With four similar expansions set for take-off around the south-east of England, could the proposal finally get clearance?. Two decades and 0.2C of global warming after a Labour government last weighed in on Heathrow, the answer appears the same: keep digging. Rachel Reeves’s anticipated backing for a third runway would again prioritise growth and the global economy over climate. Interviewers are even asking Ed Miliband if he would resign in protest – a question that last troubled the headlines in 2009.
Airport expansion in the UK, especially in the south-east of England, is coming regardless, with four other London-branded airports sneaking ahead in the queue. Stansted and City have both been granted permission to grow. Fully developed plans that will radically alter the scale of Gatwick and Luton have, meanwhile, been through the inspectorate and await ministerial signoff.
And now the spectre of a Heathrow scheme that would overshadow all of them in terms of additional flights, pollution and carbon emissions has been revived. Is the nation ready to wake up and smell the kerosene?. Perhaps the most salient lesson since Gordon Brown’s government rubber-stamped Heathrow’s plans 15 years ago is that no third runway has yet been built. Some of the factors that halted it were temporary: the coalition politics that blocked the runway, before creating a commission that chose it again in 2015; then the pandemic and collapse of international travel.
