It has happened. Ryanair, that airborne purveyor of misery and outrageously priced sandwiches, has capitulated. The airline has reversed its policy of separating children from their parents, a practice so needlessly cruel that it belonged less in the annals of commercial aviation and more in the pages of a Victorian penny dreadful.
The victory, if one can call it that, belongs to the UK's consumer rights watchdog, which had the audacity to demand that families be allowed to sit together without paying a ransom. Huzzah, we cry, from the cheap seats. Yet, as with all things in this late-stage consumerist farce, the celebration must be tempered with a dose of sober analysis.
For this is not a triumph of moral awakening, but a whimper of practicality. Ryanair, let us be clear, did not change its policy because its corporate heart grew three sizes. It changed because a regulator poked it with a stick, and the cost of defending the policy outweighed the meagre revenue from family separation fees.
This is the logic of our age: virtue is merely an optimisation algorithm. The real story here is not that decency prevailed, but that we live in a world where such a policy was considered viable in the first place. Consider the historical parallel.
During the Fall of Rome, the legions were paid in salt. Today, we pay for the salt that is rubbed into our wounds by budget airlines. The analogies are facile, I know, but they serve a purpose.
We have become a civilisation that tolerates the intolerable, that normalises the grotesque, all in the name of a cheap flight to Malaga. The 'parent seating fee' was always more than a surcharge, it was a philosophical statement. It declared that the family unit, that bedrock of society, was a negotiable convenience.
That a child's need for security could be monetised. That a mother's anxiety was a revenue stream. And we accepted it.
We argued over it, complained about it, but ultimately we paid it. The watchdog's intervention is a corrective, not a cure. It is a bandage on a wound that is festering.
For every policy reversed, a dozen remain, quietly extracting indignity fee after indignity fee. We celebrate this victory because it is rare, because it feels like justice. But let us not mistake a single battle for the war.
The war is against the creeping commodification of every human interaction, the reduction of life to a series of 'optional extras'. Ryanair's reversal is a morsel thrown to the masses. We should take it, eat it, and then demand the full feast.
