The Heathrow runway row is back as debate over airport growth gets noisier With four similar expansions set for take-off around the south-east of England, could the proposal finally get clearance?.
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.
Rachel Reeves’s anticipated backing for a third runway would again prioritise growth and the global economy over climate.
Two decades and 0.2C of global warming after a Labour government last weighed in on Heathrow, the answer appears the same: keep digging.
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.
