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Heathrow

The great Paul Theroux begins one of his finest travel books by saying that it is"““no coincidence that none of the 650 major languages and dialects contains a sentence, phrase or clause that even approximates to the words, ‘as pretty as an airport.’””" That is particularly true of urban airports, of which Heathrow might be advanced as an exemplar. They are paradoxes, and they destroy lives, as we have just heard eloquently expressed, but they provide livelihoods, so nobody should approach the issue in a cavalier way and without considering balance. But, having considered balance, I must say that there is not the slightest doubt that this proposal for Heathrow should be opposed in this Chamber, implacably opposed outside this Chamber, will, I predict, be voted on in this Chamber, which is a point that I shall come to in a moment, and will be defeated in this Chamber. All those processes should be gone through. I should like to set out three simple premises. They have been mentioned before, and I regret that there will be repetition, but it is worth repeating these things—three simple premises that seem to me to be immutable. First, of course, Heathrow is in the wrong place. In 1946, the last Lancaster flew out of the site and the first converted Lancaster bringing passengers flew into the site, where they disembarked and sat in tents in armchairs, no doubt sipping glasses of champagne and smoking cigarettes through long, elegant holders. If one had said to those first passengers, ““Do you know that from this site in barely half a century’s time, we are proposing to fly 700,000 flights a year?””, they would have looked around at the villages and said, ““You are stark mad.”” But, of course, the madness persisted, and it persisted because of an irresistible and, apparently, irreversible process. The process was very simple: every expansion of Heathrow was used to reinforce the idea that Heathrow was indispensable. And that indispensability became the basis for every subsequent application and demand for expansion, so the process became circular, and it became never-ending. It is never-ending, and the villages in the constituency of my good and hon. Friend the Member for Hayes and Harlington (John McDonnell) will be the first to go. But the truth is that nowhere is safe. I have a mental vision of Her Majesty herself standing on the battlements of Windsor castle, looking with angst-stricken eyes as the first bulldozers appear on the far side of Windsor Great park. Indeed, for those who know it, the royal ride through the centre of the park would make a splendid runway—apart from the statue of George III in the middle of it, which would have to be ritually removed.