There comes a time when even the most elaborate of jokes ceases to be funny. We have reached that stage with the 55-year-old farce that is airport expansion in southern England: the only people who are still laughing are our rivals, who cannot believe their luck at our stupidity and incompetence.
In theory, Britain is the most open economy in the developed world, as witnessed by our embrace of Chinese trade, extending even to nuclear technology; in practice, our congested and crumbling airports mean that we are cutting ourselves off from the rest of the world, rationing the number of travellers who can fly to and from emerging markets. You can’t have free trade without trading routes, and on that basis we have become shockingly inward-looking. Frankfurt and Paris have 2,200 more flights than Heathrow every year to mainland China; at last count, 26 vital emerging market destinations benefited from daily direct flights from other European cities, but not from Heathrow. As demand continues to outstrip supply, the cost of travelling will eventually rise by £3-4 billion a year, imposing the equivalent of nasty trade tariffs on business.
Our embarrassing inadequacy might have been tolerable had it been a novel phenomenon; it was, however, already being discussed in 1960. Even Harold Wilson, a Labour prime minister who was wrong about most other things, knew that we had a problem: he commissioned the Roskill Commission into a Third London Airport in 1968. It concluded that it should be built in Cublington, Buckinghamshire. That was the wrong answer for Sir Edward Heath, Harold Wilson’s successor: yet to his credit he signed off a Thames Estuary Airport at Maplin Sands, Foulness, in Essex in 1971 instead.
The project would have come with two new motorways, a high-speed rail link to London, a huge new port and a new town housing 600,000. Britain would have been in a dramatically better place today; tragically, the scheme was axed by Labour in 1974. It was the first real outbreak of Britain’s nimbystic anti-growth, anti-development disease, a debilitating pathology that has crippled us for the past four decades and which George Osborne has vowed to tackle.
We must all hope, therefore, that the Davies Commission into airport expansion, which found in favour of a new runway at Heathrow, doesn’t end up like Roskill and subsequent airport reports – or that even if its advice is ignored, that it helps precipitate real change. It is time for the Conservatives, who wasted five years by blocking Labour’s attempt to enlarge Heathrow but now claim to be ushering in a new golden age for infrastructure, to stop dithering.
It was one thing to delay any decision until after the election; but we are now in late October and the shops are filling with mince pies. The Government must take a decision – be it another runway at Heathrow, the clear winner from Davies’s report; an expansion at Gatwick; or even (and this is unlikely now, not least given the Mayor’s rivalry with Mr Osborne) a Boris Island on the Thames Estuary in Kent – before the end of the year. It must then invest as much of its post-election capital as necessary to achieve a historic breakthrough. More capacity, wherever it happens, is infinitely preferable to another 20 or 30 years of economically suicidal bickering.
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