Airport chaos: Brexit flight of fancy as Grant Shapps refuses to listen to Jet2 and Ryanair chiefs: Ian McConnell

He has emitted the usual soundbites of the Johnson administration such as “cheap labour” in response to entirely rational suggestions that the UK Government should ease immigration rules to help solve the problem. His answers, during a weekend grilling on the airport and airline woes, very much add to the picture that the Johnson administration believes the Brexit for which the UK electorate voted was all about clamping down on immigration from the EU, which is sadly what this UK Government has done with spectacularly grim consequences.

Mr Shapps, while he interestingly made a point at the weekend of saying he did not vote to leave the EU, is a senior member of a UK Government which has Brexit to thank for its big majority in the House of Commons.

And this is an administration which has, as things have gone from bad to worse on the Brexit front as was always inevitable, continued to paint the Leave folly as something positive. As its spin has reached epic proportions it has invented a job title of Minister for Brexit Opportunities and Government Efficiency for arch-Leaver Jacob Rees-Mogg.

So you would expect the Johnson administration, in the face of whatever new woe unfolds, to bat away claims that it might just somehow be to do with Brexit.

Business leaders and organisations have repeatedly flagged, with plenty to back up their assertions, the huge part Brexit has played in fuelling skills and labour shortages across a whole raft of sectors.

However, while it would if the politics were stripped out of the situation be baffling that someone not working in the aviation sector would dispute what the chief executives of two major companies operating at the front line were saying, it was no surprise at all that Mr Shapps was doing just that. There was also a dollop of “whataboutery” from Mr Shapps as he pointed to problems at airports elsewhere in Europe and flagged cancelled flights in America, as he appeared on the BBC’s Sunday Morning programme.

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He emphasised his belief that some companies operating in the aviation sector had cut staff too deeply. This may be part of the problem in some cases. However, it is worth noting Chancellor Rishi Sunak’s furlough scheme meant at times that such operators had to pay significant national insurance and pension contributions and sometimes part of the wages of staff laid off through this programme at points during the pandemic, when revenues had disappeared. Mr Sunak also failed to provide sufficient visibility on the furlough scheme, repeatedly insisting for example in the summer and autumn of 2020 that the programme would be ended in October that year. He had to perform a dramatic U-turn as he was overtaken by events which seemed obvious enough to many, many other people.

Mr Shapps said on Sunday of the international travel woes: “The airports and the airlines and the travel industry need to make sure it is sorted out.”

He talked about having sped up security clearance processes for people working “behind the scenes” at airports, declaring: “I made a change in the law to make that easier and faster.”

Good for him.

Mr Shapps added: “Now we need the industry itself to deliver. Clearly they’ve been taken by surprise by the way in which people have returned to travel after two years of being locked down. I am not surprised. We were saying all along, ‘You will need to be ready for this’.”

And he seemed determined to point the finger at the passenger aviation sector, while crowing about the UK’s emergence from coronavirus-related restrictions.

Mr Shapps said: “I think the cuts went too deep. We had the furlough programme – I appreciate all the uncertainty about coronavirus.

“Of course, this country was able in the end to come out of coronavirus the fastest. So that also will perhaps have taken them by surprise.”

He added: “We’re not the only people with the same problems. I was looking at what is happening in Schiphol and around Europe, and also in America where two-and-a-half thousand fights were cancelled this weekend to see that it’s a global problem of rehiring people in very, very tight employment markets. We have got record high levels of employment, record low unemployment levels, and as a result they are finding it difficult to get people on board.

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“We have already taken some measures. I have got some further measures on security that I will be taking but principally it’s down to the airport operators and the airlines to make sure they both match the number of tickets they sold with their capacity to deliver it but also where there are problems, and we understand that there will be problems in a market like this, that they sort it out quickly. And that’s why I am also going to be focusing on the compensation for passengers.”

The compensation thing seems like something of a deflection, given the questions he was asked were all about what the Government was going to do to help solve the aviation sector’s troubles, which clearly stem from a major lack of staff.

Mr Shapps’ views and tone could hardly have been more different from those of the chief executives of airline and holiday company Jet2 and of Ryanair.

Detailing the views of its chief executive, Steve Heapy, on the impact of Brexit, Jet2 said: “During a meeting with government and industry on Friday, Mr Heapy expressed his frustrations with the current employment market – as Brexit has taken hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people out of the job market and that is having an impact on many industries, including ours.”

It is indeed.

Making it plain that it had been doing its part, Jet2 added: “As a UK airline and tour operator that has, unlike others, not made any cancellations thanks to our proactive recruitment strategy, we are extremely proud of our hard-working British colleagues who continue to deliver award-winning customer service for UK customers every day.”

Mr Shapps might want to reflect on Jet2’s comments in the round. Jet2 is making the point that it is doing all it can, while emphasising that Brexit is indeed having an impact.

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Asked on the Sunday Morning programme if the UK Government might relax the rules on foreign workers for the aviation sector, as it did for the haulage and meat-processing industries, Mr Shapps declared: “The answer can’t always be to reach for the lever marked ‘more immigration’. In fact…in Europe they have got exactly the same problems. If you looked at what was happening in Amsterdam this weekend, the problems across Europe, you will have seen exactly the same difficulties.”

For his part, Ryanair chief executive Michael O’Leary said: “Pre-Brexit you would have had lots of eastern Europeans doing baggage-handling, the check-in jobs and the airport security jobs. They all went home during Covid. There is a real tightness in the labour market, which is an absolutely direct result of Brexit.”

Mr Shapps does not seem that interested in hearing from those on the front line though, or certainly not where it contradicts his Government’s ideology.

He said: “You see the same problems across Europe. So clearly if it were only to do with Brexit then there wouldn’t be a problem in Schiphol or elsewhere so that clearly can’t be true.

“But secondly, look, if O’Leary or anybody else’s solution is all we need to do is employ cheap labour from somewhere else – look, I didn’t vote for Brexit but the country did. And we have made our choice. We want a high-wage, high-skill economy. That means the aviation sector like all other sectors, as the HGVs, the lorry driver sector has now done, needs to train people domestically.”

Going into political hyperdrive, in the face of continued questioning on the Sunday Morning programme about Brexit not having made things easier, Mr Shapps declared: “You are ignoring the fact that airports across Europe have also had the same queues so if it was just a Brexit issue then that wouldn’t be the case.

“As with lorry drivers, we found the solutions were actually in making sure that decent salaries were paid, that people were trained here in this country, that people were attracted to a job, not just better salaries but also better conditions as well. That’s the sort of economy we want to run in this country. It’s what the country [has] voted for and it’s what we’re delivering.”

What the UK Government is actually delivering with Brexit is immense economic damage.

Maybe arch-Brexiters do not care about what goes on at airports or with international travel generally, given the insular view of many of them. Then again, that probably is not the case, given these Brexit diehards are usually the first to take to social media to protest about having to stand in longer passport queues at overseas airports because the UK is no longer part of the EU.