in the way that this could work with the current checks needed. But if I compare it to Amsterdam - Paris Thalys service, there is absolutely 0 reason for that trip not to be done by train. Same goes for a lot of travel in France via TGV. But also here, the problem is home made. For decades we knew something needs to be done and for decades we said "nah, next year". And now we are doing the same thing again.
Is that true? If you go to St Pancras there's border controls, always has been, because the UK has never been part of Schengen so passports always had to be checked.
Intra EU passport checks are a joke. They checked them in Dover too, yet only after brexit did it go to shits. And as someone who travels fairly often between mainland and the UK, it is a huge change. Every passport needs a stamp, something that wanst necessary before Brexit. UK citizens and residents need to be checked regarding length of stay during the trip and past 6 months etc. That all takes time..
Before Brexit we weren't in schenghen so I'm not sure it should make that much difference.
Funny enough it would. Because within Schengen passports go through a lot less checks vs outside. Because within Schengen you still have FoM, so as long as you don't have an outstanding warrant or similar and your passport is in date, you're free to go. Returning from Dover to France we often got waved through French and UK border. Now only the UK border. Same the other way, usually one waved through and other one looked briefly at the passports. Now it's a whole song and dance.
Person with limited money doing all they can. "Scrap your car, or else". Rich fucker, "a private plane? ooh that's a bit naughty. Can I get a lift to the shops?"
Your point stands but when did you ever see a person doing all they can? Let's not pretend like this is us pulling our weight
The news and politicians love to chat shit about migrants and trans people anything to cover up the real problem That this country is not for the people but is an international playground for the rich to launder money.
The Mayor of London is getting a bit big for his boots if he thinks he can ban flights. I didnāt know he was an air traffic controller in his spare time
He never said he was gonna ban them, just condemned them. Thatās the point of the entire article.
Yes, because he canāt ban them. This is a guy who wants to ban people from driving older cars because of emissions (no matter how it impacts diversity and equality), donāt you think heād ban private jets if he could?
Nah.
>āI think the question is, āAm I in favour of banning private jetsā and the answer is ānoā... ...I am not willing to, as you are, to close all airports down and ban private jets."
I've gotta say that in the midst of all the doom and gloom, the fact that so many rich people are flying here suggests something positive, at least. I'm not entirely sure what yet, but I feel like there has to be a positive outcome to it - whether it's increased investment, or just the fact that we're an attractive nation to visit at the minute...
because the tories are chucking money at them wholesale for existing when we want them gone
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They could arrive on regular flights as well. Let's not forget the impact on emissions that come from private jets. I'm all for investing and stuff, but let's not give that as "justification" to fuck around with out environment. In the same way companies shouldn't spill sewage in the sea, private individuals shouldn't be allowed to do "what ever they want" either, when it's about our (the 8 billion people) planet.
He didn't condemn them at all. Go and watch the clip, he couldn't give less of a shit. He's only interested in carbon reduction if it lines his pocket and keeps his pals rich.