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Commentators have highlighted the failure of political leadership after the announcement of controversial plans to expand Heathrow Airport, with Welsh devolution cited.
A leading political lobbyist who has advised UK and Wales ministers told The Eye: “These politicians don’t know their arses from their elbows, so the voters are completely confused, and this business about the third runway at Heathrow is just the latest example”.
The lobbyist pointed to the long drawn out history of the third runway, and how voters have been told in the past it would come, but then that the plans had been cancelled.
He said: “Whatever the rights and wrongs of this so-called decision now, no one can deny it has been an unbelievably convoluted affair, and that’s down to the politicians”.
In announcing Heathrow Airport’s third runway the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Rachel Reeves, said that it can be built and operating in a decade’s time.
She declared she wanted to see “spades in the ground” in the current Parliament and planes to start using the runway by 2035.
Ms Reeves also proclaimed that Sadiq Khan, the Labour Mayor of London who is opposed to the expansion, could not stop the new runway.
The first plans for Heathrow Airport had SIX runways in a hexagon shape, with a proposal for three more to be added.
It was initially built with those six runways in 1946 but by the 1970s three had been closed due to new planes needing longer runways.
A fourth was decommissioned in 2003, leaving the two current runways.
Discussions about another parallel runway began in the 1980s and in 2009 Gordon Brown’s Labour Government approved an expansion, saying it was needed for economic reasons.
But the Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition scrapped it in 2010, with then Prime Minister David Cameron stating there would be no expansion “no ifs, no buts”.
Yet as a sop to those that wanted the expansion, Mr Cameron’s Government established the independent Airports Commission to look at London’s airport capacity problems, and in 2015 it went back to original plans and recommended Heathrow Airport as the preferred site for a new runway.
In 2018, Theresa May’s Government approved the idea but it was opposed by several MPs, including Boris Johnson who famously said he would lie down in front of bulldozers to stop the third runway’s construction.
However, Mr Johnson, then Foreign Secretary, was not there for the actual vote as he was in Afghanistan, and to critics this appeared convenient.
Sir Keir Starmer, current Net Zero Secretary Ed Miliband, Culture Secretary Lisa Nandy, Environment Secretary Steve Reed and Northern Ireland Secretary Hilary Benn also voted against the plans at the time.
In the light of all this the lobbyist, who wished to remain anonymous, was cautious about the current announcement to expand Heathrow Airport and added: “This isn’t the first time we’ve seen this from my paymasters and mistresses. The steel industry was nationalised, de-nationalised, nationalised again, then privatised.
“You could even call Welsh devolution, which has now happened, a failure of political leadership in the past”.
Following a bitter campaign in 1979 the Welsh devolution scheme was originally defeated by 4:1 with a massive 79.7 per cent against and only 12 per cent in favour.
Yet in 1997 ANOTHER referendum was held to establish the assembly (now parliament) with almost EXACTLY the same powers, but this was narrowly passed.
So the moral of the story appears to be that whatever the politicians say, you should wait because it might never happen…
The memories of our Editor’s (Welshman Phil Parry’s) astonishing, decades long award-winning career in journalism (watching politicians change direction constantly) as he was gripped by the rare neurological disabling condition Hereditary Spastic Paraplegia (HSP), have been released in a major book ‘A Good Story’. Order it now.
