{"id":23529,"date":"2018-10-26T17:25:35","date_gmt":"2018-10-26T16:25:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thevoiceoflondon.co.uk\/?p=23529"},"modified":"2018-10-26T17:25:35","modified_gmt":"2018-10-26T16:25:35","slug":"hundreds-of-thousands-demand-ryanairs-apology","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.westminster.ac.uk\/thevoiceoflondon\/hundreds-of-thousands-demand-ryanairs-apology\/","title":{"rendered":"Hundreds of thousands demand Ryanair&#8217;s apology"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">Following an incident on a Ryanair flight that many are calling racist, a change.org petition has currently amassed <\/span><a href=\"https:\/\/www.change.org\/p\/ryanair-apologise-to-compensate-delsie-gayle-for-racist-abuse-on-your-flight?recruiter=499065779&amp;utm_source=share_petition&amp;utm_medium=twitter&amp;utm_campaign=psf_combo_share_initial.pacific_abi_gmail_send.variation.pacific_abi_select_all_contacts.select_all.pacific_email_copy_en_gb_4.v1.pacific_email_copy_en_us_3.control.pacific_email_copy_en_us_5.v1.lightning_share_by_medium_message.control.lightning_2primary_share_options_more.control&amp;utm_term=443678\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">close to 310k signatures<\/span><\/a><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">, demanding an apology and compensation for the victim of the incident. <\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400\"><br \/>\n<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">On October 19th, <\/span><a href=\"https:\/\/www.theguardian.com\/world\/video\/2018\/oct\/21\/racist-incident-filmed-on-ryanair-flight-video\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">footage emerged<\/span><\/a><span style=\"font-weight: 400\"> online of an elderly white man screaming insults at an elderly black woman on a Ryanair flight from Barcelona to London. The man, later identified as David Mesher of Birmingham, was filmed calling passenger, Delsie Gayle of East London, an \u201cugly black bastard\u201d and loudly insisting that she be moved away from him.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">Ultimately, Mesher was permitted to stay on the flight while Gayle was relocated to another seat, despite several other passengers insisting that Mesher be removed from the plane.<\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400\"><br \/>\n<\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400\"><br \/>\n<\/span><\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.flickr.com\/photos\/monstermunch\/4185089901\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/live.staticflickr.com\/2750\/4185089901_626ff35309.jpg\" alt=\"Ryanair B737-800 EI-DWM\" width=\"500\" height=\"281\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<h6><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">Image courtesy of Andy Mitchell via <\/span><a href=\"https:\/\/www.flickr.com\/photos\/monstermunch\/4185089901\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">Flickr<\/span><\/a><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">.<\/span><\/h6>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">Since the incident, Ryanair has contacted the police. But as the airline\u2019s response came after the video had gone viral, there has been criticism that Ryanair is not properly being held accountable.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">Several petitions have popped up on the widely-used website of change.org. While the most popular one regarding the incident is close to its goal of 500k signatures, there are others with signatures ranging between <\/span><a href=\"https:\/\/www.change.org\/p\/tribunal-petition-for-ryan-air-to-pay-compensation-to-victim-of-racism-on-flight\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">one and five thousand<\/span><\/a><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">. <\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400\"><br \/>\n<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">However, it is yet to be seen if anything will be done in regards to the incident. As no petitions have yet been published on Parliament\u2019s <\/span><a href=\"https:\/\/petition.parliament.uk\/\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">official petition website<\/span><\/a><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">, there is no obligation for the UK government or Ryanair to respond.<\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">Any impact this has on Ryanair has yet to be seen. While Ryanair\u2019s stocks hit a low on the day of the controversy, it is unclear if the two are correlated. Despite the backlash, the airline\u2019s stocks have steadily risen throughout the week.<\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400\"><br \/>\n<\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400\"><br \/>\n<\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400\"><br \/>\n<\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">Words: Elise Fritts | Subbing: Taylor Paatalo<\/span><\/p>\n<h6><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">Featured image courtesy of freestocks.org via <\/span><a href=\"https:\/\/www.pexels.com\/\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">Pexels<\/span><\/a><\/h6>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Following an incident on a Ryanair flight that many are calling racist, a change.org petition has currently amassed close to 310k signatures, demanding an apology and compensation for the victim of the incident. On October&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":476,"featured_media":23530,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[135],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-23529","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.westminster.ac.uk\/thevoiceoflondon\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23529","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.westminster.ac.uk\/thevoiceoflondon\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.westminster.ac.uk\/thevoiceoflondon\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.westminster.ac.uk\/thevoiceoflondon\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/476"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.westminster.ac.uk\/thevoiceoflondon\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=23529"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blog.westminster.ac.uk\/thevoiceoflondon\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23529\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.westminster.ac.uk\/thevoiceoflondon\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/23530"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.westminster.ac.uk\/thevoiceoflondon\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=23529"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.westminster.ac.uk\/thevoiceoflondon\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=23529"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.westminster.ac.uk\/thevoiceoflondon\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=23529"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}