English: The Daily Mail clock, just off Kensington High Street (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Dr Alf is right but I think the issue is greater than UK airports, which are run on a cost-plus basis to everybody’s advantage but consumers. The fact is UK consumer law is very weak and all sorts of people from rogue builders to retailers to petrol stations have turned ripping off consumers into an art form.
We see this with the BBC, which is in daily abrogation of the licence fee, the police who fail to record 50% of crimes yet pretend that crime is falling, the NHS which pretends that we have the best healthcare system in the world but kills 70,000 people a year through GP misdiagnosis and another 120,000 through botched operations.
The Government itself swindles the taxpayer by charging 3 times as much as Singapore for providing identical services. This cannot be explained away by cock-ups, waste and inefficiency—Other factors are at work.
The airlines and travel companies are doing no more than follow the example of the Government, local authorities, quangos and much of private business, all of which have too great a proportion of incompetents, liars, scoundrels, dissemblers and sad to say it out and out crooks.
The Daily Mail therefore needs top go for bigger targets and have some real “turning over the tables of the moneychangers ” and Roger Cook moments.
Dr Alf's Blog 