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The Cafe
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Today’s banner
Sunset over Glasgow taken from Kelvinside
Photograph by
Ann Donaldson
Living in a queue:
airport ordeals
I have known
Jill Stephenson
I can’t imagine that any provision is made for people who arrive at Heathrow and have a connecting flight to elsewhere in the UK. This is something that is likely to affect Scots and visitors to Scotland particularly.
There is a suggestion that, when the Border Agency is displeased with politicians, it ensures that the greatest discomfort is felt at the sharp end – at airports. Queues there are, rightly, deemed to be what will exercise the travelling population most. That will lead to pressure on politicians. But whether the shambles that currently prevails is really part of a cunning plan is surely questionable.
Not that I would want to speak up for the Border Agency. It could, after all, redeploy to airports some of the person-power that it uses for checking up on people like me. It is at the behest of the Border Agency – although enforced particularly officiously by the University of Edinburgh (and not so officiously by some universities, and not at all by still others) that I have to fill in a form and present my passport every time I receive a fee from the University of Edinburgh (where I was a permanent member of staff for 39 years).
This has meant jumping through this hoop three times this year (having done so in the last two years also). This year, I also had to provide a copy of the outside cover of my passport, which seemed a particularly useless exercise. Of course, university administrators at local level are burdened with the clerical work for all this, but I imagine that some checking is done by Border Agency people who could be more usefully employed – at airports.
Citizens of the UK (and the EU) apparently are likely to have to wait for ‘only’ an hour at worst at Heathrow, compared with longer periods for non-EU, or non-EEA, nationals who must be sick to death of Britain before they get out of the airport. But that hour could be disastrous. I can’t imagine that any provision is made for people who arrive at Heathrow and have a connecting flight to elsewhere in the UK. This is something that is likely to affect Scots and visitors to Scotland particularly.
The answer may partly be to increase the number of overseas flights from Scottish airports – although Ryanair seems to be trying to put that into reverse at Edinburgh. Routes to European destinations from Scotland are quite well-served, but it’s longer-haul journeys that are the problem. Perhaps, since Emirates flies into Glasgow and Newcastle, there should be encouragement for Etihad or Qatar airways to fly into Edinburgh. Or perhaps we have to settle for flying via Amsterdam, Frankfurt or Paris. The Greens will throw up their hands in horror, but we do need a solution to the problem of our dependence on Heathrow. The demise of British Midland as a separate concern only enhances this need, since presumably it will mean that BA’s monopoly on routes from Heathrow to Scotland will be reflected in its fare structures.
Our problem here is that the numbers don’t stack up. This was clear when, not so long after it started up, the excellent ferry service from Rosyth to Zeebrugge found itself in trouble. A lack of freight traffic was said to be the problem. No doubt many companies were pleased enough with the ferry route that already existed to the continent from Newcastle and felt no need to change to Rosyth. And there was not the weight of numbers from Scotland that made it a worthwhile endeavour. Do we have the weight of numbers to provide a clientèle for more international flights from Scotland, including more long-haul flights? There has been talk of direct flights to China, for example, without examining this indicator of viability.
Still, we perhaps should not get too exercised about being delayed at immigration at Heathrow and possibly missing a connecting flight. The overload at Heathrow – with too many terminals (and therefore passengers) for the number of runways – ensures that pretty much any flight after midday is delayed, with knock-on effects into the evening. The chances of a late afternoon or evening flight to Edinburgh or Glasgow being on time leaving Heathrow are not high, so we can stand in the immigration queues without panicking.
Jill Stephenson is former professor of modern German history at the University of Edinburgh
