If you had to draw up a list of people and things it is de rigueur to loathe, it would definitely include Ryanair. Tabloid newspapers, Jeremy Clarkson, Brexit, red-hued men who pop up in the Question Time audience to moan about Jeremy Corbyn, and Ryan-bloody-air — these are things that every self-respecting member of the chattering class must bristle against.
And that is why one moral error made by a Ryanair crew member has led to demands for the entire company to be boycotted. ‘Let’s all boycott this airline!’, the right-on have cried in response to a racist incident on a flight being badly handled by an attendant. Yeah, right, like these people would ever deign to use this cheap airline with its cheap passengers in the first place.
This is the scandal over a Ryanair crew member’s mishandling of a horrible racist event. The video of the incident makes for deeply unpleasant viewing. Filmed on a flight from Barcelona to Stansted, it shows a man yelling abuse at a black woman. He calls her an ‘ugly black bastard’. He physically threatens her: ‘I’ll push you to another seat.’ Nasty stuff.
Thankfully, other passengers intervene, telling the man to shut up and calling for him to be thrown off the plane. A Ryanair crew member also reprimands the man, telling him he is being ‘super rude’. But then the crew member makes a moral error: he moves the woman who was being abused rather than the man who was abusing her.
That was bad. To inconvenience the victim of racist insults is a misjudgement. However, if we are being generous — and when it comes to stressed-out, badly paid flight attendants, I’m always inclined to be generous — we can surely agree that the flight attendant was rattled by what he was witnessing and made a speedy decision to try to calm things down.
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