Greenpeace & others are talking with lawyers to legaly challenge the decision. Opposition groups will also be raising issue during the planning enquiry stage of the application

Politicians are seeking a vote in parliament & are seeking an allocation for a full days debate in parliament this Wed

A Labour policitian in the area suggested that those 700 families whose homes would be demolished should each adopt one of the 650 politicians who vote & harry them – write to them etc

There is also an EU Protocol which gives an inalienble right to a property/ landowner to stay in possession of their property/land. One of the residents affected has written to the EU court system to elicit such a case & urges other residents to pursue the same – maybe a multi-track legal action pending

Apart from this there is alot of community demo’s & other direct action planned. It remains to be seen if this affects the course of this application…

agreed.

what pansy global leadership on co2 reduction is this?

why are the good people of sipsonganj making this a reason to vote tory?

how has boris been able to take this up so easily?

We need a dual spine, East and West, of new TGV routes the length of this nation.

That would reduce some of the traffic on Heathrow. Boris is also quite right in suggesting that Heathrow is in the wrong bloody place. Spending more money on it is pouring good money after bad. Stick the hub airport away from residential areas.

Heathrow expansion is a stupid idea.

Shut it.

Why exactly? If the cost and the time of, say, London – Paris is cheaper and quicker by surface transit, what’s the point of having an air link? Fast rail has allegedly killed the air alternative on some routes:

http://www.francetravelguide.com/tgv-train-a-grande-vitesse.html

or

http://www.atwonline.com/magazine/article.html?articleID=2177

IIRC the London – Glasgow flightpath is the busiest in Europe.

If you can make the overall journey time less than or equal to a couple of hours, your on a winner.

I would certainly like to see a better UK rail netwrok, thus drastically reducing the need for internal flights. However, there will always be demand for planes to Europe.

I’d like to see Heathrow return to the idea of intercontinental traffic. Continental traffic should be, largely, the stuff of TGVs.

Could you arrange for direct links from Manchester, Liverpool, Newcastle, Edinburgh and Glasgow to London, Paris, Frankfurt, maybe even Rome and Berlin, etc?

It would kill half the traffic through Heathrow stone dead.

Thanks.

Quote: Residents are invited to join him for a lively debate about the implications of expansion at the airport.

Other speakers inc. Richard Barnes, Deputy Mayor and London Assembly Member for Ealing and Hillingdon, British Airways, BAA and campaigning groups from both sides of the expansion debate.

This is the first issue based People’s Question. The event at the Beck Theatre is on January 21 at 7pm. Doors open 6pm.

Heathrow might provide people with jobs, but that’s no reason to make it any bigger than it is. I have often thought that if BAA could have it all their own way, then much of that area of West London would be Heathrow, with just a surrounding strip of dwellings for people working within the airport, like Bournville for Cadbury!

I hope this does not happen. Incompetence should not be rewarded – if they can’t manage bleeding Terminal 5, then they REALLY don’t deserve another runway!

Sorry for the late reply. I am not sure that a tax system that reflects environmental costs is an attack on civil liberties, since is merely acknowledges the impact of a particular thing’s externalities. Indeed, some economists would argue that such a tax system is an ideal one. I do agree though that there is not some simple solution to the whole thing.

As for cheap flights becoming more popular, I suspect not, as people will be cutting back on foreign holidays.

‘With Britain now in recession, the demand for flights is likely to drop anyway.’ Well, that lovely bloke O’Leary is on the record as saying he wants a depression. Hyperbole? Maybe, but I can see recession actually being good for low cost airlines if peole see them as cheaper. They probably are cheaper than rail.

I agree absolutely about using tax, but not in a million years will you, protesters, government or anyone get that past the electorate in one piece. I do not revel in this, but environmentalists seem to want to deal with the world as they wish it was rather than as it is. As I said, lots of good will but naff all in terms of impact in really changing anyone’s behaviour.

Again, high-speed rail links will attract protest.

I have sympathy with environmental arguments – I just that they were less disingenuous about the end-point of those arguments. Indeed Rumbold, on the face of it, the liberty implications of this seem at least equal to those in anti-smoking legislation the you railed against on here a few weeks ago.

“But it still does not change the fact that there is demand for flights, from Heathrow or otherwise… it is the public that the environmentalists need to take it up with.”

Agreed. But the government, if it is serious about reducing carbon emissions (i.e. the externalities) , can use the tax system to make rail more attractive and flying less attractive. Properly taxing transportion relative to its carbon emissions would raise the cost of flying and lower the cost of rail travel. Obviously we would need the rail infrastructure would need to be in place, but I see no reason this could not be done in the same time that it takes to build a third runway. With Britain now in recession, the demand for flights is likely to drop anyway.

I think that you make a very important distinction about anti-heathrow and anti-expansion, but it still does not change the fact that there is demand for flights, from Heathrow or otherwise. Rail may be able to diminish some of this (though in honesty I have reservations about this whilst Ryanair charge £1 a flight). And that is not to mention that rail links need noise, fights to the death with NIMBYs etc.

The ugly truth is that the protesters will get lots of good will, but I don’t see any evidence that it is reducing the appetite for flights from London. Think of it this way. Compare the reaction to Heathrow expansion with the type of reaction full blooded bans on cheap flights would generate. I suspect that the reaction such a ban would create would make the reaction to conflict in Iraq look muted.

Hectoring the government is all well and good – it is the public that the environmentalists need to take it up with.

Perhaps, but the modd at the moment isn’t really anti-heathrow, but anti-expansion. And locals are more concerned with increased noise, demolition of houses and more pollution than with climate change, though obviously plenty care about that as well.

Fug:

I’m sorry, I don’t understand.