Time to start a conversation about a Frequent Flyer Levy

Keir Starmer and Just Stop Oil (JSO) are set for a mid-air collision. Long before they sprayed Stonehenge with orange cornstarch, the group announced a summer of transport protests. The target? Airports. Less than a week after Labour are likely to take the reins of power, JSO will set off a wave of direct actions aimed at “applying political pressure” and getting government climate policy onto a “war footing.” It’ll be Starmer’s first major challenge, and he’ll be ready.

Our prime minister-in-waiting has made his feelings about JSO clear. He’s called the group “contemptible”, “pathetic” and has suggested even stronger punishments for climate activists than those applied under the Tory’s infamous Public Order Bill. JSO antagonism immediately after Starmer takes office might seem like a recipe for disaster. It could easily back a new Labour government into a corner, from which its only obvious move is lashing out at a fringe radical group seemingly at odds with its project – one of apparently grown-up political realism. Families stranded at airports unable to take their one annual holiday will be catnip to the papers that paved Starmer’s path to victory. But JSO have an unexpected opportunity here. They could amplify years of hard work from civil society groups, galvanise public support and open a pathway for Labour to enact radical aviation policy. How? By exclusively targeting private jets and the runways of the rich.

The latest figures suggest aviation accounts for 7% of the UK’s GHG emissions. This is all the more shocking given the fact that half the population doesn’t set foot on a plane in any given year. In the UK, just 15% of people take 70% of all the flights. The emissions of this overwhelmingly wealthy minority are even higher than the frequency alone suggests. Business class trips account for 2.6-4.3 times more emissions per flight than economy tickets. Private jet flights are astronomically worse. Per person they spew a whopping 45 times more carbon into the air. So, aviation gobbles a massive slice of our carbon budget. A tiny sliver benefit.

It isn’t JSO’s strategy to attempt to influence specific government policy. Instead, they force climate into the spotlight through mass disruption. They’re incredibly accomplished at that. That’s one reason why it doesn’t faze them that they’re reportedly less popular than Rishi Sunak (by a significant margin). Our planet is burning, after all, so why should climate activists care whether people particularly like them? Here, however, is a rare chance for a win-win. Civil society organisations have been mobilising for a long time to get a Frequent Flier Levy on the table of a sympathetic government, and JSO could apply the pressure needed to make this transformative policy a reality.

A Frequent Flier Levy is a progressive tax scheme on flights. It would charge people more depending on how many flights they take, the fee ratcheting up so that flying becomes prohibitively expensive the more an individual jets off. A businessperson taking their tenth flight of the year would pay far more for their ticket than someone on the same plane taking their first flight – a pensioner visiting their grandchild abroad, for instance. Research suggests that a Frequent Flier Levy would reduce the number of flights that the richest people took, while leaving those who fly rarely completely unaffected. According to the climate charity Possible, the money raised could help transition airline workers into clean jobs and fund low-carbon travel alternatives like high-speed international rail.

The physics of climate chaos require that air travel be capped. A recent Chatham House report concludes that the UK needs to reduce the overall number of flights by a third by 2030 to stay within climate targets. It’s only possible to do that equitably, and without popular uproar, if flights are more evenly shared out. Otherwise, we’ll either blow through our carbon budget or leave the skies as the exclusive preserve of the very rich. The battle lines are already drawn. The richest fifth of the population currently flies five times more than the poorest fifth. A Frequent Flier Levy could remove a major roadblock to addressing that.

Advocacy groups think the new Government might be keen to explore something as innovative, fresh and popular as a Frequent Flier Levy. In the Spring Budget, Jeremy Hunt surprisingly increased Air Pass Duty for business and first-class tickets. Even though it was modest, the fact that a Conservative Government was willing to make that move is indicative of the political class’s willingness to start targeting richer airline travellers. Despite its watering down of climate policy, Labour could be open to something bigger. Some are meaningfully worried that JSO actions at airports could slam that door shut if they indiscriminately target working people and bait Starmer into being brutal.

For many, flights this summer will be their one opportunity to take a proper holiday with family. Like those trapped at Manchester airport after an electrical fault last week, they’ll not only be distraught, but also barely responsible for the lion’s share of aviation emissions. A widespread JSO campaign targeting families would be an XR climbing onto the roof of a tube carriage moment, but on a massive scale.

JSO’s airport action last week was anything but indiscriminate. At 5am, two activists cut through a chain-link fence at Stansted airport. They’d been hoping to target Taylor Swift’s private jet (her annual emissions from flying equate to the carbon footprint of 1,000 average Europeans). Unfortunately, the singer had already taken off, so they doused 2 other private jets in orange and recorded a video. Sat by a fire extinguisher, a sprayed jet bathed in dawn light in the background, Cole McDonald said “While people are starving, the elite and the rich fly thousands and thousands of feet in the air above us all. Billionaires are not untouchable.” Unusually, even the right-wing press saved its fury for the potential that this could herald mass disruption at passenger airports. Even more unusual, a Daily Express commenter went as far as to express muted support. “The first […] protestor to actually voice their opinion, instead of just spraying things orange and do nothing.”

This is fertile ground for an unexpected alliance. Billionaires are deeply unpopular. A 2019 survey found that half the nation agrees that “nobody deserves to be a billionaire,” while another from last year discovered that 75% of people in support of a wealth tax on millionaires. At the same time, nearly 80% are in favour of taxes on private jets. Very few know that the UK has the highest private jet emissions in Europe, or that a jet emits as much in an hour as the average Brit in a few months. The more the rich fly, the less space there is for the rest of us. Add that to the messaging and mass support should be easy.

Already the ingredients are there. A couple of months ago somebody posted about the prospective JSO airport actions on the Reddit page r/UnitedKingdom. The subreddit is often a hotbed for climate activist ire but the most popular comment, by far, was this:

“I get they want the coverage. And aviation is a fair target in lots of ways… but I still think they go after the wrong people. Target Farnborough and Northolt airports, where the ultra rich fly their private jets from, every day of the year.”

JSO’s organisational skill and media savy could turn a series of actions against private jets and rich fliers into radical climate policy with, unusually for them, widespread support. It could even offer a path for Labour to push for both a Frequent Flier Levy and tax on private jets. A Frequent Flier Levy is already the most popular route to making air travel fairer and easing our way into demand reduction, but it could also pave the way for an equitable approach to cutting emissions rather than blunt, unpopular, technocratic instruments that pit people against planet. There’s a clear roadmap for this. Climate charity Possible has worked out that a Frequent Flier Levy could help reduce the number of flights we take by a third, all while leaving the habits of 77% of the population completely unchanged.

Hitting out at private jets is a golden opportunity. People hate private jets. Targeting them is democratically literate. And, in a clever bait and switch, it’d catch Kier out if he didn’t come out against the profligacy of elite emissions. Labour have nothing to suggest when it comes to aviation emissions. All they’ve hinted at is continuing work on “sustainable aviation fuels,” the techno-fix red herring much loved by the Tories and Richard Branson. But they could be forced, with a strategic campaign backed by popular fury at the rich (even from Daily Express readers), into trying something new, something fair and something with radical potential. If JSO want to apply political pressure, a Frequent Flier Levy is the way. A jet-centred wave of actions would get us on that runway.

Charlie Hertzog Young is the author of Spinning Out: Climate Change, Mental Health & Fighting for a Better Future (Footnote Press, 2023)

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