Quintin Jardine's blog

I flew into Edinburgh Airport last Thursday, into the middle of a controversy. If you’re from that city, you’ll know this already, but if not, the owners of the terminal have incensed most of its users by announcing that it plans to charge every driver £1, just to drop off friends and family. I had a long conversation with a Scotsman journalist last week, in which I tried to nail down a single overwhelming reason why this is an intolerable proposal. I couldn’t; some things are just too outrageous for logical criticism and this is one of them. There is nothing to justify it. If there was decent public transport to the place, maybe, but there isn’t. Even if there were, it would be impractical for those travellers who don’t live in the city, and that’s actually a hell of a lot of us.

I wound up saying two things to the Scotsman reporter. The first was that if a client had come to me in my PR days with such a plan, I’d have told him that I was not in the business of defending the indefensible, and that he’d better find himself a new advisor if he planned to proceed. The second was that it’s a huge irony that Edinburgh Airport’s ultimate owner is a Spanish company called Ferrovia. If an airport operator tried to introduced such a charge in Cataluna, they’d be blown away, and these people know that. But it’s fine for them to fleece us Scots. Eff you, Ferrovia, and the plane you flew in on.

Here’s a little story to back up my outrage. A few years ago, the town council in L’Escala, where we live, decided that all the boat-owners who wanted to park in the town’s marina, one of the most expensive in Spain, would have to pay for that too. However they forgot one thing. The town’s commercial fisherman, small and medium sized, all work out of the same place. A hut was built, a barrier was put in place and a man was hired to take the money. On the first morning, the fishermen arrived. They took their tickets and said nothing, but gathered together and a meeting was held. When it was over, they walked back up to the hut, broke the barrier and threw it in the sea. It was never replaced. I’d love to think that Edinburgh’s travellers might take similar direct action. But we won’t. Let’s face it; in our city corporate stupidity is an art form, and in its face we are all law-abiding sheep.