Taking from the poor and giving to the rich

Speaking of aircraft, I found the most revealing insight into Concorde's retirement in the BBC's account of the plane's final flight on Friday:

On disembarking, actress Joan Collins said there were "cheers and tears" among the passengers when the plane landed.

Yes, there would be cheers and tears from Joan Collins and her friends, because they never paid for their tickets. Concorde's revenues covered its operating costs for the first time only in 1983, more than 20 years after the project was conceived. The development costs in the meantime rendered Concorde an investment of immense economic irrationality. Even at its peak, the only people who benefited from it were those whose time was so valuable or self-importance so inflated that they could justify paying a multiple of sometimes seven or eight times the more conventional carriers. Yet while they paid a lot they didn't pay the economic cost of their tickets, which ought to have taken account of the development as well as the operating costs. Concorde was a subsidy from British and French taxpayers to the rich and powerful.

Among the politicians responsible for this fiasco there's plenty of blame to go round. None is more deserving of it, however, than the Minister of Technology in the late 1960s, Tony Benn. The man who would later insist on the inclusion in Labour's programme of a commitment to a 'fundamental and irreversible shift in the balance of wealth and power to working people and their families' was responsible for precisely the opposite effect in government. It's worth recalling this, because amid the sentimental Concorde retrospectives this minor aspect of British political history has been struggling for attention. The BBC published an interview with Benn last week in which the scheme's begetter at least made a passing, defensive and oddly passive acknowledgement that not all had been well:

When you are building it and a quarter of a million jobs depend on it you don't cancel it - it was ludicrous to [temporarily] cancel it in 1974 before it went into service.

You can argue whether it should ever have started - that's an entirely different argument and governments do do things for prestige.

That's not quite the philosophical tone he adopted at the time. According to Benn's diary entry for 4 May 1970:

Ronnie Melville, my Aviation Permanent Secretary, has been indicating his anxieties in little minutes to me which I have begun to suspect are for the record.

Then he broke in to say, 'Well, Minister, I must tell you that my advice is that we cancel Concorde. I have come to the view we must cancel. It is not an economic aircraft' (of course it never had been), 'and unless there is some overwhelming national or prestige reason for us to keep it we should cancel.' He said that I was not to believe the figures that were coming from his officials. They always went up, and so on and so on - he really lost control.

Yet when back in government (as Secretary of State for Industry), Benn - on his own account knowing that Concorde had no economic rationale - wrote, in his diary entry for 31 July 1974:

[Foreign Secretary] Jim Callaghan was making his statement on Cyprus and I followed with my statement on Concorde. I got some hostile questions, some friendly ones, and the Bristol MPs spoke. It was really exciting: I have saved Concorde and that is now off my chest.

This Pooterish boast illustrates an infrequently-remarked characteristic of recent British political history. Whatever else may be said of Tony Benn, he stands as perhaps the least competent and most reactionary minister in a generation.

Comments

[Anthony C]

Least competant and most reactionary? Try adding most hypocritical to the list. Touting his principles around the television and radio stations, but never resigned from anything did he? Never let his principles drive him so far as to give up his ministerial Rover.

It's even worse now, when he's managed to get half the country thinking he's just a sweet old man who "tells it how it is". It makes me sick - Lecturing us on the dilution of Parliament's grand traditions. Funny, that didn't seem to bother him when it came to the grand old principle of collective responsibility in government.

The silly old fool.

[David Duff]

I remember someone at the time suggesting that the industrial subsidy given to Concorde should have been called an Arts Council grant!
David Duff

[James]

It's a bit harsh to say they 'never paid for their tickets'. If Concorde made an operating profit after 1984 then at least some money was recouped -- it would have not made sense to stop it flying, would it? Surely then the losses would have been even higher?

[Benjamin Keen]

Operating costs are rather tricky for transportation though. Is there adequate accounting for things like heavy overhauls?

I'm more conscious of the situation in the cases of railroading; a North American freight railroad needs an operating ratio of about 0.80 to be healthy because it has an immense depreciating physical plant that must be maintained. Something of this nature may be true to a lesser extent of a system like Concorde - parts for instance must be breathtakingly expensive compared to a 'commodity' airliner like a 737.

[thomas]

Benn has never been right about anything. Until the Iraq war???

[Anthony C]

Yeah, I thought the sight of a doddering old idiot sitting in Baghdad gently tossing laughably soft questions to a mass murdering dictator was a deeply edifying spectacle.

[Clem Snide]

"The man who would later insist on the inclusion in Labour's programme of a commitment to a 'fundamental and irreversible shift in the balance of wealth and power to working people and their families' was responsible for precisely the opposite effect in government."

That's not just Tony Benn. That is pretty much the contemporary definition of socialism.