Third Runway Appears Dead

I wrote the other day about the inconsistency in Transport Secretary Lord Adonis’ position on the planned third Heathrow runway, given that he aims to replace the UK’s short-haul air travel with a high speed rail network. It looks as though it’s not really inconsistent after all:

High Speed Two, the company charged with proposing a north-south route, is working on a business model that features a Heathrow station but does not factor in a new runway at the UK’s largest airport, reflecting Tory policy to block expansion.

In an interview with the Guardian, the High Speed Two chairman, Sir David Rowlands, and the company’s chief engineer, Andrew McNaughton, said the scheme required a plan that could be used by a Labour or Conservative government. “Our ambition is to produce a report that is useful to the government before and after the election. We are modelling Heathrow with and without a third runway, so that it is equally useful to either kind of government.”

So despite the Department for Transport still publicly supporting the third runway, HS2 is essentially being set up under the premise that it will never happen. It makes plenty of sense, since moving away from domestic, short haul air travel removes entirely the justification for a third runway; the expansion predicted for Heathrow would be generated entirely by short haul travel. Good news all around really – it’s been crazy that Spain, a country moving out from a dictatorship merely 25 years ago, should imminently have the largest high speed rail network in Europe, that China (a country which notably has banks under state control) should be aiming to have the largest network in the world, whilst Britain makes do merely with the recently completed HS1. I don’t care if it’s a policy being introduced to damn the Tories if they decide it can’t be afforded after they win next year – if we’re on the road to HS2 and beyond, I’m pleased.

Yes to High Speed Rail? No to Third Runway!

Transport Secretary Andrew Adonis has nailed his colours to the wall, surprisingly speaking out in favour of a future of high speed rail in the UK, at the expense of short haul air travel:

The transport secretary, Lord Adonis, said switching 46 million domestic air passengers a year to a multibillion-pound north-south rail line was “manifestly in the public interest”. Marking a government shift against aviation, Adonis added that rail journeys should be preferred to plane trips.

“For reasons of carbon reduction and wider environmental benefits, it is manifestly in the public interest that we systematically replace short-haul aviation with high-speed rail. But we would have to have, of course, the high-speed network before we can do it,” he said.

Goodness me. It’s a laudable aim, which I thoroughly support. It’s clear to me how long it’ll take, but an infrastructure upgrade such as this has been long overdue for decades. Our roads are rubbish, our rail system remains a joke, and moving to a low carbon domestic transport policy would be an amazing achievement for a government which over 12 years has shown scant regard for climate change. Surely this represents an about-turn for the Department of Transport, and the widely reviled third runway for Heathrow is now dead? No:

Adonis said a high-speed rail scheme would not undermine an aviation policy that calls for new runways at Stansted and Heathrow over the next decade.

“If you look at projections for long-haul air demand the third runway just on long- haul demand alone is justified,” he said. According to government estimates, air passenger numbers will nearly double to 465 million a year by 2030.

So it’s justified purely on his figures of long-haul air demand? Yet local businesses don’t want the third runway, nor do local residents, and BAA has recently been forced to admit twice as many people are affected by the airport’s noise than previously estimated. Thirteen CEOs of major British firms are against it, and passenger numbers are falling, and what about those figures…don’t they just fall down if short haul flights, which account for a third of all Heathrow’s traffic, and which are the driver of airport expansion get taken out of the equation? Adonis’ position on the third runway is untenable if he retains his commitment to using High Speed Two and beyond to move from short haul flights entirely; he can’t have it both ways.

Heathrow’s Third Runway: Dead?

It looks as if a major blow has been dealt against the putative third runway at Heathrow:

According to a presentation by the Department for Transport, seen by the Guardian, BAA is not expected to seek planning permission for a third runway until 2012. The last possible date for a general election is 3 June 2010 and BAA’s best hope for expanding Heathrow is to submit an application by then.

However, executives at the airport group have conceded that it will be impossible to compile the plans and data necessary for an application by that date. Under the DfT timetable, any BAA planning application is likely to be submitted under a Tory administration that has vowed to obstruct Heathrow’s expansion.

The DfT presentation deals a further blow to BAA’s ambitions by conceding that the government document that must underpin a planning request for major infrastructure, a national policy statement, will not be ready until 2011. A national policy statement is a key guide for any planning decision by the Infrastructure Planning Commission, the newly created body that will evaluate a Heathrow proposal.

Anti-expansion campaigners said the DfT document confirmed that the odds of Heathrow getting a third runway were diminishing. “There is no way that BAA can get planning permission before the next general election. The chances that a third runway will never be built are increasing all the time,” said John Stewart, chair of the Hacan ClearSkies campaign group.

Good news that BAA simply don’t have the time to assemble all the information needed for the planning application before the next general election. Bad news would be the trade off  in the Tories winning that election – greater environmental protection; intended abolition however of the Human Rights Act! Which is preferable, given that the current voting system still encourages a binary choice between Labour and the Tories?

A Third Runway? Please.

With the third runway at Heathrow most likely to be approved soon (it was supposed to be this week, but it’s curiously been shifted back), Simon Jenkins makes some excellent points:

The prime minister has again postponed taking a decision, but that will not stop him meekly championing the carbon lobby by parroting Matthews’s nonsense to reluctant Labour MPs. He will waffle about “insisting” that the airport and airlines “take steps” to reduce carbon emissions. He will promise that a third runway will not go ahead if they “breach air pollution and noise levels”, or if Heathrow fails a punctuality test.

What will Brown do if these conditions are not met? Will he come from retirement, break up the tarmac with a drill and rebuild Harmondsworth? This is infantile politics, but it will doubtless dupe the ever-spineless Labour backbenchers.

Brown will do what his predecessors have done, which is lie. In the 1960s ministers promised “for all time” that there would be no expansion of Heathrow. It expanded. When T4 opened in 1978 there was another promise of no expansion, and a cap of 275,000 flights. The pledge was broken within a year. At the time of T5 the cap was raised to 480,000, and the prime minister and cabinet agreed that a third runway would be “totally unacceptable”.

That promise is now broken. In 2006 the transport secretary, Ruth Kelly, promised that a new runway would be a short, domestic one, with flights only over countryside to the west. She also promised carbon and pollution limits. Those promises have been broken. The government wants almost to double the number of Heathrow flights to 700,000, an astonishing increase on the present chaos, and careless of the impact on west London or its infrastructure. This is an orgy of planning abuse. No Heathrow promise is worth a bucket of spit.

Ministers lie because they know they will be out of office, or out of sight, when their pledges are broken. They know that no government can bind its successor and that Big Carbon, like Big Pharma, always gets its way. When we were young we were told that new airports could go anywhere because new planes would be so clean and quiet that nobody would mind. It was all rubbish.

The biggest lie is that a third runway is about something called “the business economy”. The BAA lobby has conned the CBI, London First and even the unions into believing this, fobbing them off with a factoid that the runway would “create 50,000 jobs”. So would rebuilding Britain’s mental health infrastructure, which would thus also be “good for business”.

I am unsentimental about much economic growth. I would flatten a rare orchid or a natterjack toad or even Harmondsworth tithe barn if the wealth thus liberated were overwhelming. With Heathrow’s third runway nothing is overwhelming except the prospective environmental damage.

This is pretty much my own argument, and of course the ‘environmental  damage’ is already with us, and is already in breach of European standards:

Heathrow’s controversial third runway – due to be given the green light by ministers this week – is unlikely ever to be built because it will fall foul of new European pollution laws, environmentalists and senior government advisers believe.

The airport’s two existing runways already cause air pollution which breaches compulsory European Union air-quality standards, which Britain will have to observe by 2015. Neither anti-runway campaigners nor the Government’s Environment Agency see how these can possibly be met if the number of flights rises by 50 per cent as planned.

With the government hell bent on expanding Heathrow at any cost, Greenpeace has adopted an innovative tactic to prevent the expansion of the airport:

Greenpeace has bought a field the size of a football pitch and plans to invite protesters to dig networks of tunnels across it, similar to those built in the ultimately unsuccessful campaign against the Newbury bypass in 1996. The group also plans to divide the field into thousands of tiny plots, each with a separate owner. BAA, the airport’s owner, would be forced to negotiate with each owner, lengthening the compulsory purchase process.

Greenpeace believes that the longer the expansion is delayed, the more likely it is that the project will be cancelled.

Emma Thompson, the actress, Alastair McGowan, the comedian, and Zac Goldsmith, a Conservative adviser on the environment, were among those who signed the deeds to the site last Friday. They each contributed a small, undisclosed sum towards the purchase, but most of the £20,000 cost was met by a secret donor.

Ms Thompson said: “I don’t understand how any government remotely serious about committing to reversing climate change can even consider these ridiculous plans.We’ll stop this from happening even if we have to move in and plant vegetables.”

John Sauven, Greenpeace’s director, said: “Many thousands of people will be prepared to peacefully defend their field in person, standing in front of bulldozers and blocking construction. This site will become a focus for climate campaigners.”

I have joined up. For the sake of the environment, for the sake of the town of Sipson, and because noone’s presented a credible case for Heathrow expansion, I honestly believe you should too. And you can, here. So the government wants to buy us off with a high speed rail hub? Big deal, they should be doing that anyway. The expansion of Heathrow isn’t justified by the credit crunch – the construction will likely mostly be undertaken by foreign labour, which is all well and good, but won’t make a dent in the recession. If there really is a case for airport expansion (and I’d love someone to try to make it), I see no reason why East Midlands Airport, Manchester Airport, Birmingham International or any number of regional airports couldn’t be developed, and connected to London by a high speed rail service. This is second nature for other countries, why not Britain?

Gordon R is Gordon B’s Salvation

Hard to imagine isn’t it, that Gordon Ramsay might just have stumbled (however hypocritically) on the answer Gordon Brown needs to survive. It sure won’t be through being advised by Tony Blair (thanks Cherie).

Ramsay has suggested that restaurants should be fined for using out-of-season produce, simple as that. But think about the implications, as the PM stumbles incoherently to find his message, his political voice. It’s all about fairness and responsibility; the new politics to move on from the now thoroughly destroyed Third Way should involve the government tying technology together with its own and consumers’ responsibility. So in Ramsay’s example it’s about not using foreign food just because technology allows us to – it’s trumping that with the notion of its carbon footprint being too big a cost and domestic, not to mention in-season produce being better. It’s rather obvious that you can extrapolate the point across the board:

– We throw away vast amounts of food whilst food prices in the developing world are escalating out of control. And Professor Tim Lang is right – we but also our politicians have to catch up with our inability to use this technology properly. We throw it away because we can, because we don’t feel a direct connection with the consequences of our actions either on the environment or on others elsewhere in the world. We don’t think twice about using out-of-season produce in our own kitchens, nor appreciate that as with restaurant fast food comparison, self-prepared food at home is healthier and often quicker and easier. Government tackling food and our relationship to it at home would have profound environmental consequences, alongside health improvements and would be a core development in a politics where consumers are helped by the government to take responsibility for the choices provided for them.

– Expanding airports, particularly in the south-east is lunacy. The economic case hasn’t been proven for a third runway or sixth terminal at Heathrow, nor for Boris Johnson’s renewed call for the Thames Estuary Airport. Common sense says unlimited expansion isn’t possible anyway, but the environment can’t take all the current planes arriving here as it is. Finally move forward with high speed rail as the Spanish so gleefully have done and realise that as with easy, cheap money, the days of treating flight paths as drag racing tracks to Majorca and Ibiza have to stop. We have the ability to race around the world at low cost whenever we want, but if you keep building airports and expanding them to accommodate this, you factor out any sense of responsibility. People want what they can get – a market that remains utterly free to do as it and its consumers pleases with always produce distortions which the consumers don’t like, such as environmental damage. Time to help them make the responsible choices.

– Walk Away from ID cards. Not only because they’re an illiberal, ineffective idea, but because the government’s central claim is just stupid. We should do it just because the technology already exists? That’s not how technology works – it tends to come from the bottom up; if there’s a pre-existing need and the technology appears it tends to get adopted. Technologies that the government thinks are cute for control of its electorate tend to bring disasters with them – the usage always creeps where it’s not supposed to go, this government has already proven how incompetent it is with handling confidential data, and there’s the likelihood of fraud in a contracted out operation such as this. They would be useless against terrorism, but it’s again a case of a road we mustn’t go down just because we can. There is an inbuilt presumption of guilt in the proposed terms of use of these cards, when we need to tie technology’s use together with responsibility.

If you want fairness then the solutions are also clear: don’t tax the poor to appease the middle classes. That was an electoral wheeze which worked as long as New Labour didn’t squander its political capital. Iraq and Brown’s last gamble as Chancellor – withdrawing the 10p tax band – have seen to that. You don’t go through with the nightmare of 42 days, you issue an immediate asylum amnesty for gay asylum seekers from Iran and other Islamic states, remembering on both counts that one of New Labour’s original claims to legitimacy was Robin Cook’s ‘ethical foreign policy’. It stopped being ethical even during his tenure as Foreign Secretary but Brown could trumpet returning to ethics and fairness as a basis for dealing with foreign affairs as a means of regaining voters’ trust in the Labour Party.

The tragedy is he doesn’t see any of this. It’s absurd that Boris Johnson and David Cameron, the current two most important people in British politics, appear to.

The Terminal 5 Song

I was going to put this on my other blog but it really does belong here. BA lost Tim Soong’s, his wife’s and his best man’s luggage, with all of their wedding clothes, and provided no compensation. The Terminal 5 Song is their revenge. Priceless. I wonder what Naomi Campbell thinks? Things seem to be going from bad to worse for institutionally muddled British Airways.

No harm in this blog being lighthearted every once in awhile…;)

Crash at Heathrow

In all honesty I really wouldn’t want to fly BA again any time soon. Not only was this not the first total electrical shutdown in the air they’ve faced, but it’s been established before that they will do anything to keep their planes flying, even when they’re clearly in an unsafe state. They’ve been lucky before, even yesterday, but I personally wouldn’t want to take my chances again.

Fuel Protesters

It’s curious to see this happening on the day that a climate change breakthrough appears to have been negotiated in Bali. At a time in history when third runways are being argued against and an exponential growth in wind farms is being planned, the fuel protesters are back, campaigning for their freedom (despite their livelihoods, I’ll get to that) to pollute significantly with fossil fuels.

Their last efforts in 2000 led to society itself nearly caving in, with unthinkable petrol queues, shelves going bare in shops and some train lines nearing the brink of shutting down. For reasons this blogger can’t imagine, the then PM Tony Blair didn’t stop their protest when it reached a crisis level. The government however this time has indicated no tolerance for outright refinery blockades. And environmental groups rightly point out that in an era where oil prices are high for all, in part due to our possibly being in the age of peak oil, cutting the cost of using fossil fuels makes no sense whatsoever. What though of the hauliers’ livelihoods, which they believe are being threatened by the high price of oil in the UK?

A number of environmental groups suggest they exaggerate their threat from fuel prices. But it’s also true that NuLabour campaigned in 1997 for a joined up transport policy, which it’s comprehensively failed to provide. At the same time however it’s entirely arguable that in a free market, if they can’t afford to stay afloat with rising fuel costs then they shouldn’t. It’s not even as if these people are poor. Maybe the shortages and discomfort that a whole section of the haulage industry going to the ground would generate, might change governmental policies towards transport more than attempts at dialogue now.

Is this a sign of things to come, resource wars occurring internationally and within our own societies? It’s low level, sure, but as the environment becomes ever more depleted through our greed, what sort of law enforcement will be needed to keep these new social grievances in check? Bali was an important step forwards towards fixing the bigger picture. What though of the smaller, the regional, the local?