Harsh new taxes on air travel, including a strict personal flight "allowance", will be unveiled by the Conservatives tomorrow as part of a plan that would penalise business travellers, holidaymakers and the tourist industry.And it gets worse:
The Conservatives will also suggest - most controversially of all - rationing individuals to as little as a single short-haul flight each year; any further journeys would attract progressively higher taxes, a leaked document entitled Greener Skies suggests.EU Referendum and Samizdata have covered this but haven't mentioned the Scottish angle.
Edinburgh has been one of Britain's fastest growing airports over the last decade or so. Much of this expansion has been in business travel that's connected with Edinburgh's huge financial sector. As well as more than 50 flights per day to London we now have two daily services to the US. None of this would have been imaginable when the Tories were last in power.
Ted Heath all but destroyed Scottish fishing when he it sold out to the EU and now the Tories plan to wipe out our most important industry. How long will the Royal Bank (the world's fifth largest) keep its headquarters here under Cameron's proposals? It's not a coincidence that it's located right next to the airport. HBoS, Standard Life, Aegon and the rest are hardly likely to stay here either if their people can't fly up and down to London whenever required.
So why didn't Cameron announce this in Perth? I expect that this omission wasn't deliberate. I doubt if anyone in Notting Hill even knows about the importance of air travel to Scotland.
A conspiracy theorist might think that this plan had been drawn up by the London-based banks to kill off their Scottish competitors. Here's another theory: Cameron is in the pay of Alex Salmond. Nothing else makes sense does it?
Unless of course the Tories are completely bonkers...
2 comments:
Comments made on previous template:
Neil Craig
I must admit I don't understand the Scottish Tories. They have an electoral system which does not disenfranchise supportes od minority parties. They are faced with 3 big state socialist parties, the most radical of which won the last election by promising a free market Irish style programme they haven't delivered, but which have barely a paper between them.
They could argue for economic success & some genuinly new radical ideas & really stir some enthusiasm for them. Instead they went into the last election on a programme of more money for council housing & drug users & are now lying back to let the Luddites walk over them
And Bob I think it is actually possible to dispute that we are suffering from catastrophic warming. I think it is even possible to ask you to produce any evidence whatsoever (not assertions but actual scientific evidence) that it is true, in the knowledge that NOBODY else has produced it.
2 April 2009, 19:00:22 GMT+01:00
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Neil Craig
i think the conspiracy theory falls since, though it will hit Edinburgh harder, it will still hit London.
I think the bonkers option is the only one that fits.
Talking of which, Bob it is, at the very least, possible to dispute that we are all sweltering in catastrophic heat today. Global temperature is falling.
17 December 2008, 18:42:55 GMT
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Mark c
D'ohhh; age and habit takes its toll. I meant of course the Czech Republic. And to think I spent three weeks touring the place on my bike last year. Dummkopf!
19 March 2007, 12:10:17 GMT
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Mark c
Cameron's laughable Scottish visit some weeks ago, compounded by the "discussion points" on limits on flights and increased flight taxes (I live in the Northern Isles), added to his pledge to "press for change" in the EU by allying with Czechoslovakia (how the EU heads of State must be laughing!)and his proposals which seem to involve attempts to outspend Gordon Brown have resulted in my resigning membership of the Scottish Conservatives. Now, where's my UKIP candidate? Agree that Cameron must be in the pay of Slippery Salmond (who by the way, whilst full of himself and his donations and new supporters, is very very quiet about personal taxes whilst promising to slash business taxes. Quiet about the EU, too).
19 March 2007, 09:45:28 GMT
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john b
FWIW, I regularly need to travel from central London to central Edinburgh; the difference between train and plane is an absolute maximum of 30 minutes each way, with no clear winner. If the plane is on time, it's slightly ahead; but it's much more likely to be 30 or 60 minutes late than the train.
(I accept that the plane wins for trips from suburban Midlothian to suburban southeast England, but the kind of trips you're talking about here will be from centre to centre.)
15 March 2007, 12:07:28 GMT
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jameshigham
That's certainly a three whisky conundrum to mull over.
15 March 2007, 09:31:27 GMT
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Andrew Duffin
Is Bob being serious?
I assumed it was a spoof comment...
14 March 2007, 12:26:29 GMT
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Hal
Bob you are a tribute to the effectiveness of popular propaganda on a huge scale. Belief in human responsibility for glogal warming is now universal, politically correct, and therefore holy writ already. Next there will be penalties for saying otherwise.
13 March 2007, 08:51:54 GMT
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Bob
Get real. Global warming is caused by human activity. This is an indisputable fact, and you're living in cloud cuckoo land if you don't believe it. And the only reason you don't believe it is because you find it inconvenient for the promotion of your ideology. Being blinded by ideology is usually something you accuse your opponents of.
An expansion in flights will cause increasing problems. I can imagine that it is useful for an international business to have access to flights, but in the future, we're just going to have to get used to not using planes so much. And electronic communication can be almost as effective.
12 March 2007, 22:49:38 GMT
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Hal
Now be honest! Is there more than a dozen Scottish Conservative voters in the SS Republic of Scotland? Well is there?
So why worry about aviation in Scotland.
The real mystery is why he is so certain that human influence has any relationship to Global warming. I thought Channel 4 had killed that silly idea.
12 March 2007, 13:24:19 GMT
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Andrew Ian Dodge
Bill...ugh I wrote that comment in a seething anger and missed out on a few punctuation bits. My soon-to-be wife Kim was obvious in her anger when she heard of Camoron's plan.
12 March 2007, 09:09:06 GMT
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stephen ottridge
April 1st is coming up soon, surely this was released early?
Everyone watch the Great Global Warming Conspiracy.
http://video.google.ca/videoplay?docid=9005566792811497638
11 March 2007, 22:35:00 GMT
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Bill (Scotland)
Actually I am convince[d] it[']s the influence of that envirofascist dolt Zak Goldsmith
Sounds about right, unfortunately.
11 March 2007, 16:09:16 GMT
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Andrew Ian Dodge
Actually I am convince its the influence of that envirofascist dolt Zak Goldsmith who got the shadow cabinet stoned and got them to agree to this idiotic policy.
11 March 2007, 15:15:29 GMT
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Ken
Unless of course the Tories are completely bonkers
Can’t argue with that. Except to say it was not just the Scottish fishing industry.
11 March 2007, 12:04:34 GMT
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