Some readers may have noticed that it takes rather a long time to get anything done in Britain these days. For example, if you added them all together, I wonder how many hours of Prime Minister’s Questions and BBC Question Time – under consecutive governments – have been taken up by a discussion of HS2. The debate over whether the country could construct a faster way to get out of Birmingham seems to have dangled over us for decades now.
It is always we who must become impoverished and everyone else who can become enriched
It is the same with almost every other major infrastructure project. That is because the UK is not just caught up by a sclerotic officialdom, legal overreach and much more, but because we seem to be caught between ideas. At least in principle, I imagine the country wants to boom. At the same time we want to be a world leader in net zero and much more. And thus you get these un-resolvable debates – such as the endless discussion over whether or not there should be a third runway at Heathrow.
Most countries would be delighted to have an airport that is one of the world’s great travel hubs. But not this country. Whenever the subject of a third runway at Heathrow comes up, MPs and others put their boots on and once again complain that we shouldn’t have that new runway, because people who bought houses in Hounslow thought they were buying in a nice, quiet area.
That is the argument of local MPs looking after the short-term interests of certain of their constituents. There is also the commonly heard argument that Heathrow shouldn’t get a third runway because we need to save the planet.
Yet how to make sense of those MPs who continue to oppose a third runway at Heathrow but are all in favour of runways abroad? Last week 20 MPs and peers wrote to the Prime Minister of Pakistan urging him to introduce a new international airport in Mirpur. Apparently the nearest airport to Mirpur at the moment is a full 80 miles away and the drive from New Mirpur City to that airport can take as long as three hours. If they think that is bad, they should try getting from ‘London Luton’ to anything that can be called ‘London’. In any case, the need to ‘unlock investment’ and ‘serve the vibrant, worldwide Kashmiri diaspora’ was at the forefront of the minds of these representatives of ours – both elected and unelected.
What is mind-boggling is that among these 20 petitioners are at least six who have been radically against ‘unlocking investment’ in Heathrow and positively against doing anything more to serve the vibrant, diaspora-filled city of London. These signatories include Rosena Allin-Khan, the MP for Tooting, who said recently: ‘I can’t support a vote to build a third runway [at Heathrow]… The environmental impact will harm my children, my grandchildren and generations to come.’ Other MPs who are similarly anti-Heathrow but pro-Mirpur are Mohammad Yasin (Bedford), Debbie Abrahams (Oldham East and Saddleworth), Yasmin Qureshi (Bolton South and Walkden), James Frith (Bury North) and Imran Hussain (Bradford East).
Another of the pro-Mirpur, less-so-London brigade is Zarah Sultana (Coventry South), and although she was not an MP in 2018 she has still been vividly opposed to Heathrow expansion. She once declared that there was no justification for a third runway at Heathrow – especially not now, because we are in the middle of ‘a climate emergency’. Heathrow expansion, she warned, would be ‘at the expense of local communities and the planet’ and would be ‘reckless, short-sighted and indefensible’.
I had always thought that one of the only reasons to impoverish the UK through militant ‘environmentalist’ policies was to ‘set an example’ to the rest of the planet. That is what Ed Miliband and others have told us for years. In case you didn’t know it, the citizens of Mirpur are forever looking to Ed Miliband for an example of what to do.
Surely the only consistent thing for any MP opposed to Heathrow expansion on environmentalist grounds to do would be to urge the authorities in Pakistan to give up on the runways too? Wouldn’t it be grand if our MPs told the good citizens of Mirpur that they will have to do without their runway because we are living in a ‘climate emergency’? I might have some respect for those MPs if they did that. But they never do. It is always we who must become impoverished – and everyone else who can become enriched –while we pretend to set some example that the rest of the world isn’t interested in.
In many other places among our parliamentarians, the same combination of parochialism and grandiosity can be found. For example, the Labour MP Bell Ribeiro-Addy believes that the UK should pay ‘reparations’ for our country’s role in the transatlantic slave trade. One reason Ribeiro-Addy is urging the government to send UK taxpayers’ money to the Caribbean and other ‘former colonies’ is so that they can adapt to climate change. At the same time she is opposed to any and all cuts to disability benefits, winter fuel allowances and much more.
If the member for Clapham and Brixton Hill had the decency to say British pensioners should hand over their winter fuel payments to provide air conditioning to people in the Caribbean, you could have some respect for it. But she doesn’t. Like so many of our MPs she simply treats the UK as the cash-rich country it no longer is, and the rest of the world as the colonies they no longer are.
Doubtless Ribeiro-Addy and her colleagues have an answer to all of this: we should ‘tax the rich’. It is a brilliant idea – no one has ever thought of it before. Perhaps someone should explain to them, however, that the international rich are already in the departure lounge of this country – and that is a pity, because there are some among them whom we could have done with keeping.
Catch the rest on Spectator TV:
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