It seems the ghosts of Victorian workhouses have taken flight, courtesy of Ryanair. The budget airline now faces an investigation for charging parents extra merely to sit with their own children. One might say they have perfected the art of squeezing pennies from the desperate, but this is more than mere profiteering. It is a symptom of a civilisation that has utterly forgotten the meaning of family, of duty, and of basic decency.
Let us not pretend this is an isolated case. For years, we have watched the slow erosion of communal values in favour of the almighty algorithm. Airlines, that great metaphor for modern life, now treat children as cargo to be monetised. The parent who wishes to hold their toddler’s hand during turbulence must pay a premium. This is not capitalism. This is intellectual and moral decadence.
Compare this to the great age of rail travel in the nineteenth century. Then, children under three travelled free, and families were seated together as a matter of course. Did the rail barons of the day weep over lost revenue? Of course not. They understood that a society that abandons its young for a few shillings is a society that has lost its soul. Now we have Ryanair, whose business model seems lifted from a Dickensian orphanage: pay extra for warmth, for comfort, for the basic human right to not have your child sit next to a stranger who may or may not have washed.
The investigation, launched by the UK’s Civil Aviation Authority, is welcome but hardly sufficient. It will likely result in a slap on the wrist, a fine that the airline will shrug off as a cost of doing business. Meanwhile, the underlying rot continues. We have created a world where the balance sheet is the only moral compass, where every human interaction is transactional. The family, that last refuge against the market, is now itself up for sale.
Some will say: why not just book a seat in advance? This misses the point. The issue is not that Ryanair offers a service, but that it has deliberately engineered a system to exploit anxiety. The seat at checkout is hidden, the fees are buried, the option to sit together is priced as an “extra”. This is not innovation. It is predation.
What does this tell us about our age? It tells us that we have reached a point where even the most sacred bonds can be commodified. We are living through the late Roman Empire of airline travel: short-term profit, moral blindness, and a population too worn down to complain. The barbarians are not at the gates. They are at the check-in desk, demanding £25 for the privilege of holding your child’s hand during take-off.
And yet, there is a lesson here. Every age of decline produces its own resistance. The outcry over this investigation, the public shaming on social media, these are signs that the instinct for justice is not dead. We still feel, somewhere deep, that to charge a parent for sitting with their child is an abomination. We still know, in our bones, that a society that allows this has lost its way.
So let us demand more than an investigation. Let us demand a return to principle. Let us legislate that no child shall be separated from its parent on a public conveyance, be it a plane, a train, or a bus. Let us remind Ryanair and its ilk that some things are not for sale. Or we can continue to descend into a world where everything has a price, and nothing has a value.
