I don’t mean to pick on Tom Harris. After all, I think it a very good thing that MPs should have their own blogs. And, as it happens, I have no firm opinion either way on the desirability or not of a third runway at Heathrow airport. But I thought this a telling part of Mr Harris’s latest post on the matter:
I’M DISAPPOINTED by the announcement that we’ll have to wait until next year to get a decision on a third runway at Heathrow.
But I concede that 70,000 submissions to the consultation will have to be considered and that might take a little while. And given that a judicial review – whatever the decision – is inevitable, consideration must be seen to be thorough.
Now I concede that this may be an honest slip and that Mr Harris genuinely wants there to be a proper consideration of the merits of the issue. Nonetheless, given this government’s previous form on “consultations” (eg, the hunting and smoking bans) I can’t avoid the unkind, perhaps even unworthy, suspicion that it’s more important for consideration and consulatation to “be seen to be thorough” than for it actually to be, you know, thorough…
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