Now is a good time to fly, despite – or, rather, because of – all the bad news. Paradoxically, our awareness of the terrorist threat makes air travel safer than ever. And, in a longer-term view, air travel has never been so cheap, and may never be so cheap again. It is certainly desirable that air travel should become much more expensive in the next few years.
This is not merely in order to pay for the “sky marshals” proposed by the Government’s review of airline safety. (Whatever the pros and cons of guns on board, enhanced security will cost money.) Nor for higher airline margins in the wake of United Airlines’ teetering on the edge of bankruptcy in the US.Above all, it is about ensuring that passengers pay the full environmental cost of air travel. The Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution reported last week on the effect on climate change of the rapid growth in aircraft emissions.

This is a long-term challenge to the world’s leaders, who have only just begun to notice the blip on the radar. Although noise pollution and the planning of new runways are important, and have dominated the debate in this country, the question of global warming is the most serious in the long run.Unfortunately, the members of the Royal Commission tend towards the typical green activists’ mistakes. They urge the Government to stop building any more airports or expanding any existing ones. That is a crude and counter-productive way of engineering higher ticket prices. It was not helped by snobbish comments about the ease with which people fly to Venice for the weekend now instead of, as in the old days, for two weeks.The first problem is that aviation fuel is too cheap. It should be taxed as heavily as fuel for other forms of transport.

The second problem is that landing slots at airports are too cheap, and allocated by governments to favour national carriers. They are a scarce resource which should be sold to the highest, most efficient, bidder.Air travel is one of the great liberations of modern technology. People should travel to the four corners of the earth – for the weekend if they want. But they must pay for the environmental damage they cause, including the local costs of building new airports..

If the legacy of the firefighters’ strike is – as well as a modernised fire service – a further weakening of the role of unions in Labour’s constitution, it will be all to the good

Andy Gilchrist has really blown it now. As if his handling of the strike had not been inept enough to date, the leader of the Fire Brigades Union has now linked the strike with his desire to replace the Blair government with a “Real Labour” one.
His attempt to take his words back was unconvincing: “I don’t want to and I have no plan to wreck Mr Blair’s career.” That was almost as good as the Foreign Office’s attempt to redefine “regime change” in Iraq as “the regime changing itself”.Mr Gilchrist was foolish to address the hard-left Socialist Campaign Group rally in Manchester, a forum in which every strike is by definition political. He was foolish to say it was “disgraceful” that Gordon Brown could find £1bn for a war to “bomb innocent men, women and children” in Iraq but could not find a much smaller sum to settle the firefighters’ dispute. The Independent does not support a war in Iraq, but the argument that any money spent fighting such a war would be better spent on public service at home has nothing to do with it.