Expensive Air Travel? It's Just Not Cricket

What would you say was the purpose of the England and Wales Cricket Board? To encourage people to watch or play cricket? To force people to watch or play cricket against their will? To destroy all cricket except for English cricket (and some Welsh cricket, but only as a sort of Vichy-style puppet cricket)? To nail every cricket in England and Wales to a board? To promote golf?

It turns out it's the last. Thanks to the ECB's sale of the cricket TV rights to Sky, the live sport on terrestrial television this weekend is the Open, not the Lord's Test. In 2005, 8.4m watched the Channel 4 coverage of the climactic Sunday of an Ashes Test match. Last Sunday's nail-biter in Cardiff peaked at only 1.5m, which may be massive for a subscription channel, but is shit for cricket and its chances of attracting new fans.

Why did the ECB make this insane choice? For money. It forgot about building on Test cricket's growing popularity after 2005's triumph, about keeping it a presence in our national life on a channel people receive automatically, and it took a big check. It's as if it was getting out of cricket - selling up for a fast buck, taking the money and running. But it can't run - it's English cricket's governing body - so it's left holding the money while it stares at the diminished popularity and, therefore, significance, of English cricket as a result of its actions. If it's not run by golf enthusiasts, it's run by fools.

Ed Miliband is not a fool, but last week showed himself just as fond as the ECB of short-term gain when he promised to safeguard cheap air travel despite the need to cut carbon emissions. Otherwise, he said, it would mean "you would go back to 1974 levels of flying". Well, if he thinks that's the worst the environmental future could hold, he hasn't been doing his boxes. "I don't want to have a situation where only rich people can afford to fly," he continued. Who does? But then it wouldn't be the end of the world. Whereas ...

Miliband clearly thinks that being seen to jeopardize the annual British exodus to drink colder lager somewhere hotter is political harakiri. He's probably right. While he may not be the most statesmanlike steward of our environmental future, he clearly knows how to keep his head above water in a sinking government (and if he has that skill literally as well as metaphorically he's got less to fear from climate change than most).

He may represent a political class that wouldn't tell you if the room in which you were standing was on fire because predictions of smoke inhalation play badly in key marginals, but his remarks give an unsettling insight into our national obsession with cheap foreign holidays.

To deny us them is like a Roman emperor running out of bread and circuses, a French president failing to defend the Common Agricultural Policy or a Russian leader being pleasant: the people won't stand for it.

Think of the other sacrifices combating climate change may involve - massively more expensive electricity; severely rationed water; a landscape humming with wind farms or hundreds of nuclear power stations, each threatening to China syndrome western Europe if a senior technician has a bad hangover day; removing the very tea from the used teabags and recycling the perforations; having to get up to turn the television on.

And think of what we could face if we don't make those sacrifices: the sea advancing up the Kilburn High Road; hurricanes alternating with droughts; all the fish and bees dying; weird Mediterranean insects and aggressive freshwater lobsters finding their perfect habitat in the Yorkshire Dales; more English wine.

Yet, to the British, neither eventuality is half as terrifying as losing our easyJet privileges. Apparently we feel there's no point keeping the planet habitable unless we've still got quick access to Disney World and Ibiza. This is bizarre and depressing. It makes me need a holiday. Are our existences so miserable that we're only living for two weeks of escape? Have we given up on the other 50, like people who give to animal charities have presumably given up on humans?

The media reaction when there's, say, an air traffic controllers' strike in August, certainly implies some kind of national neurosis. Stranded holidaymakers are spoken to, and behave, like victims of an atrocity. The cameras pan along queues of heartbroken Britons in flipflops. "I don't know how they can do this to people!" complains someone with a tragic expression and a Hawaiian shirt as if he's talking about extraordinary rendition. Don't these thoughtless foreign trade unionists understand that it's not just people's lives or livelihoods or children or homes that they're toying with, but their holidays?

What makes all this even sadder is that so many holidays are a huge disappointment. Hotels don't look like the photos, the beaches are crowded, the food gives you the runs, you're more stuck with your bloody family than ever. And however idyllic the destination, what series of experiences can live up to such rabid expectations of joy? This is why I don't think I'll ever watch The Wire - it literally cannot be as good as people say unless it turns out not to be a TV program but a cream-cake-bottle-of-whisky-orgasm combo.

Holidays aren't for going on, still less for feeling rested by, but for looking forward to. They distract us from the daily grind because they're a light at the end of the tunnel, just before the next tunnel. As soon as we return from a trip, exhausted, broke and disappointed, we feel the overwhelming urge to book another one so we can look forward to that.

So it surely doesn't much matter what holidays actually involve. Even in Miliband's 1974 dystopia, when fewer of us went abroad, the prospect of trips to Cornwall or Blackpool kept us at least as sane as our hopes for Gatwick-launched escape do today. We've randomly fetishised "sunshine" and "abroad". But fads change. If we could only switch to "drizzle" and "model villages" then politicians might pluck up the courage to make burning kerosene as costly for us as it is for the environment.

• David Mitchell chooses his Desert Island Discs on Radio 4 FM today, 11.15am