I've written about the third runway quite a lot on this website. The Government made the right decision today in enabling the principal London airport to grow. Heathrow is of vital economic performance and critical to Britons being able to see the world and come home again without too much fuss or expense.
What is, I think, under appreciated is that this debate is not simply two-sided. You can't really understand the politics of a third runway at Heathrow until you realise there are really three broad groups in play:
1. We like air travel, but not Heathrow
Boris, Charlie Elphicke, many residents of West London. They aren't against an expansion of air travel but don't want to see an expansion of Heathrow itself. This is understandable. Long years of operating beyond capacity have left the airport without the best reputation and it probably isn't the site that you'd choose if you were building a new airport from scratch today. However, it is Britain's international hub and establishing a new one is difficult and expensive.
There are network effects with air travel, the more routes you have into an airport already the more it makes sense for airlines to introduce new ones. Passengers travelling on a new route can connect to more places once they arrive in London. Heathrow is one of the most important international hubs and that makes things easier for businesses based in Britain (they are more likely to be able to get a flight where they need to go, when they need to go) and makes Heathrow the best place for airlines to expand new services.
Establishing a new hub in the Thames estuary or in Manston, as Charlie suggests, would be next to impossible even if they could be built. No airport but Heathrow can be a British competitor to the continental hubs. If we lose that competition then international businesses, sick of having to travel everywhere via the continent if they base themselves in London, will invest elsewhere.
2. We hate air travel
Plane Stupid, Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth, the Liberal Democrats. Charlie thinks they'll listen to his schemes for new airports. They won't. They're out to stop people flying. They carry banners that say "cheap flights cost the Earth" (expensive flights taken by environmentalists going to climate summits in Bali are okay) and work to reduce the options open to working class Britons with the temerity to want to enjoy a summer holiday in Spain.
Theresa Villiers is very much in this camp. She strongly opposes expansion at Stansted as well as at Heathrow. High speed rail is held up as the preferred alternative, and indeed I've loved my journeys on the Eurostar, but it is a marginal player in terms of international travel and major increases in its capacity and use will make little difference to the total need for more flights to cater for consumer demand. The real game that the greens have in mind is to stop people travelling long distances at all. At least Monbiot is open about that objective.
3. Expand Heathrow
The Government, the CBI, Iain Dale, the TUC, the IoD, the airlines (if the other airport proposals were so great, why would they be opposed?), me, the City.
At the moment, camps one and two are working together. The coalition can only hold together as a negative one, though. Expanding an airport other than Heathrow would be in the interests of group one but not group two. Were Boris' airport to move even part of the way from fantasy to reality all his green supporters would melt away and campaign just as hard against it, if not harder, as they are against a new runway at Heathrow.
Conservatives can, in principle, be both for affordable international travel and against the third runway. At some point, though, supporters of new airports or expansion - but not at Heathrow - will discover that Theresa Villiers' fanatical opposition to airport expansion is more wide-ranging than theirs. Eventually, we will need to have a reckoning over whether the Conservative Party is in favour of letting ordinary Britons enjoy a holiday abroad, or not.
