If the Tories really didn’t want a third runway at Heathrow they should have called for one. That would have stopped Gordon Brown. He is only going ahead because he thinks it will draw a dividing line between the supposedly pro-business Labour and naïve tree-hugging Tories. And I confess that I started out being in favour of it, so fatuous were the environmental arguments against it. Farting cows produce more greenhouse gas than aircraft (or cars), as does rice production – and do we see Greenpeace activists campaigning outside Aberdeen Angus steakhouses or Chinese restaurants’?
But the debacle over Terminal Five brought home to me a more important point. Britain needs and deserves a flagship airport, yet Heathrow is a national disgrace. Sir Thomas Harris, vice chairman of Standard Chartered Markets, put it well recently when he said that after its ridiculous hand luggage limitations “The result is an experience so unpleasant that many international executives I meet will do almost anything to avoid travelling through Heathrow.” The queues are disgraceful, especially when you reach security and realise they are caused not by lack of scanning equipment – but the failure of BAA to staff the equipment.
The Heathrow hassle factor is getting worse, as I found recently flying to Edinburgh (where, deplorably, BAA have erected an advertising billboard in front of a Spitfire there to commemorate its role in the war). They now send you around this retail maze, taking a picture of your child on the way in to make sure you don’t try and swap it later on. New bureaucracy. New queues.
This isn’t about the environment. It is, as Boris Johnson says, about refusing to reinforce a 1940s planning error – Heathrow should never have been built where it was. Having more people change at Heathrow may mean more profits for BAA, but it’s hardly a burning priority for the UK economy. A far better help would be improving the airport (and the links to it) so people are more not disinclined to visit London.
Heathrow – with its tattiness, its scant resources, its overcrowding, its strikes, its cattle-herding approach to passengers – needs to change its ways. To start to look like a flagship airport that represents rather than embarrasses this country. Then – and only then – should it ask for a third runway.
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