John Porter: Biting the hand that feeds you
Seven major hospitality companies have written to Gordon Brown telling him that, quite frankly, they don't think the Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) is up to the job of regulating tourism.
Their pitch to the PM is that they'd much prefer to come under the wing of the Department of Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform. The tourism industry, they argue, is a massive employer and contributor to the economy and deserves a proper, grown-up ministry to look after it.
I wish them well. But it's something of a high-risk strategy. Gordon, one imagines, has a pretty full in-tray just at the moment, Unless the tourism chiefs are very lucky and get their wish immediately, the chances are they'll have to deal with the DCMS pretty soon.
Even the most even-handed of public servants isn't going to take too kindly to being told that their department is a bit second-rate.
It would be a bit like knocking the hat off a lollipop lady, telling her she's not a proper traffic cop, and then expecting her to see you safely across the road the next morning. You could hardly complain if she directed you straight under the wheels of an oncoming juggernaut.
At the heart of this may be the secret fear, deep in the souls of these titans of tourism, that they haven't really got proper jobs at all. In all but scale, the London Eye and Alton Towers are little different to the touring fairs that set up on commons and parks up and down the land. That makes their executives the corporate equivalent of the grease-monkeys who climb on the backs of the dodgems and make lurid suggestions to teenage girls.
I'm not even sure about the use of the word 'industry' when it comes to tourism. Anything that involves lathes, production lines and welding justifies calling itself an industry. 'Tourism', 'leisure' and other descriptions are really just catch-all phrases that try and lump together a rather disparate group of activities.
The members of my mum's OAP pilates class and a group of robust Preston lasses on a hen weekend in Blackpool are both customers of the leisure 'industry'. Not even the most casual observer would be likely to confuse one with the other, though.
Whatever you call it - hospitality, leisure, tourism - the business of pleasure is a big contributor to the economy and deserves to be taken seriously. But telling the public servants who regulate the sector they're not up to it may not be the wisest of tactics.
