Airport chaos shows the decline of UK service

How is it that the more technologically advanced Britain becomes, the less efficiently it operates?

Don’t talk to me about British Airways. Ten minutes before we got into the cab to take us to the airport, I glanced at my phone to check the terminal number and discovered that our flight to Spain was cancelled.

I wasn’t alone. According to The Telegraph website, tens of thousands of Brits were stranded at airports – while, coincidentally, the first cargo of refugees had that very morning been deported to Rwanda. It seems that if you want to go abroad this summer, your best shot is to apply for asylum in Britain.

The half-term airline chaos is one of the first tangible signs of the damage done by lockdown: that’s also why thousands can’t get a driving test or see a doctor. But I suspect it’s not just a post-covid phenomenon, for British service has been going south for years.

Take flying. Legroom has shrunk over decades. BA had already experimented with ending free food on short haul (now reversed). During

Covid, airlines took public money while laying off staff and then failing to sufficiently rehire, such that when they did reopen, they were unable to honour tickets that were bought in good faith. They should’ve invested in better pay and conditions, and years of campaigning for the right to flatten the land around Heathrow for a new runway suddenly look rather silly.

Things are not well-run. For example: I called BA to demand a refund. I was told this wasn’t necessary as I was still scheduled to fly, that I had rebooked to do so in three days’ time.

I replied that not only was this untrue but it implied I was a lunatic, for I apparently intended to arrive in Seville late Tuesday, spend one day touring the city and then return on Thursday. The man put me on hold. He returned to tell me it was the computer that had rescheduled me and I was in fact entitled to my money back.

There was no “sorry”. No “you were right”. Time and again in my adventures in capitalism, the product is rubbish, the service is indifferent, and, rather than admit fault, the providers gaslight you into thinking they did nothing wrong. A shout-out here to the engineer who turned up at my flat, unarranged, while I was out, then later sent me an email to inform me he’d be coming at the time he’d already been – and if I wanted to rebook, this would incur “an additional charge”.

Also worthy of mention is the carpenter who bid to put up a bookcase: he wouldn’t paint it, he said (“I never do the painting”) but about a month later sent me a quote for £1,620. A chap who offered to install it and paint it, quoted me £3,105. I can only imagine he was going to use liquid gold. One explanation for these prices, other than that I look like a rich mug, is that Britain is now so fully employed that it’s become harder to find workers, be it baggage handlers or builders (I’m perfectly willing to buy happiness, but no one will take my money). But this doesn’t by itself explain why our way of life feels so stretched, despite what we are constantly told are the blessings of modernity.

A reader wrote a letter to this newspaper yesterday pointing out that in 1959, he walked into his driving centre hoping to get a test that afternoon and was disappointed to be told he’d have to wait a week. How can it be, with all our internet and apps, that it now takes months rather than days? Paradoxically, the more technologically advanced Britain becomes, the less efficiently it operates. In my 20s, when I went abroad, I would go to a travel agent’s, buy everything in one place, and leave holding the necessary documents. Today, just purchasing the insurance for Spain was purgatory because the policy I ordered wouldn’t “sync” with my online account, which meant I couldn’t access it. “We’ll ring you back,” said the Post Office. They never did. To make certain I was covered, I wound up buying two policies for a holiday I didn’t take.

I was lucky to speak to someone. Bank branches are shutting fast; the human element is withdrawing from view. Corporations disguise how cold and indifferent they can be with campaigns of faux compassion: “Yes, we have left you to shiver in the dark for six months, but we love Gay Pride!” And a large part of the problem is, there is no political pressure to change, for the Tories are no longer the party of the consumer, pushing the principle of “the best service at the lowest price”.

Instead they flatter the providers, lauding and lavishing cash on the NHS even though one can call an ambulance for a heart attack and, by the time it’s arrived, have died of old age.

Lockdown was in a sense the apotheosis of producer capture, and its aftershocks – those missed appointments or cancelled exams – are merely an exaggeration of what we had to put up with before, a speeded-up decline, but the same direction of travel.

As for me, I found myself dressed up with no place to go, shivering in a linen shirt, and decided that if flying was impossible, we wouldn’t unpack but decamp to a spa in Britain instead.

That’s how I swapped Seville for Norfolk. The hotel was OK, though it was crammed with kids and I was the only adult dressed like David Niven, but every rain storm reinforced that this wasn’t Andalusia.

I was miserable till the last night, when we bought some fish and chips and ate them outdoors. Overlooking the steamy marshes and lush rhododendrons, I remembered that England, for all her faults, is the most beautiful place in the world.