The BIS (Department for Business, Innovation and Stupidity) have “advised” in such a way that tour operators may well have to pick up the tab for all those caught up in the ash cloud. Further, they now suggest that tour operators should be able to forsee events which even skilled and trained geologists and volcanologists find impossible to predict.

We do not have to look too far back to find a rather different example in the approach of Her Majesty’s Grateful Government. When the bankers fell into crisis (in an event which was easily foreseeable, save that the Serious Farce Office and other regulators who were supposed to watch out for exactly that sort of thing were all too busy “doing” dinners and lunches) we tax payers were told how seriously serious the matter was and that we would have to mortgage our children’s and our children’s children’s futures to bail out Bankers so that they would not have to sell their second yachts and/ or helicopters and wind up having to use the train to get to work like the rest of us.

Of course, the ash cloud matter is different. We are only talking about small people and small money and true to form, the present UK Government follows the maxim: “Money talks, merit walks” – rather like the USA Government getting all hot under the collar about BP and spilt oil, whilst doing relatively little about their own errant industries wreaking havoc in foreign pastures, specifically, Bhopal.

We have, however, moved away from a feudal economy towards a welfare economy. This is not a bad thing. The world is just too dangerous a place for private insurance companies to cope with (as Niall Ferguson said) and welfare covers a much wider orbit than 10 shillings and sixpence a week from the ‘nash. One of the main purposes of Government is to step in when calamity threatens to overwhelm; the insurer, so to speak, of the last resort. Irrespective of the corner of the business involved. The global affect of the bank disaster scales down easily to the European disaster of the ash cloud. In both cases, a whole industry is at stake. In both cases, many firms are at risk and in both cases, many jobs would be lost, were the industry involved compelled to shoulder all the costs of an unforseen, un-predictated and devastating calamity. Indeed, it could be argued that, as the banking disaster was not a natural phenomonon but a man-made one, the ash cloud is, possibly, a more deserving cause than the Banks.