Save our summer!
Huge protest to demand that MPs restart holiday f lights and protect 1.6million travel industry jobs
PROTESTERS from the travel industry will descend on Parliament this week in a mass demonstration to highlight the ‘desperate’ situation as borders remain closed.
On Wednesday, 800 staff from businesses including easyJet, Virgin Atlantic, British Airways and the holiday giant TUI will march on College Green in Westminster aiming to force Boris Johnson to extend the green list and save the summer.
The Travel Day of Action was organised to lobby MPs to back fledgling airlines and tourism operators and extend financial support, including the furlough scheme.
Tim Alderslade, chief executive of the trade body Airlines UK, will be among the attendees.
Huw Merriman, Conservative chairman of the Commons travel select committee, said: ‘This lobby is a great opportunity for more MPs to hear first-hand from constituents whose jobs and businesses are at risk from border and travel restrictions.
‘Perhaps the pressure will cause each of the Conservative, Labour and SNP frontbench teams to stop competing as to who can devise the harshest restrictions on international travellers and, as a knock-on, its workforce.’
Ahead of the event companies representing both domestic and overseas travel are writing to MPs to alert them of their ‘desperate’ situation.
One MP said: ‘You’ve got legal pressure cranking up, parliamentary pressure cranking up, and people i n s i d e Government c r a n k i n g up pressure.’
This month former Prime Minister Theresa May launched a blistering attack on the Government’s travel restrictions, which have left global Britain ‘shut for business’.
She told MPs: ‘It is incomprehensible, I think, that one of the most heavily vaccinated countries in the world is the one that is most reluctant to give its citizens the f r e e d o ms those vaccinations should support.’
Today, another former Cabinet Minister also hits out at the ‘devastating travel ban that has put tourism and aviation on their knees’.
Writing in today’s Mail on Sunday, Dr Liam Fox says: ‘As a former International Trade Secretary, it pai ns me to l o o k a t a hal f - empty Heathrow Airport, one of the world’s great transport hubs, and a centre not only of passenger travel but many of our exporting businesses.
He added: ‘ To talk of closing our borders, as one Government adviser did last week, is to lose the plot.’
Unite, the trade union, is also organising a demonstration at Manchester Airport, where staff will hold placards and post pictures of the protest on social media.
At Heathrow, staff and union officials will highlight the impact of the travel ban by posing for photos on empty runways and in closed terminals.
Tim Hawkins, chief of staff at Mancheste r Ai r p o r t s Group, said the aim of the day was to ‘demonstrate the level of concern there is among people right across the aviation industry’.
He added: ‘ We are really concerned we are facing a summer with the prospect of so little traffic. Over a million jobs rely on the aviation industry in the UK. We would really hope Ministers will listen to these concerns.
‘There is a huge disparity of the UK’s approach and other countries, where travel is being allowed under much less stringent conditions – people with vaccines can travel, and if you haven’t been vaccinated you need a predeparture test.’ New data this weekend shows the UK’s travel industry has been the hardest hit in Europe, with a 73 per cent collapse in flights to and from the UK compared with 2019. Industry estimates show more than a third (37 per cent) of the UK’s 526,000 travel and tourism jobs could be wiped out due to the pandemic. Luke Petherbridge, of the travel agent and tour operators’ associati on Abta, one of the protest’s organisers, said: ‘The UK travel industry has h a d n o wh e r e near the level of support needed to d e a l wi t h the devastating impact on people’s jobs, livelihoods and businesses.
‘ Figures don’t do j usti ce in explaining the financial and emotional toll this has taken on those working in travel.’
Meanwhile, Cabinet support for opening up foreign travel is growing. A Government source said: ‘Accepting that having the second vaccine is what counts, there comes a moment where we can say we have done everything we can.
‘We can’t suspend the economy i ndefinitely. People are really hoping this is not going to be startstop any more.’
Despite promises to open up travel on May 17 with the launch of a ‘green list’ of countries that can be visited without the need to quarantine, the only popular holiday destination, Portugal, was removed shortly after it was added. The list is next up for review on June 28.
Tory MP Marcus Fysh, who voted last week against the lockdown delay and backs reopening the UK’s borders, warned of ‘ creeping authoritarianism’ and attacked the lockdown delay and the Government ‘over-egging’ the risk of a rise in infections.
It comes after Ryanair and the owners of London Stansted and Manchester airports took the Government to court over its refusal to reopen Britain’s borders. Virgin Atlantic and British Airways have also joined the legal challenge.
Legal papers say the decisionmaking process behind the Government’s traffic lights system of green, amber and red travel destinations ‘ lacks transparency in a fundamental way’, with no scientific data disclosed for any green or amber country except Portugal.
Yesterday, Derek Provan, chief executive of AGS Airports, which owns Aberdeen, Glasgow and Southampton airports, said: ‘Whilst not a direct participant of this legal challenge, we fully support it.
‘ Throughout this pandemic we have heard Government state on numerous occasions that it is working with the aviation industry.
‘ The fact it has taken a legal c hal l e nge f r o m o ur i ndustry colleagues to call for greater transparency around the traffic light system is a clear indication that there continues to be a fundamental lack of engagement.’
He said moving Portugal to the amber list was a ‘catastrophic blow for an industry on its knees’.
‘Catastrophic blow for an industry on its knees’