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- The Guardian, Friday 16 January 2009
Even those closest to the government's decision to expand Heathrow admit that undecided voters are unlikely to be flocking back to the Labour cause this morning in gratitude for a third runway. One of them put it very starkly to me yesterday. "Our problem on Heathrow," he said, "is that the policy is going in one direction and the politics are going in the opposite one."
As political problems go, this is one of the most timeless of all. Since at least the time of the ancient Greeks, rulers have striven and failed to reconcile the reality that what is good for the state is not necessarily synonymous with what the people want. So I don't think I am going out on a limb to say that Geoff Hoon, the transport secretary, has failed to find the answer to a problem that not even Plato managed to crack.
Ed Miliband has probably read Plato in the original Greek. The energy and climate change secretary was right to say yesterday that the important principle at the heart of the Heathrow decision was that it rejects both the puritanism of the anti-flying absolutists and the decadence of the unconstrained aviation expansionists. I'm sure that in his mind there is a platonic ideal airport, providing fast efficient travel to all points of the nation and the globe, with prosperity, aspiration and reduced emissions all balanced in perfect harmony. The problem is that this airport is not called Heathrow.
Hoon and Miliband have to face three big difficulties. The first is that not every compromise between the two extremes of wholly constrained and wholly unconstrained aviation is as good as every other compromise - it is the content of the deal that matters. The second is that Heathrow is a particularly problematic airport and not just a representative of airport problems in general. And the third is that Heathrow has become a symbol for one of the great causes of the century - and Labour is on the wrong side of it.
No government in its right mind is ever going to stop people from flying. But the Heathrow decision was a once-in-a-generation opportunity to say something very big, very brave and very difficult about the fact that the permissive proliferation of aviation is not merely a symptom of what Desmond Morris has called the human infestation of the planet but also, at least as seriously, about the damage our lifestyles and consumption are doing both to ourselves as individuals and to the biosphere.
Yesterday's decision ducked that opportunity. I am all for compromise; however, the Heathrow announcement seems less an embodiment of Labour's pragmatic readiness to make tough compromises, which was how Hoon depicted it, than an embodiment of its almost congenital inability, when backed into a corner, to make decisive right choices on really difficult issues and then to build political alliances to ensure they are supported, implemented and understood.
Faced with the question of whether, as Theresa Villiers put it, to graft an airport the size of a second Gatwick on to the chaotic Heathrow airport mini-city already wedged among the west London suburbs, Hoon and Miliband have come up with a bit of everything and a fair helping of nothing. A third runway, but not a more efficient "mixed-mode" throughput on the existing two. A sixth terminal, with new roads and rail links to connect it to the other five and to London. More use of motorway hard shoulders to (supposedly) speed drivers and buses in and out of the vast site. A new high-speed train network to connect Heathrow to Birmingham (one day) but not Manchester or Leeds.
Timing may not quite be everything in politics, but it is certainly a lot more important than almost any other factor you can name. When a government is on the crest of a political wave of goodwill in an era of prosperity, as Labour was for so long, it can sometimes take a hard decision and get away with it. When a government is in the depths of a political trough and times are hard, however, there is only one consequence of doing something the public don't want. Government just gets even more unpopular than it was already.
Political logic says this is what will happen to Labour as a result of the Heathrow decision. When the only genuinely spontaneous applause for the package comes from the business class who travel in the plane and from the working class employed to keep them flying, the reality is that what might once have been an opportunity for agenda-setting has now become an exercise in damage limitation. Most people simply don't care if more flights go from Amsterdam, Frankfurt or Paris rather than London. Most people in west London would be delighted.
The opposition parties sense the local mood but otherwise they do not give much of a lead. If Heathrow expansion ever came to a vote in parliament, which it clearly ought to do by any democratic yardstick, then it would go down by a large majority. If Labour is ousted in the election, moreover, the whole thing will be scrapped anyway. But what would a Tory government do then?
Heathrow could and should surely have been addressed years ago. It's not as if there wasn't the money, or the issues have burst upon us unexpectedly. Almost everyone in the country knows that Heathrow is a shambolic mess, and that it has to bear too much weight for an airport in the heart of the overcrowded southeast. Likewise, everyone has long been aware that our roads are as inferior to Germany's as our railways are to those of France. The environmental issues have been as clear to see for years as the bubble of credit was in the financial world. Yet in both cases the same charge applies - ministers knew that something needed to be done but were either too confused or too afraid to do it.
This week we read of the death of the actor Patrick McGoohan. To anyone who saw him in The Prisoner, the debonair McGoohan is forever identified as Number Six, the former secret agent who spends his life trying to escape from an apparently ordered community that is in reality a prison - a sort of Heathrow departure lounge without the planes.
Many members of the Labour government sometimes strike me as people who inhabit a similarly benign but repressive community at Westminster. Like Number Six, many of them really want to break free and do the right thing. Like The Prisoner, they never quite manage to do it. Maybe that is because, like him, they are too often their own jailers.
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