Media
You just can't rely on Tory papers, Gordon
Published 19 March 2008
The third Heathrow runway will supposedly be great for business and will mean more cheap flights for all. You'd think the right-wing press would be all for it. But no
Which newspaper described the plan to build another runway at Heathrow as "a transport error of monumental proportions"? Which paper broke the story that the government and the British Airports Authority colluded in fudging the amount of pollution the runway would cause? And which paper told its readers in an editorial that "we owe it to future generations to reverse this folly"?
The answer, in all three cases, is the Sunday Times. Yes indeed, the paper of A A Gill and Jeremy Clarkson has been delighting the likes of Plane Stupid and Stop Heathrow Expansion in recent weeks with a full-blooded anti-runway campaign.
So much space and authority has it committed to the cause (I recommend the withering treatment of the BAA case by Simon Jenkins) that it must now rank among the most vigorous opponents of the scheme in the whole of the national press.
Ruth Kelly and Gordon Brown surely never foresaw this. There they were, offering to roll out a multibillion-pound concrete carpet in west London for the benefit of international big business, and promising into the bargain that the citizenry could have all the cheap flights they wanted: who would think a Murdoch paper would object?
And it doesn't stop at the Sunday Times. At the Times, columnists Anatole Kaletsky and Camilla Cavendish have also denounced the third runway, and even at the Sun there seem to be doubts. The Sun's response to the Plane Stupid protests posed the tricky question: "Expanding Heathrow may benefit the economy - but at what price to the environment?"
Some see in this the hand of James Murdoch, the new boss at News International, who certainly seems greener than his father - he likes to make his companies carbon neutral. But this doesn't fit with what the Sunday Times, and Kaletsky, have actually been saying.
They oppose the third runway, not on grounds related to carbon emissions but for functional reasons: they say Heathrow doesn't work and can't be made to work, and so the disruption caused by expansion can't be justified. They want a whole new airport built from scratch somewhere in the Thames Estuary. That's not exactly green.
For all the papers on the right, the airport issue presents a dilemma. They like to think they are laissez-faire and friendly to big business, and they distrust environmentalists and people who wave banners from the roof of parliament, all of which tends to make them pro-runway. But at the same time they are in favour of the countryside and of settled communities, and they do love to bash the government, which might make them anti-runway.
At the Telegraph, Simon Heffer is an anti, bewailing the damage to the mainly Conservative constituencies in the Heathrow approaches. He also lives near Stansted, "and I know well the pretty hamlets, with listed buildings and adjoining gently rolling country that will be obliterated by an expansion".
Also in the Telegraph, Clive Aslet, editor-at-large of Country Life, has declared that "anybody with an ounce of feeling for the planet can see that London's principal airport is a strategic disaster". But the paper as a whole has not been opposing the runway with any vigour.
And what of the Daily Mail, so recently the scourge of plastic bags? Has it applied its new green priorities to civil aviation? By no means: the Mail is some way from becoming a climate-change activist, and it is still reasonably friendly with Gordon Brown, so there has been no assault on the Heathrow plan from that quarter.
Yet neither has there been the endorsement of the runway that Brown would like. Instead, the Mail has shown a sneaking regard for the Plane Stupid demonstrators (well-bred working types, it seems, rather than "the usual raggle-taggle of jobless drop-outs"), whose activities connect with the Mail's concern to articulate the rage of the oppressed middle classes.
Sally Emerson put it in words: "When the protesters against the third runway at Heathrow climbed on the roof of the Houses of Parliament I actually felt a certain sympathy with the renegades. The people in power inside, in the Houses of Parliament, do not seem to give a jot about our way of life."
Whatever the motivations, there is no comfort here for Gordon Brown. If he hoped that the Tory press would back Heathrow expansion, he was mistaken.
A questioning role
The former Times columnist Mary Ann Sieghart explains how she came to back the Iraq invasion: "If the chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee produces a dossier saying that they are convinced there's a very strong case that Saddam has WMDs, who are we to question that?" The answer, surely, is that we are journalists.
Brian Cathcart is professor of journalism at Kingston University
Post this article to
We want to encourage people to comment on our content and to exchange views with other readers and hope this will be done on a courteous basis. However, if you encounter posts which are offensive please let us know by emailing comments@newstatesman.co.uk and we will take swift action where necessary.
