Airlines are gaming our political system for fossil-fuelled profit – on top of the multi-billion pound bailout

The climate column: If the aviation industry can have almost permanent access to the Treasury, transport ministers and the media, it is time climate protection groups did too

Our political parties need to stop being training grounds for fossil-fuelled political lobbyists. It is time to expose the political-party apparatchiks who use the experience and knowledge they get from working in government to create lucrative careers promoting the fossil fuelled industries that destroy our planet.

For the last two months I despaired watching the deluge of media coverage supporting the aviation industry’s campaign to get multi-billion government bailouts. They had put no financial reserves by for a rainy day and now they want taxpayer-funded corporate socialism.

Ryanair and Easyjet demand favours from government, whether it’s zero safe distancing on planes, destruction of the protective quarantine or huge bailouts, on top of the billions already received in furlough grants.

At the peak of this campaign, I noticed that there was a new parliamentary group of MPs called the “Future of Aviation Group” who were leading the charge to destroy the cv19 quarantine protections.

Most people do not realise the difference between such ad-hoc industry parliamentary groups and the formal statutory parliamentary committees, who carry out detailed research into industries and adjudicate what is in the public interest. The other parliamentary groups are basically MP clubs, which promote a particular industry. Frequently they are pulled together by a professional political lobbying firm, paid for by industry corporations, who provide and pay for secretarial and media relations support behind the scenes.

By investing very little money, the corporations can get their views out in the papers, without their fingerprints. The public thinks the statements are the considered view of a statutory parliamentary committee, when it is nothing but corporate propaganda.

So, when I read of this new “Future of Aviation Group”, I smelt the usual rat I contacted their chair Henry Smith MP to ask who to approach for media comments, as I suspected that it would be an aviation lobbying firm behind the press releases. But his office never got back to me. I then found a list of aviation industry bodies supporting the group, including IATA, the Airport Operators Association and Airlines UK. I emailed the AOA to see if they knew the media contact By sheer stroke of luck, a man called Paul Gaffney rang back to say he was a consultant acting for the AOA, but were also doing the press work for the MPs’ group. I then googled him and found he was a co-director of Tendo Consultancy, another lobbying firm.

This consultancy includes Laura Holloway, former adviser to the Tory leader of the House of Lords, Will de Peyer, former adviser to Danny Alexander, Lib Dem chief secretary to the Treasury, and Gaffney, former adviser to a number of senior front-bench Liberal Democrat MPs.

Unusually, this particular lobbying outfit did not have apparatchiks from former Labour governments, which other fossil-fuelled and nuclear lobbying firms usually have. When we asked how Tendo Consulting can justify using the experience their lobbyists gained with senior frontbench MPs and at the Treasury, to promote the climate-destroying aviation industry and make a profit, they failed to reply.

Not only do they do aviation lobbying, Tendo also employs Peter Carroll who claims responsibility for the Fair Fuel Campaign, one of the most devastatingly damaging lobbying operations in UK history, resulting in over £110bn in fuel-duty tax-cuts for the fossil-fuelled motor lobby since 2011.

This cut helped deprive the NHS of billions in desperately needed resources.

When climate protectors chant, “we need system change, not climate change” they rarely specify which actual systems need to change. But from my 12 years in mainstream politics, I know we need to stop corporations taking advantage of our democracy by hiring senior members from the top of our political parties, which enables them to game the system.

Whilst climate protectors were stuck at home during the lockdown, the media was flooded with pro-aviation press releases. And the media failed to give almost any space to the aviation industry’s opponents, despite Siberia being simultaneously in meltdown from record temperatures of 17C above average.

This meltdown, of course, is risking more lethal pandemics than even Covid-19, from the melting frozen pathogens in the permafrost. The UN issued a statement that humanity was now in a race for survival.

“Let’s get back flying, shopping and driving,” screamed the headlines. Even one travel writer proclaimed that holidaying abroad would reduce Britain’s risk from infections. It was as though all those marches by Greta Thunberg’s student strikers or the thousands of arrested Extinction Rebellion earth protectors had never happened.

There is also another major economic downside to bailing out the UK’s addiction to flying. This is because the bailouts will enable millions of richer Britons to spend their holiday money abroad, when the UK’s leisure industry is in economic dire-straits.

The UK has an enormous negative balance of payments deficit for tourism. UK holidaymakers abroad spend a whopping £33bn more than tourists visiting the UK spend here. Imagine how many jobs in the coming depression that £33bn could protect in the UK, if it was spent at home instead?

The billions squandered on the bucket-shop airlines could be used to give a £500 tax-credit to those choosing to holiday at home in the UK, as the Italian government is doing. This saves Italian tourism jobs and slashes the carbon emissions for Italians’ holidays.

We need to crack down on the corporate manipulation of our government. If the aviation industry can have almost permanent access to the Treasury, transport ministers and the media, it is time climate protection groups did too. Parliament should make it illegal to be a corporate lobbyist and simultaneously a member of a political party.

It is time to end the system by which these political party members use their party membership to train as corporate lobbyists and advocate for fossil-fuelled corporate profits.

With the planet on fire, we need a democracy fit for purpose.