Just when you thought it was safe…

Lady Thatcher so disliked British Airways’s ethnic tailfins that she famously took out a paper napkin and covered up the tail of a model plane on the BA stand at a Tory party conference. Should she be passing a model of a BA plane in the next few days, she’ll want a tablecloth to cover up the whole damn thing. It wasn’t meant to end this way, not when British Airways was liberated from state control in the first flush of privatisations in the early 1980s. With the dead hand of the minister for transport lifted from its shoulder, the airline became one of the most admired British businesses of that decade. The service became responsive to consumer demand rather than to a civil servant’s whim. For several years, international competitors like Air France performed dismally by comparison, flying half-empty jets with frumpy decor to destinations to which few wanted to fly.

The swipe-card dispute of the past fortnight has shown much of BA’s superiority to have been an illusion. If BA seemed efficient, it was only by comparison with national carriers which remained in state hands. Twenty years after privatisation, BA remains lumbered with a remarkable quantity of its former state-owned baggage. It is riddled with overmanning and archaic working practices maintained by union militancy.

One can only sympathise with BA’s chief executive, Rod Eddington. The start he has made in reforming the airline merely emphasises the scale of the problem he still faces. Since cuts were forced upon airlines in the wake of the World Trade Center attacks, 10,000 British Airways staff have been made redundant. And yet still BA manages to resemble a massive job-creation scheme. For every member of staff it employs, British Airways flies 736 passengers a year. Non-unionised easyJet, by contrast, manages 6,300 passengers a year for every employee, and Ryanair 8,300 passengers.