IIRC, APD is about the only tax which hasn't been stealthed. It was £10 on UK/ European flights when Labour came to power, then reduced to £5.
Did we really think the industry could "get away" with this tax "reduction" forever?
The chattering classes will repeat the mantra that aviation fuel is not taxed (ditto for buses via rebate, trains and ferries), and that aviation's contribution towards climate change is rising faster than their own hot air.
There will certainly be a green arms race between all of the main parties, and aviation is a soft touch. Yet the industry has done so little to present a balanced response.
We know MOL will just f and blind, whereas Easyjet have a more rational approach. However, both airlines are still just saying "we use efficient fleets, we're not to blame". Then the charter airlines will say they cram more people in at higher occupancy rates, whilst BA & co. ask for the most polluting long haul flights to be excluded because there isn't an international consensus on the issue.
Ultimately, all airlines will argue their own corner, but their voices will be drowned out by the envirovangelists, unless the industry can come up with some decent proposals of their own.
Emissions trading has to be a better way forward than tax. But the green lobby don't like this. Why? Because it involves asking the question "what is a reasonable price to pay in order to mitigate the alleged damage caused by flying." They just want to stop everyone else from flying, so the airports are free of clutter when they take their long-haul ecotourism trips to Costa Rica.
The current carbon cost of a return hop from London to Edinburgh is just £1.42, according to Climate Care (which tells you how to offset your flight, but doesn't acknowledge the concept of trains causing pollution). Compare this to the £10 APD (pax are doubly stung on internal flights, but again, airlines say very little about this).
It might well be a fair argument to say that airlines should pay something to the exchequer and something to cover their external environmental costs. But I get really worried when local authorities, central government and special interest groups unite to demand a switch from short haul flights to high speed rail.
Even though I think properly run trains can be a much more convenient option, I just don't trust the idea of giving anyone a blank cheque, considering our existing system's voracious appetite for burning up tax payers' cash. Whatever the true environmental costs of flying are, they are minimal compared to the 20p/mile subsidy to Virgin Trains, or the 3.6p/mile average UK rail subsidy. If I take a Virgin Train from Coventry to BHX, the subsidy for this short journey is greater than the allegedly unpaid environmental cost of a domestic flight.
By all means, let's have the debate about aviation's relatively small impact on climate change and relatively large economic benefits. Even the tourism deficit argument has limited sway when you consider that there always will be a natural leakage to sunnier climates(or ski resorts which can actually guarantee snow!). Our tourism deficit of £17bn is a significant problem, but still much less than, for example, Germany, which has an E38bn deficit.
This debate shouldn't be something for the airline industry to be run away from. Instead, we should present the facts as they are, and let people make their own minds up, as millions are already doing by voting their way through the airports. Just as high fuel prices have only had a limited impact on people's driving habits, I'm sure that a moderate increase in the cost of flying will not stop people taking holidays, whatever their incomes. We just need to make sure that common sense prevails, and ignore the alarmist scare tactics about impending doom in either the aviation industry, or the environment.