Daily catch-up: Third runway at Heathrow – never going to happen

Outdated 'predict and provide' thinking about air travel, plus Tony Blair on the case for New Labour

The Transport Secretary has just announced a "delay" in the Government's decision on plans for a third runway at Heathrow. That is what I wrote a mere seven years ago, on 4 December 2008. The minister in question – super fiendish deadly quiz question, this – was Geoff Hoon. I said then that the third runway would never be built.

My view is that Britain does not need more runways. This is the outdated assumption of "predict and provide": that economic growth somehow depends on increased air travel. Lots of people want to fly in and out of London: in that case they should pay more to use limited capacity more efficiently. I suspect I may have lost that argument, and that there will be new runways at Gatwick, Stansted or Luton.

But three years ago, I explained why not at Heathrow:

It is that 30 per cent of all the people in the European Union who are affected by aircraft noise live near Heathrow.

This is an astonishing statistic, which shows how unusual Heathrow is as an international airport in rather than outside a big city. It was so surprising that the estimable FullFact checked it out when Boris Johnson used it on the Today programme in January [2012].

They have just updated their article with revised figures from the CAA, which are that, in 2006, the latest year for which information is available, 756,000 people (page 20, table 6e) were affected by aircraft noise louder than 55dB near Heathrow, out of 2.5m in the whole of the EU.

Still true. Still not going to happen.

• Tony Blair has written a defence of New Labour for The Spectator. The usual stuff. Good, right and unlikely to change a single mind. Which he seems to accept in his conclusion:

Many – especially in today’s Labour Party – felt we lost our way in government. I feel we found it. But I accept in the process we failed to convince enough people that the true progressives are always the modernisers, not because they discard principle but because they have the courage to adhere to it when confronted with reality.

I wrote about why Labour is so hostile to its most successful leader for a new group blog called Middle Vision last week. For once, the below-the-line comments are thoughtful and interesting. I've written about the subject before, and hope to publish a longer version soon.

• I missed this interview with Stephen Gilbert, author of an admiring book about Jeremy Corbyn, last week. He is amusing about the herd mentality of Westminster journalists: "They live in the moment like animals do." He speculates that Labour MPs will succeed in deposing Corbyn as leader, forcing 25 MPs, including him and John McDonnell, plus the 250,000 Labour members and supporters who voted for him, to form a new party of "democratic socialists", which would then sweep to power. If only he were right about the first stage.

• And finally, thanks to Moose Allain ‏for this:

"I thought I saw some auks, but it was just a skua flying backwards."