Airline cartel claim

Well, there are many things to catch up with, both grave and... I was going to say grave and gay, a phrase we can no longer use unless we really have in mind the gay community and, as a matter of fact, there is serious news on that front which I ought to touch on before we move on to what concerns a majority of the population.

The word is just in that a bill is going through the council which will make San Francisco the first city in America – I imagine the first city anywhere – not only to sanction the marriage of members of the same sex, but to begin issuing such people as apply with absolutely legal marriage certificates, to which will attach all the laws applying to dependency, inheritance, wills and the like.

Talking of legislation and challenges to it, we now have another, unique suit, the bold and thumping action involving six international airlines including British Airways and British Caledonian which charges them with conspiracy in running Sir Frederick Laker and his airline out of business, but before I come to that, there's a topical, er... topic which I thought I had dealt with once for all, or rather 36 times for all down the years, but which, to my surprise, is still a matter of great mystery to some of my friends in Britain and other countries who are not, in all other matters, dense at all.

A frequent visitor to this country, an old and beloved friend, a man of shrewdness and wide education, called me the other day to pronounce the amazing sentence, 'What exactly is Thanksgiving?' This would be rather like an educated American calling you in London or Ottawa and saying, 'Tell me exactly, what is meant by the monarchy?'.

Well, on Thursday, more turkeys were consumed by more millions of Americans since at any time – well since a year ago, on the same Thursday, by decree of 350 years ago, the last Thursday in November. At least it had been established as a sacrosanct date, as a national legal holiday for centuries until along came Franklin Roosevelt 46 years ago. He, at one time, developed a very lively fondness for changing old laws and customs.

As a very pungent and funny columnist wrote at the time, 'Mr Roosevelt feels so blithe up there on the mountain in the White House that he's come to regard handing down the oracles as one of the perquisites of his office. So he will ram through one bill through Congress and then another, each more audacious than the last and he doesn't turn a hair if they're defeated. He looks around and says, "All right, how about a new Supreme Court?" '

He actually did try to reconstitute the court, packing it with judges agreeable to his own policies, but it was too much for the whole country and he was struck down.

Hardly less sacred than the court itself is the institution of Thanksgiving. Roosevelt dared in, I think 1936, to shift the traditional festival from the last Thursday in November to the third Thursday, just to amuse himself and show who was boss. The country was outraged, as if Mrs Thatcher were to announce, under her own steam, that from now on the Queen's Birthday would be celebrated on Boxing Day. So, FDR was defeated again.

Thanksgiving, then, commemorates every year the completion of the first harvest of the Pilgrims, the first guarantee that they would survive in the New World and in the rude and forbidding landscape they had landed on. Let me remind you or give you a hint of their feelings about the ordeal they'd come through by quoting the memorable words of the first proclamation of Thanksgiving Day which was given out by that sombre Yorkshireman, William Bradford, the first governor of the Massachusetts colony. It was issued and recited on 23 November 1623 and it was, at once, an enormous sigh of relief and a prayer of thanksgiving. This is it:

'In as much as the Great Father has given us this year an abundant harvest and has made the forest to abound with game... (A very odd sort of game they'd never before seen – a turkey) ... to abound with game and the sea with fish and clams and in as much as He has protected us from the ravages of savages... (Honestly, that's Bradford's own phrase! He was referring to the tribes that collectively have been called, ever since, by Englishmen 'Red' Indians)... and has spared us from pestilence and disease … (And that's a whopper. In fact, about twice as many people who hadn't died on the atrocious transatlantic voyage died in the first year of settlement)... and has granted us freedom to worship God according to the dictates of our own consciences, now I, your magistrate, do proclaim that all ye pilgrims, all ye wives and little ones do gather at ye meeting house on ye hill between the hours of nine and twelve in the daytime on Thursday November ye 29th, there to listen to ye pastor and render thanksgiving to Almighty God for all his blessings.'

So, they met together at ye meeting house and, I imagine, they marvelled not only at the abundance of the harvest they had by then consumed, but they also marvelled at the strangeness of that harvest – the new odd bird, the turkey, the crop which was indeed the staple of the Indians all the way down to the tip of Chile, Indian corn or maize, the cranberries they'd gathered from the cranberry bogs of Cape Cod (they're still there), the pumpkins they were taught by the Indians to turn into pie or pudding – all these honoured dishes, along with sweet potatoes baked with marshmallows and corn (maize) in various compounds (corn pudding, corn bread) were on millions of plates between noon and nine pm on Thursday.

Along, I ought to say, with other confections, liquid especially, including the dreaded whisky which the Pilgrims would have abominated. Thanksgiving was their unique and, for many years, their only annual festival. Surely I'm forgetting Christmas Day among these godly folk? By no means! A custom came in very shortly of pausing from the wood chopping and house building and snow fencing and downing tankards of ale and eating a fugitive pie or two on 25 December, which – rumour began to have it – was the birthday of Christ. The fathers moved very swiftly to stop this blasphemy. They got out ordinances absolutely forbidding the ceasing of labour, the drinking of ale and acts of merrymaking on 25 December done as a great scandal and mockery of God's word by such as have come to believe that 25 day of December is a sacred day. Whatsoever day our Lord was born, the 25 December was most certainly not that day.

As, I suppose, in their calendar it was not. Anyway, the general whooping it up on that day in the name of Jesus Christ – and what a pagan orgy we've made of it – didn't really get going until the nineteenth century, until after the good and foreign Prince Albert had introduced such oddities as the yule log and Christmas cards and boar hunts and God knows what all into England.

So, now please will nobody write in to ask me again, what exactly is Thanksgiving?!

What was I going to go on about? Oh yes! Freddie Laker! Well, the suit, just filed in New York, contends that British Airways, British Caledonian, Pan America, TWA, Lufthansa and Swiss Air slashed their own transatlantic air fares with the express or partial purpose of undermining the bargain-basement fares of Laker Airways and, in the end, ruin him.

The first point that must occur to the American airlines and their lawyers is that they were not free to do this until President Carter deregulated the airlines. This meant putting them in open competition with each other in the matter of prices. Before that happened, all the airlines, by government regulation, could charge only exactly the same price for the same trip. Indeed, in those days, the competitive advertising of the different airlines was often funny and frantic. They all charged at one time, let us say $330.56 for the economy round trip between London and New York. Neither more nor less.

So the advertising had to take the form of saying, 'We give you more!' or 'We add a snack at teatime' or 'No seats are so luxurious as our seats' or 'No airline has stewardesses so beguiling'. But, once the airlines and their fares were deregulated, they could really compete against each other in a price war. They really slashed prices. They did this in spite of the glaring fact that they were already losing millions and, after the awful oil crunch of 1973/4, when the cost of aviation fuel quadrupled, they would lose many millions more. They're all in appalling financial shape and many of their woes have been credited or discredited to the act of deregulation.

So, it will be at least interesting to see if the airlines don't, as a defence, shift the blame to the United States government. Certainly it was deregulation, with or without a conspiracy, that for a time doomed anyone trying to undercut the big airlines. And very soon, in the past two years, the ruinous price of fuel caught up with them and now, still losing millions, their fares have ballooned alarmingly.

I've been chided – chid? – in the past week or two for saying nothing about the arrival on the world scene or in the Kremlin of Mr Andropov. Well, Mr Andropov's name fell on us 24 hours before I sat down at the microphone. Is it not a marvellous thing that a name which, the day before, most of us would have guessed to be a character in Chekhov or a soccer player, that this name, by the magic of the satellite and the laser beam, could within 24 hours be pronounced by all of us on five continents with immediate and increasing confidence and ignorance.

That was two weeks ago. Since then, British and American journalists have been digging away, working in shifts like teams of archaeologists on to a new Tutankhamen. The only correspondent who actually knows Mr Andropov has come up with the intriguing news that he, Mr A, has a large collection of what is described as 'classic American jazz of the 1930s and Forties'.

Now, at first glance, this could mean that he's on our side but it may be a clue to a deep-dyed policy. I suggest we might search it out by having some old aficionado of Duke Ellington and Benny Goodman put on over the BBC a series of concerts – radio preferably, TV can blind you to the essential secret of anything.

Call it 'the Andropov Connection – American Classic Jazz – The Thirties and Forties Revisited.'

I think I know just the man to do it.

This transcript was typed from a recording of the original BBC broadcast (© BBC) and not copied from an original script. Because of the risk of mishearing, the BBC cannot vouch for its complete accuracy.

Letter from America audio recordings of broadcasts ©BBC

Letter from America scripts © Cooke Americas, RLLP. All rights reserved.