Nobody likes a speedy boarder. That’s just a fact, plain and simple. People who purchase priority boarding upgrades on low-cost airlines are genuinely worse than the devil. They’re snooty and snobby, and the only way they can distinguish themselves from the unwashed plebs they’re forced to share a plane with is by spending a fiver for the privilege of sitting in it first. They’re people who go on the internet specifically to pretend not to know who Kim Kardashian is. They’re people who sneer in Harvesters. They are the absolute living worst.

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They’re so bad that they’ve even done the unthinkable and made Ryanair look halfway good. Ryanair, for crying out loud: a company that’s inherently impossible to like. A company that made its name with unremitting unpleasantness as standard, run by a silent-movie baddie on a gap year from tying women to railway lines, has somehow come out of a policy announcement looking decent. Ryanair has just announced its intention to force everyone who uses a wheelie bag as hand luggage to purchase a priority boarding pass. And, well, hooray.

On the surface, this is simply to address issues of space. On a plane with 189 seats, they say, there is only enough space in the overhead lockers for 90 bags. But lately, people have been exploiting Ryanair’s two-bag hand luggage policy by dragging both a wheelie bag and an oversized rucksack on with them. If every passenger did this, there’d be 380 bags all competing for a microscopic amount of space. Ryanair’s answer is a simple one: if you really want to bring two big bags on board with you, you’re going to have to pay for them.

But really it seems Ryanair is simply doing a sterling piece of detective work. Whether intentionally or not, it’s actually helping to weed out latent speedy boarders. The people who are speedy boarders at heart – the sort of people who ignore the homeless and watch illegally streamed films for free, the sort of people who look at you with a dumb I’d-help-if-I-could expression when you ask for them to move their bag from an empty seat on a crowded train – but can’t commit to paying extra to make their monstrousness explicit, are gradually being edged out into the daylight.

They’re the people who stop the plane taking off, attempting the equivalent of stuffing a wedding cake into a condom

And, make no mistake, people who try to cram two big bags into the overhead lockers on planes are the living embodiment of latent speedy boarders. They’re the people who stop the plane taking off on time, causing a bottleneck in the aisle because they’re tutting and wheezing and attempting the aviation equivalent of stuffing a wedding cake into a condom. They could have just placed one of their bags in hold for free like everyone else. But no: that would have taken a maximum of five minutes and the barest trace of consideration for other people, and their convenience isn’t worth that.

But now these people have been forced out into the open. If they want to maintain their selfishness, they’re going to have to pay for it. They’re going to have to let everyone else on the plane know upfront what exactly a swaggering pranny they are. The bell will ring in the departure gate, and they’ll announce “Can everyone who labours under the woeful apprehension that they’re somehow better than you please come to the front of the line?”, and the rest of us will watch, silently committing their bovine faces to memory.

Honestly, I think Ryanair could have probably gone a little further with this plan. Hopefully its next policy will involve leading the speedy boarders to the plane with a bell-ringing nun who keeps chanting the word “Shame” at them. Or, better yet, special badges for speedy boarders to wear, so that everyone else can single them out and understand the depths of their depravity. Or, you know, slightly bigger overhead lockers. Whichever’s easiest, really.

• Stuart Heritage writes on film, TV and music for the Guardian