Transport Insights

I’ve just caught up with what Keir Starmer told Metro about the government’s mindless “builders not blockers” decision to back more flights at Gatwick.

When asked whether he is a climate doomer, the PM told Metro: ‘I strongly believe that we can get this right, which means we can have the expansion of the growth that we need at the same time as meeting our climate obligations, and we can do both.

‘In other words, you don’t have to choose one or the other.

‘You don’t have to sort of say to people nobody can travel in the way they want anymore.

‘I think that would be completely the wrong thing to do.”

He disingenuously portrayed the issue as a binary choice between a pragmatic policy and a total extreme; you either add more flights or say to people “nobody can travel in the way they want anymore”.

Nobody.

It goes without saying that people are flying from all over the country, including Gatwick, at the moment and that this won’t stop if you have *the same number of flights*.

This is the sort of nonsense that should be beneath a prime minister, but no, it’s classic Blairism.

A good few years ago I wrote how Ed Milband, a cabinet minister in the last Labour government who was reportedly opposed to its then plans to expand Heathrow, told a conference:

We’re not going to tell people they can’t fly.

It was a lie then and it’s a lie now. At the time I called Miliband a “gutless Blairite clone”. The same could be said about Starmer.