BAA

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Last week the managing director of Edinburgh Airport, Gordon Dewar, became chairman of the Edinburgh Tourism Action Group (ETAG). Dewar talks interchangeably about the needs of the airport and tourist industry. Surely increasing tourism means expanding the airport to allow more passengers to fly here from abroad?

It's not quite as simple as that. Firstly, British people fly twice as much as anyone else in the world. We do this because we're an island, but also because the aviation industry is such a powerful lobbyist. The impact on our tourism industry is dire: each year we spend £20 billion more abroad than foriegn tourists spend here. Visitors from overseas only make up 28% of the passengers flying to Edinburgh. The rest are Brits returning home.

This aviation-driven tourism strategy is unsustainable and embarassing. Remember the Homecoming campaign? Instead of empowering the managing director of the City’s airport we should be encouraging British people to holiday at home. Putting Dewar in charge of tourism is like leaving the fox in charge of the chicken coop.

The appointment puts BAA in an incredibly strong position to fight any increase in passenger duty or tourism taxes. It will allow the airport free reign to promote its expansion plans, which would lead to more noise and carbon emissions. And by equating itself with tourism, you can be sure that they won't be short of cash for expansion. Roll over while we rub your belly BAA.

The Airport Operators Association has just whacked out a report claiming that the UK would lose £30 billion a year if we don't sign a global aviation deal at Copenhagen, as well as putting 700,000 jobs at risk. It seems maths is not the airline industry's strongest point.

The report concludes that the UK aviation industry contributes £18.4 billion to the UK economy, and employs 234,000 people. Now I'm not the best at sums, but £30 billion doesn't equal £18.4 billion, and 700,000 is not the same as 234,000. So where's the extra jobs and cash coming from?

This is all a bit complicated, so bear with me while I try and explain my confusion.

1. The industry is currently supposed to be worth £18.4 billion and employing 234,000 people. These figures are pretty huge, and have historically been arrived at using all sorts of fiscal gymnastics, such as including anyone employed near an airport doing things vaguely related to the industry as directly employed by them. But let's take the figures at face value for a second.
2. No global deal means we lose £30 billion and 700,000 jobs - figures far greater than the industry is supposed to be worth to the economy. These figures are forecasts: i.e. they are numbers made by projecting current earnings and employment levels into the future.
3. They have to do this calculation twice: once for 'what the industry would be worth with a deal' and once for 'what the industry would be worth without a deal'. In the former, the rate of annual growth must be higher: i.e. there must be more planes and more airlines making more profit with a global deal than without (otherwise the global deal would lose the industry money).
4. Both scenarios assume a particular rate of growth. This rate of growth is basically the multiplier you apply to the present figure to work out what the given value for the industry's output in year 20XX will be. Both growth rates, and I cannot stress this enough, are chosen by the consultants (normally based on past trends) and cannot account for real life factors, like the massive recession we're currently in, or the impact of CO2 limits on airlines.
5. The industry would need to be worth substantially more than £30 billion at this arbitrary point in the future from which they are measuring. It has to be worth more than £30 billion because otherwise there wouldn't be an industry left - which is too far-fetched for even a report of this poor quality.
6. Both valuations are fictional because they are entirely based on forecasts. The industry might be worth X in the future, and it might also be worth Y, but neither scenario is guaranteed.
7. In other words, the report's authors have picked two numbers from the ether, declared one to be the value of the industry without a global deal, and one to be the value of the industry without a deal. They've then announced the difference between the two as the impact of the deal on the UK economy. (Ditto for job creation.)

This is a very long-winded way of saying that this report is a pile of nonsense, littered with completely insane predictions and madcapped ideas of what the future will look like. Back of a fag packet doesn't really cut it: whichever analyst cobbled this together should be held up as a shining example of how economics doesn't work, and barred from ever writing a economic analysis ever again.

I should also point out that the industry enjoys a £10 billion subsidy because it pays no fuel duty or VAT, and that we have a £20 billion tourism deficit. So an industry worth £18.4 billion (if we take those vested intrests' word for it) is already costing us £30 billion each year - global deal, or no deal.

Source: Flickr

Apologies for the lack of blog post yesterday declaring the conflict to be over and thanking everyone from my stylist to my cat's stylist to the drama teacher who believed in me. I was climbing in the Peak District, having first phoned BAA to check that they weren't planning to make any big announcements while I was away. Their publicist assured me that they weren't, so I packed my bags and went.

But through the impenetrable morning fog came a quiet vibrating. Leo: "Seen the news?" Me: "No, just drizzle and sheep." Leo: "BAA's canceled the third runway." Me: "Ah. Nice." Leo: "Oh, and half of Greenpeace is on the roof of Parliament."

So BAA has told Theresa Villiers that there's not to be a planning application submitted before the election, and Villiers has sworn that scrapping the third runway is a manifesto commitment. Unless the polls are wrong (and some of us who grew up under Thatcher might be wishing that they were) the Conservatives will win the next election. Ipso facto, no new runway at Heathrow.

At the moment it's all speculation, but it doesn't take a genius to work out that expansion at Stansted and Heathrow is pretty sunk. But that doesn't mean that the battle is over. Across the UK craven councillors, regional development tossers and the Secretary of State for Climate Change are all trying to get regional airports expanded. While the third runway may have been the symbol of climate illiteracy, regional airport expansion is a testament to the self-important: "Bristol has to have a great big airport or I'll feel inadequate when I meet councillors from other cities."

So rest assured: Plane Stupid is not giving up and going home. While last week was an awesome one for climate change activists - agreement on deforestation in the Amazon, no Kingsnorth, no third runway - there's still plenty of fight to be had. Over the next year we'll be taking on the regional airport expansion programme and that great generator of demand, deliberately misleading airline adverts ("Fly to Barcelona right fucking now or you'll have nothing to talk about at work on Monday"). We'd really like you to come along for the ride.

In fact, why not start now by grabbing your mates and dragging them to the Great Climate Swoop next weekend? You're also invited to Copenhagen in December, and why not join us as we occupy the runway of... oh wait, that action's a secret. You'll just have to wait and see.

Source: Flickr

Ask almost anyone under 30 what got them into politics and protesting, and I'll bet you a fiver they mention the Iraq war. For me, nothing symbolised the arrogance of Government more than a war no one wanted, which achieved nothing except the slaughter of hundreds of British troops and hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians.

So BAA's latest PR campaign, destined for page 13 of local newspapers everywhere, makes me go a special kind of angry. We've already endured them press releasing the launch of the Bike to Work scheme as being part of a carbon reduction strategy; now we're subjected to Operation Patchwork Quilt.

OPQ is a hearts and minds spectacular, in which BAA took all their old security guard uniforms (otherwise destined for the rubbish bin) and gave them to Help for Heroes, a charity which seems dedicated to ignoring the single easiest way we could help the troops - getting them out of the war - in favour of blind patriotism and flag waving. Somewhere along the line they were dutifully stiched into quilts to be given to injured soldiers.

Now I'm sure everyone injured in Iraq and Afghanistan (soldiers and civilians alike) is crying out for a quilt, and that BAA's gratutious attempt to appear part of the community has touched their hearts. After all, a new quilt is a perfect replacement for having an arm or a leg blown off by a roadside bomb in a country you can't find on a map where no one wants you to be - especially if you come back to find your once peaceful village is now under the flightpath of a newly expanded airport.