Whilst it’s always nice to write and talk about the good things in life, sometimes we have no choice but to confront the things that irritate us and affect our lives in a negative way. None of us can fail to be aware of the huge increase, in recent years, of anti-social behaviour in this country and you only have to open your national or local newspaper to see many examples of what I’m talking about.

Yesterday, a Ryanair flight from Tenerife to Manchester was delayed due to the behaviour  of one of the passengers. The 7.25am flight was already full and about to leave on time but was then delayed to enable the last passenger, a drunken Englishman, to board the plane.

Once he’d taken his seat he became abusive to both passengers and cabin crew causing the plane’s captain to take the view that he was a threat and danger to the safety of the flight. The captain aborted take-off, turned the plane around and returned to the terminal where the police boarded the plane, arrested the man and took him away. The flight was delayed by nearly an hour, 300 decent law abiding passengers were more than a little inconvenienced and  the airline suffered financial loss all because of the irresponsible and selfish  behaviour of one man.

Fortunately, the Spanish police are not so obsessed by political correctness and human rights as ours and no doubt they gave the lout a bit of rough treatment before throwing him into the cell where he belongs. With a bit of luck he will also be fined heavily and banned from flying with that particular airline, though in my opinion he should be banned by all airlines for at least a fixed period. An example surely has to be made.

The problem is that these type of incidents occur with alarming regularity on flights carrying British holiday makers and if that seems a harsh thing to say just ask any travel operative from Spain, Greece, Portugal or Turkey, for example, what they think of us British. Whilst they may say that they realise we’re not all like that there are certainly enough to cause concern and words like thug, hooligan and drunken lout come quickly to their tongues. 

That is a cause of shame for all of us, if only for the fear that we all end up being tarred by the same brush. It’s about time we and our government did something about it.