Has near-unanimity damaged the case against Heathrow extension?
Waiting for my train at Charing Cross last night, I was flicking through a magazine in the WHSmiths reading room outlet. A columnist making the case against a third runway at Heathrow had written a piece reeling off the political opposition to the scheme. This included
Mayor of London Boris Johnson, who whatever you may think of him commands several million votes [sic], many times more than any Member of Parliament and a sizable chunk of the British electorate, is opposed to the third runway[.]
Indeed he is, although his opposition seems to rest more on the inconvenience that extra flights will cause to Conservative-voting West Londoners than to any commitment to cutting air travel or emissions: see the approval of increased flights from City Airport or the Heathrow-on-Sea plans as examples.
But, I thought, surely you are understating the case – in the Mayoral elections it certainly wasn’t just Johnson who was against the expansion of Heathrow. Without doing a full search through every (more…)
