Shut the ticket offices, leave your bag at home

In praise of Ryanair

The dissident right has a slightly miserable relationship with air travel. Rather than taking joy in their ability to jaunt across Europe at £30 a pop, they instead post pictures of 1950s aeroplanes they could never have afforded to use and proclaim, ‘we were never asked’.

This is false. All of Europe was asked millions of times a year if they wanted to pay for business class, and the good spendthrift Europeans took £30 from their wallets and handed it to Michael O’Leary, CEO of Europe’s leading low-cost airline. Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry once opined that ‘air travel is cattle hell and no airline can turn a profit’. This is factually incorrect, in that Ryanair makes £120 a second, and the opinion is slightly laughable unless you believe yourself too ‘aristocratic’ to listen to two hours of Caribbean Rhythms in the air on your way to Poland.