"At stake are 100,000 jobs and a business of £5 billion," said the Times of London on the subject of duty-free. "Aer Rianta estimates that some £70 million of business and 4,000 jobs are threatened by the proposed abolition," an Editorial in this newspaper reported on the same day. So we may safely conclude that the abolition of duty-free will be an economic catastrophe for Europe, the equivalent of sacking every male worker in Luxembourg. And in Ireland, the effects would be proportionate and would be like dismissing the entire workforce of Aer Lingus and Dublin Airport - which essentially is what the pro-dutyfree lobbyists have been so warning us about for so long. An economic dark age will follow the ending of duty-free; people will cease to read and write; and warring and illiterate bands of savages will club one another where the duty-free checkouts once so happily hummed.
Special pleading
All rubbish, of course. In truth, duty-free means duty-free for the shop, not the shopper, and the arguments used in its favour are either mendacious or misguided. Of course, their presentation is more than tinged with wide-eyed piety, and with plentiful assurances of the public welfare being the reason why duty-free should be retained. It is a special pleading which monopolists have invariably used to defend the retention of their monopolies.
Which is fair enough. If I had my ankles draped either side of the fat, porcine spine called duty-free, I too would start mumbling sanctimoniously about it being in the general interest that my monopoly be protected; and I would find experts to assure any courts of inquiry that global economic catastrophe would result if the monopoly were ended: yes, indeed, your honour (gravely), children will starve and skeletal widows will be evicted from their humble garrets, and orphans will be dying in their droves in ditches, the poor little mites. Naturally, such arguments make no sense; but the motive, ah the motive is as clear as noon in the Gobi.
The spuriousness of the argument is the only feature which equals the clarity of the motive. For airports will, regardless of duty-free status, remain vibrant centres of economic activity, as are major railway stations or even petrol stations. Shopping is recreation. We live in a culture which abhors thought, reflection, silence. Between flights, if we have time, we experience a compulsion to buy barely less powerful than that to breathe. Will this vanish when the European Union waves its imperial wand and tells us we must rid ourselves of those little commercial islands exempt from the normal duties and taxes of society?
Of course it will not. And anyway, for many goods in the duty-free shops, the wand will make do difference, since they are either not subject to duty, such as chocolates or any food in Ireland, or do not experience a price drop on duty-free shelves. Who has ever seen a newspaper or a paperback book cheaper in the duty-free area than it would be a few feet away in the duty-liable airport concourse?
Absurd prices
It is not merely a matter of parity of price: often enough, prices in duty-free are actually higher than they would be in countries in which duties are already low, such as France or Spain, where the airport dutyfree shops attract only the incorrigibly idiotic, the jet-lagged, the innumerate. Nobody with a brain larger than that of a domestic cat would shop in the duty-free at Paris and hope to get a bargain. The only reason for browsing among the shelves there is the prospect of a good laugh at the absurd prices or of getting rid of surplus foreign currency; and even that latter argument will perish the day the Euro appears.
Duty-frees are where footpads cosh us with our own ignorance, our own infantile greed. Examples: a friend who bought a computer in Singapore dutyfree and saw the same machine on sale more cheaply in Grafton Street; and worse, his friend (me) who, numbskulled and imbecilic after an all-night flight from Africa, bought a push-button radio in Paris which could be bought over the counter in London for £40 less.
The standard argument used to justify duty-free is that it makes flights cheaper and that when it is abolished, air fares will rise. Last bit first: they won't. The US, whose internal flights are of course without duty-free, still has far cheaper air fares than we have. Why? Competition drives prices down; monopolies - which all duty-frees are - drive them up. But maybe the subsidy argument has some validity: if airports can make money out of pre- or between-flight economic activity, might they not charge less for landing fees?
Retail activity
Correct. But nobody is suggesting that economic activity in airports would come to some post-nuclear halt, and that bewildered travellers would henceforward wander with their bags through a commercial wasteland, with a few bedraggled urchins begging where there was once prosperity and plenty - though that would appear to be the prognosis of the Save Our Beloved Duty-Free Lobby. The reality is that, far from airports diminishing in importance as centres of retail activity, they are certain to grow. They do not need the fictions, the falsehoods and the downright frauds of duty-frees to make that growth possible.