On 19 October 2018, an incident occurred on a Ryanair flight FR9015 from Barcelona to London Stansted. During the incident, David Mesher, a 70-year-old white man from Birmingham, racially abused Delsie Gayle, a 77-year-old black woman from East London, who was seated next to him. After she was slow to move from her seat, he became abusive, using expletives against her and referring to her as a "stupid ugly cow" and an "ugly black bastard". Various passengers and staff asked Mesher to desist from his behaviour. Staff ultimately decided that he should remain in his seat rather than being removed from the plane, with Gayle being asked to move seats instead.
Another passenger, David Lawrence, filmed the incident and posted the footage to social media; he commented that he wanted to raise wider public awareness of the racist incidents that black Caribbean people experience. There, it gained widespread attention; international mainstream media coverage followed. A number of prominent politicians condemned the incident and Ryanair's response to it. Ryanair were criticised for not removing Mesher from the plane and handing him over to Spanish police; for moving Gayle rather than Mesher; and for failing to appropriately apologise to her after the incident.
Several days later, police revealed that they had discovered Mesher's identity and gave the information to the Spanish authorities. Barcelona City Council announced that it had instructed its public prosecutor to determine whether his actions constituted a hate crime under Spanish law. A week after the incident, Mesher publicly apologised to Gayle on the ITV Breakfast television show Good Morning Britain and rejected the idea that he was racist. Gayle did not accept the apology; her daughter rejected his claims to not be racist.
Background
At the time of the incident, David Mesher was seventy years old. A former railway worker, he was once employed by British Rail at the ticket office of London Waterloo station and later by London Midland Railway as a train announcer. He formerly lived in Barking, East London with his mother, but after her death, he had moved to Birmingham, where by 2018, he was living in a sheltered accommodation housing block in the Yardley Wood area of the city.
One former colleague expressed surprise at Mesher's actions during the incident, noting that when "[Mesher] was in the ticket office at Waterloo station[…] [he] was always so polite. He would not be rude to anyone, otherwise he would not have been dealing with the public. It was a real shock to see him and the vile language that he used". While in Yardley Wood, he had had problems with various neighbours; reporters found one who called him "a racist pig and bully", while another said "no one really likes him. He keeps himself to himself and we don't know much about him". One resident living adjacent to him called him a "strange man" and noted that they "had problems" with him in the past. One related that Mesher had "no respect for other people", and that in one incident Mesher had been "driving me mad by playing music loudly and continuously on a loop. I banged on his door to ask him to turn it down and he wasn't even in. How inconsiderate is that?"
At the time living in East London, Delsie Gayle was seventy-seven years old and was a retired care assistant; she had moved to Britain from Jamaica during the 1960s as part of the "Windrush generation". In late 2017, her husband—to whom she had been married for over fifty years—died. Her daughter observed that she was "feeling really down and depressed" and decided to take her on a holiday to Spain so that it might "raise her spirits".
Incident
The incident took place on 19 October 2018 on the Ryanair flight FR9015 from Barcelona to London Stansted; it occurred before take-off, while the plane was still on Spanish territory. In the incident, Mesher sought to get past Gayle, who was in the aisle seat, to access his window seat. Gayle, whose mobility was affected by arthritis, was slow to move out of his way. At this point, Gayle's daughter explained to Mesher that her mother was disabled. Mesher's response was that "I don't care whether she's fucking disabled or not - if I tell her to get out then she gets out." A flight attendant appeared and asked Gayle if she would like to move; she responded that she wanted to remain close to her daughter. At this, Mesher stated: "Move her to another seat... I can't get in while she's sat there." Gayle responded with: "You smell. You need a wash", to which Mesher followed with "If you don't go to another seat, I'll push you to another seat." The argument continued. After she spoke to him in English with a Jamaican accent, Mesher said: "Don't talk to me in a fucking foreign language you stupid ugly cow." Another passenger intervened, asking Mesher to stop being abusive. His response was that "I will carry on as far as I can with this ugly black bastard."
Several passengers called for Mesher to be removed from the plane. A flight attendant told him that he was being "super rude" and asked him to calm down before stating that he would have to ask his supervisor what course of action should be taken. Ultimately, Mesher was not removed from the flight. He was allowed to remain in his seat while Gayle was asked to move from hers, which she did; Mesher then told staff that "I'm alright, now she's gone". Gayle's daughter subsequently related that the cabin crew denied hearing Mesher use racial slurs and told her to call Ryanair customer services on 22 October.
A fellow passenger, David Lawrence—who like Gayle was of Caribbean heritage—filmed the incident and posted it to social media. He explained that "for many years a lot of the West Indian community have gone through these types of incidents in Britain, but have never been able to share it with the public or the world. So I decided that I had the opportunity to film this, as difficult as it was". In his view, it was important that the public be made aware "that these incidents take place" and that this was something that could now be achieved through "the power of social media". He noted that one fellow passenger called him "childish" for filming the incident. Lawrence criticised the response of both fellow passengers and the plane's staff, adding that he had seen individuals escorted off of planes before for less serious actions. After being uploaded on the 20 October, the footage was widely circulated on social media and attracted the attention of mainstream media in both the UK and abroad. Within several days, it had been viewed millions of times.
Response
Various politicians spoke out at what they regarded as Ryanair's lack of appropriate action in the incident. Chris Grayling, the Secretary of State for Transport, appeared on the BBC's Today programme, where he stated that the incident was "totally unacceptable" and expressed the hope that "police would want to take action in such an extraordinarily unacceptable case". Karl Turner, the Member of Parliament for Kingston upon Hull East, tweeted that Mesher "should have been removed from the flight and handed over to the police". Turner added that if the plane was in the UK at the time of the incident then a criminal offence had definitely been committed. Later speaking to BBC Radio 4's The World at One, Turner expressed concern that Mesher would escape criminal prosecution because there was no extradition arrangement for events of this nature and thus Mesher might not face Spanish prosecutors unless he handed himself over willingly; "I doubt whether he's going to do that."
Stuart McMillan, the Member of the Scottish Parliament (MSP) for Greenock and Inverclyde, tweeted to state that "This is really appalling Ryanair. You will know the identity of the man and the level of training given to your staff." Margaret Ferrier, the Member of Parliament for Rutherglen and Hamilton West, tweeted that the footage was "utterly disgusting" and that the flight attendant was "incapable of responding appropriately" to the "racist male passenger". Ferrier later tweeted that Ryanair's CEO Michael O'Leary should personally call Gayle to "apologise profusely for the incompetence of his flight attendant in handling this racial abuse incident properly." The MP Dawn Butler wrote a letter to Ryanair, accusing them of "empowering a racist" by failing to act against Mesher at the time of the incident. She added the view that it was "particularly sad" that this occurred during Black History Month. Gayle's local MP, John Cryer, stated he would raise the issue through an early day motion in the House of Commons. Jeremy Corbyn, the leader of the Labour Party, expressed his intention of contacting Gayle about the incident.
After the footage appeared online, various calls were made to boycott Ryanair over their response; among those endorsing such a boycott was the MP David Lammy. A Change.org petition was launched calling on Ryanair to apologise and compensate Gayle for her experience. On 21 October, Ryanair tweeted that it had reported the issue to Essex Police and that "As this is now a police matter, we cannot comment further". This public statement did not include an apology to Gayle. Ryanair stated that they contacted Gayle on that same day, with a letter sent both by post and email.
Reporter Jeremy Vine tweeted his criticism of Ryanair, stating that "they need to explain how this man's disgusting racial abuse of the black lady in the seat next to him ends up with HER being asked to move. It is beyond belief."
Writing in The Independent, Helen Coffey noted that the incident raised questions regarding "the rules of jurisdiction" when it comes to aviation, highlighting that it was often a "grey area". Also in an op-ed for The Independent, Biba Kang highlighted the fact that the incident came to light on the same day that the Doctor Who episode "Rosa"—featuring an encounter with the African-American civil rights activist Rosa Parks in 1950s Alabama—was first screened on British television. For Kang, the two occurrences reflected "how far we've come since the inception of the civil rights movement, while also reminding us how far we have left to go." Kang saw both the Doctor Who episode and the Ryanair incident as evidence that "black people are treated as aggressors in scenarios where they are really the victim"; in Gayle's example because staff treated her as if she was equally guilty as Mesher in the argument and was asked to move seats. He linked this to the "racist stereotype that black people are innately confrontational or aggressive", so that when they are faced with racial abuse their angry responses are regarded as "evidence that the abuse was provoked" in the first place.
Writing for HuffPost, Nadine White and Lucy Pasha-Robinson noted that for many black British people, the footage about the incident was "shocking, but not surprising." White and Pasha-Robinson noted that many of the black Britons they talked to could relate experiences of "everyday racism" that they had encountered in their lives, such as being referred to as "golliwogs" or "niggers" by strangers or neighbours, being followed by store security when entering shops, and encountering racial abuse on social media. In an op-ed for The Guardian, Hugh Muir cautioned that Mesher "may not be able to take responsibility for his actions. If he is, he is damned by them, by the knowledge that his show of inhumanity was seen by millions, by the terrible certainty that his dark side is forever transparent." He praised Lawrence for filming the incident and thus ensuring that it "became a cause celebre" but criticised other passengers on the plane who "sat by – keener to get home perhaps than to stand up for an elderly woman being racially abused". Ultimately, he described the incident as being "like the Rosa Parks story enacted in reverse".
Police investigation