Keep it simple to make the right runway choice
HERE’S some advice for the MPs taking part in today’s division on the Heathrow runway: stop making life complicated and just vote for what you think is right. For the whole debate about airport expansion has been bedevilled by second-rate political gamesmanship — courting a handful of local constituencies, outmanoeuvring opponents and attempting to wring-out concessions.
We’ve got a Labour Party that only committed itself to a new runway in its 13th and final year in government, replaced by a Labour opposition now against a runway only because its shadow chancellor wants to get a round of applause at his local residents’ meetings. We’ve had a Conservative Party that prided itself on taking the big decisions but on coming into office cancelled the new runway and then spent eight years commissioning reports to help it reverse its mistake. We’ve got Liberal Democrats who preach broad internationalism and then seek to sever links with the rest of the world to satisfy the narrow concerns of their Twickenham and Kingston MPs. We’ve got Scottish nationalist MPs who, despite years of support for a new runway and the air links with Scotland it brings, at the last moment tell us they would sacrifice the interests of Aberdeen and Inverness rather than walk through division lobbies with MPs for Manchester and Birmingham.
We’ve got a former Mayor of London who promised to lay down in front of the bulldozers to stop a runway and then takes a plane abroad to avoid standing up for what he professes to believe — we congratulate Theresa May for insisting that her government votes for her policy, and we respect the anti-runway former minister Greg Hands, who resigned rather than ran away. We’ve got the current Mayor, Sadiq Khan, who was the junior transport minister when a plan for a new runway was first announced, who everyone knows in private would be relaxed if it was built but who publicly comes out against the project he once promoted. We have airlines who favours expansion, just not this particular plan nor its funding. Despite fair concerns about costs this may also be (some suspect) because they want to maintain their dominant position in a congested airport.
Who pays the price for all this cynical, self-serving behaviour? Millions of passengers, facing growing congestion and delays; thousands of businesses, denied the connections to new markets; local communities, who will all face the permanent blight of threatened future expansion until this is resolved; and a capital city that prides itself on its global connections, but whose congested airport is cutting it off from the growing parts of the world.
Today, Parliament has the chance to bring this sorry tale to an end, with a decisive vote in favour of a new Heathrow runway. Do the right thing and let Britain take off.