The British Conservative Party’s latest big idea is that Brits will all be allowed one short-haul return flight a year at the standard rate of tax (thus, according to the authors, not penalising “ordinary families” enjoying their annual holidays) but after that VAT or another levy would be imposed. Everyone would have a “personal green miles allowance”.

Writing in the Times, Tim Hanes is not impressed:

“David Cameron and George Osborne, the Shadow Chancellor, are evidently very pleased with themselves about this initiative. They are more thrilled still that Al Gore is coming to Britain this week to address the Shadow Cabinet on environmental matters. This is the same Mr Gore who won an Oscar for his documentary about global warming only for it to be revealed that his house in Tennessee consumes more energy that a small smokestack factory. Further, despite being hip in Hollywood, Mr Gore has not become a more entertaining speaker. My advice to Shadow Cabinet members is to take a sleeping bag to this meeting. And when they wake up, they should be asking searching questions about the commission’s proposals. Rarely can there have been a policy so patronising, ignorant and statist. It is staggeringly patronising in its assumptions about the behaviour of what it believes are “ordinary families”. Only Notting Hill Man could believe that “normal people” take one annual short-haul trip, probably to the likes of Benidorm or Magaluf, from where they return with skin burnt bright red and a straw donkey under the arm before resuming their humble existence while saving up for next July’s outing to the Med. The idea that there is a divide between “ordinary families” who fly but once a year and a small minority of serial travellers is laughable. No such division can be discovered. The document is also supremely ignorant about the airlines, emissions and market economics. The Stern review noted that air travel is responsible for 1.6 per cent of global emissions; companies operating to and from this country are blamed for 0.1 per cent of the total. This is not a large number and it pales into insignificance when compared with the amount of household energy that is wasted. The notion, which Mr Osborne apparently holds, that airline emissions could account for a quarter of Britain’s carbon sum by 2050 requires extrapolation that Thomas Malthus on speed could not come up with. Furthermore, the likes of easyJet are already investing heavily in much cleaner aircraft. They would have fewer resources to do so if additional taxation hit their profits. More tax, if it had any effect, would lead to more empty seats being flown into the skies. The heart of the low-cost airline business model is that the fleet consists of one type of aircraft, so the option of putting passengers on a smaller plane does not exist. Empty seats are environmentally inefficient. In fairness, the commission considered this possibility. One option that the report floats is to tax airlines for the number of empty seats they fly — seats that would be unoccupied only because other taxes had ensured that some people couldn’t afford them. Those put off would surely be “ordinary people” on domestic flights because most other travellers in this sector are on business trips and could reclaim the VAT later. It is insane. It is also absurdly statist. It represents a degree of micromanagement over what human beings do that the governments of the old Warsaw Pact would have been proud of. There now appears to be a bizarre competition going on between the two “Daves” — Mr Cameron and Mr Miliband, the Environment Secretary — as to which of them can impose himself most on the rest of us. Dave C. backs a “personal flight allowance”. Dave M. wanted to be yet more ambitious with “personal carbon allowances” that would mean me and my neighbour trading the fact that he drives a lot and I fly more than he does before either of us could move anywhere.”

Back in the old pre-Thatcher days, the Tory party believed that its business was the orderly management of decline. This now appears to have been replaced with a wild enthusiasm for the abyss.