That Was The Week That Was 25-29 January
All together now – Chaos! A week for the misery-guts
Everyone likes coordinated action. Who does not vote for people, governments, families and companies working in perfect harmony and synchronisation? We all do. Of course we all do! Poetry in motion is what we all want; and what we all want from others too. Imagine being the sort of misery-guts that wants things to fall apart, for the falcon not to hear the falconer, as Yeats warned, for the trapeze artists to miss.
If you are such a misery-guts, this week, the week that was, was a good week for you. For the rest of us… not so much. Monday started with the Commission pushing for additional safeguards for travel from outside the EU. Not a good start, if you are involved in international transport, but there is a pandemic on… But the Commission went further. It also wanted ‘an update to the free movement approach to coordinated restrictions’. Whow. Coordination of free movement restrictions? Restrictions that we all apply that makes movement not free, in a coordinated way? How free is coordinated movement at the best of times, and how much freer can it be once restricted? Is that what that means? Your guess is as good as the next persons’, frankly. To put it mildly, it begs a lot of questions.
Sometimes, on a Monday, you can see where things are going to go this week and your best bet is to roll over and try to get back to sleep. For the week. This was one of those weeks. What can go right after a start like that? Into the gale of this semantic and intellectual blizzard, calls for urgent coordination for the recovery of the travel and tourism sector were always going to get lost…
So when on Tuesday the formal presentation of the Portuguese presidency which you will pleased to know hit all the buzzword bingo targets – sustainability, digital, mobility – no one was paying attention. Borders were closing, and the only thing coordinated seemed to be the uncoordination. Even the US got into the act, demanding negative test results before flying from Europe. To the extent it was digital, it was two-fingered.
Wednesday did show some coordination – the Council agreed a mandate for slot relief. This would be the coordinated response that the legacy airlines and airports want, yes, the airports too, to give a huge present to the legacy carriers. Not 80:20, not 60:40, but the right to return half of all slot series and then 50:50. So it is actually a 25% obligation, because apparently we need the level of commitment to connectivity that only being arsed to operate 25% of the time gives you. Give that sort of commitment and you can stop anyone else earning any goodwill or priority, or you know, competing. Why are the legacy carriers (and, frankly, the Commission) are so afraid of competition? That is coordinated, this commitment to slot coordination, it is just reasonableness and fairness that is uncoordinated.
Still, you will be pleased to know that never able to take yes for an answer, IATA is already lobbying for still more generous limits.
By Thursday the coordination we all knew we wanted was going full bore. Europe and the UK started a fight that undid more Brexit goodwill by trying to block the delivery of vaccines and lockdowns were extended and hardened. So that was the coordinated approach we all wanted, in a coordinated way that started to see all borders closed. By Thursday night, what was possible, what was legal and what was actually happening was beyond anyone’s ken. This was the coordinated approach we all knew we wanted.
But the good news was that Friday was worse. The chaos of Thursday was really getting its game face on by Friday. It had done the warm-ups, stretched its hamstrings and came charging in to really get the weekend underway. The reverse Dunkirk the Commission had arranged to get truck drivers back from the UK – an act of kindness at any time – was lost in the mire of vaccine embargoes, the invocation of the Good Friday Agreement and more, still more, requirements for PCR tests and blocked borders.
You would hate to watch an uncoordinated, catch-as-catch-can total mayhem approach.