Shropshire Star

Peter Rhodes on short-sighted voting, a brilliant plan to cut air travel and a round of applause for scrapping HS2

Read today's column from Peter Rhodes.

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No permit, no flight

It may be time to resurrect my brilliant plan for cutting aviation emissions at a stroke, unveiled some years ago to almost universal apathy.

Each year about 240 million passengers fly in or out of the UK. That's equivalent to about four flights per member of the UK population. So on January 1, each UK citizen would be issued with four flight permits for the coming year. You cannot fly without a permit. Some folk will be satisfied with four permits. Some frequent flyers will be desperate for more. And some folk, particularly the poorer and elderly, won't use any permits. Instead, they can sell their permits at the highest price to anybody who needs more. At a stroke, the number of UK flights is stabilised, unwanted permits become a nice little earner for non-flyers and those who think they are so important they need to fly 50 times a year will think again.

And now the clever bit. Once rationing of flying has become accepted, the number of permits is cut from four to three per year. If any government were serious about cutting emissions, this is the sort of scheme they'd be looking at. If . . .

Incidentally, biggest round of applause on Any Questions (Radio 4) was for the man who suggested scrapping HS2.

As the results came in from the council elections, two things struck me. Firstly, how many husbands and wives sit on the same councils. Secondly, how many seriously obese people seem drawn to local politics. Explanations, please.

Having attended dozens of council-election counts, I have seen the agony and the ecstasy first-hand. It is a brutal, tearful business. One moment you're Councillor Bloggs OBE, Cabinet Member, Chair of Environment and Portfolio Holder for All Things Wise and Wonderful. The next you are Fred Bloggs, pensioner, wondering why the phone no longer rings and how you're going to manage without that £10,000 a year in expenses. The bitterest part is knowing that you've done nothing wrong. You did a good job for the town, only to become a sacrificial lamb for your party colleagues' cock-ups in Whitehall.

Foolishly, I turned up at the polling station without my reading glasses and had to rely on the political-party symbols rather than the small print. There was a yellow bird which looked like a frazzled canary. There was a red rose which, obviously, no true Yorkshireman could endorse. And there was a huge oak tree in union-jack colours which presumably indicates a party with long-term commitment to the British environment and is doubtless supported by that nice Greta Thunberg. Oh, yes, a picture's worth a thousand whoppers.

Talking of Sweden, a reader in that country tells me health treatment is free in state hospitals but patients pay £8 a day towards their meals. Another reader says this a great idea and why don't we do the same in Britain? Does anyone have any idea how much the NHS would spend collecting £8?