All right-thinking people should relish the imminent death of that International Federation of Pickpockets, Footpads and Purselifters, Inc. known as duty-free. Its obsequies have been attended with the tributes suited to a Mafia boss, and not coincidentally. No commercial activity has enjoyed a public reputation so diametrically opposed to the actual reality of what it did. Duty-free has been to the ethics of fair trading what King Herod was to kindergartens.
There is no such thing as a bargain in duty-free. Duty-free shops everywhere are localised monopoly cartels. They exist in a price limbo where nobody is actually aware of how much anything actually costs. Thus, in the hallucinogenic atmosphere which airports necessarily generate, and which quickly stifles common sense, reason and memory, items on which there is no duty find themselves being offered as bargains in "duty-free." And air travellers, being either bored, stressed or disoriented by the prospect of air travel or its actual reality, seem to lose all economic reason.
Bangers and rashers
A colleague in the duty-free section of Dublin Airport the other day saw a woman buying two packets of rashers, a pound of sausages, one white pudding and one black pudding. The price paid for this unfried and eggless fry? £17. A cooler bag cost another £2.
So, no, there is no duty on bangers and rashers in Dublin Airport, either now, or in its duty-freeless future. But there clearly is a Stupidity Tax, levied on the witless, the sleepless or hopeless, who apparently think that even abroad breakfast without a fry is like football without feet. And the principles at work which enabled the sharp practitioners to levy the Stupidity Tax - and pocket it themselves - on ordinary domestic foodstuffs will remain when duty-free is gone.
We have been told more untruths in support of the duty-free system than you will hear in an entire Sinn Fein ard fheis. The health of airlines depend on it! It exists solely for the good of the passenger! A population the size of Poland's depends on the system remaining in place! Demand will slump, with disastrous ripple effects throughout the western European economies! MI5 planted the Warrington bombs! The IRA ceasefire is intact! Et cetera!
We can of course all agree with our friend the worthy Et Cetera! All the rest is self-evident, self-serving rubbish. Economic activity will not cease in airports simply because the duty-free element of it is now subject to duty. Nor will prices change a great deal upwards, because the duty-free concessionaires will simply go out of business if they continue to pocket the duty, which is what has been happening in the past.
Mushrooms?
Moreover, people travelling through airports will remain as stressed, jet-lagged and cretinous as they were in the golden age of duty-free. They will still pay £17 for rashers, pudding and sausage. And sir also wants an egg? £22, if you please. And a slice of tomato, too? Happy to oblige, oh imbecile. That will be another £8, please, ha ha ha. Mushrooms, you say? Why certainly, dough-faced cretin, we have a special on mushrooms this morning, as it happens: one mushroom, £8, two mushrooms, £19, and three for only £27, cod-brain! Sir will take three? And perhaps a drop of sauce on the side? Yes? That's an extra £7.75, if you please. In all, that'll be £87.24, you peripatetic loon - or would you rather pay in euros?
Paying in euros is, of course, the key to all this; and the key to the fictions of the single market. When we began on this journey towards a united Europe, whoever thought that by the end of the 20th century governments would be no closer to the goal of harmonisation of taxes and duties than we were almost 30 years ago? The H-word was dangled before our eyes in the 1980s, and we dolts - the sort of half-wits who pay £17 for an unfried fry - actually believed we were going to get harmonisation of duties and taxes. The sop thrown our way was a continuation of the rule of the International Federation of Pickpockets, Footpads and Purselifters, Inc.
European law
That rule is now over. A word of advice to airlines, Ryanair in particular. Might you not register special in-flight shops - called Ryantienda, say - in Spain, which is effectively duty-free, therefore conforming to European law by paying duty, but of course at Spanish rates, i.e., virtually not at all? This will of course not make governments happy; but then it would be a sad day indeed if the purpose of our existence were to please those whom we elect, rather than the other way round.
I mention Ryanair because it has earned our good will; that will vanish overnight if the company continues to charge "booking fees" which are added to the cost of the air fare because the company is gracious enough to accept our business. Ryanair is fighting the utterly spurious "airport tax" being charged on travellers at Farranfore, and rightly. Its argument is made simply absurd by its own booking tax. Lowcost airlines earn our love by their low costs; and they lose it immediately with sly little charges which are the hallmark of the International Federation of Pickpockets, Footpads and Purselifters, Inc.