In a rare moment of decency, Ryanair has announced it will no longer charge parents to sit next to their own children. Let us pause to marvel at the sheer absurdity of what came before: a budget airline, already notorious for charging for everything from printed boarding passes to the right to breathe, had the audacity to demand extra coin for the privilege of keeping a five-year-old from screaming into the ear of a stranger. This was not commerce.
This was a shakedown dressed in corporate livery. But the British consumer, that long-suffering beast of burden, finally bellowed loud enough to be heard. The Department for Transport, perhaps alarmed by visions of toddlers consigned to cargo holds, stepped in.
Ryanair blinked. And we are meant to applaud. Yet let us not mistake this for a triumph of regulation.
This is a victory for common decency, a concept that has been in steady retreat since the first vending machine charged extra for a bag of crisps. The real scandal is that it took a government intervention to force an airline to do what any half-decent human being would do without a second thought. We have reached a point where the baseline of acceptable behaviour must be legislated.
We fine parents for letting children cry on planes, then turn around and charge them to prevent it. This is the moral squalor of an era that has mistaken profit for purpose. Ryanair will still charge for water, for legroom, for the oxygen we breathe if it could.
But for one brief, shining moment, the family unit has been protected from the market’s invisible fist. Savour it. It will not last.
