How can people say we can’t build anything in this country any more? Listen: our parliament is literally falling down, has caught fire 45 times in the past decade alone, and is going to take tens of billions of investment just to get it in the same postcode as fit-for-purpose – a fact which has now been kicked down the road for actual decades by successive cohorts of MPs who can’t handle being the ones to face reality, even though they are actually walking around in it every day. So don’t you dare tell me we don’t build things. We build the best damn metaphors in the world.
Another thing we might be building, perhaps in our own inimitable style, is a third runway at Heathrow. This is the heavy hint dropped by chancellor Rachel Reeves at Davos this week, which – if realised – could open the gate to the Labour Upside Down. Half of the cabinet hate it, half of them love it. Imagine Tony Blair but in asphalt.
Yes, we are now just days out from Rachel Reeves’s big speech on growth, delivered against the backdrop of an economy she is widely credited with having shrunk. That won’t be the literal backdrop, of course – it’ll be one of those custom-made slogan backgrounds, saying something like Getting Britain Growing, or Growing From Strength to Strength, or – my personal preference – Let’s Just Grow a Pair! In this speech, Reeves is expected to back a third runway, as well as the expansion of Gatwick and Luton airports. Students of the form book of British infrastructure projects should know she is unlikely at this stage to unveil the three options for the third runway. Namely:
1. It goes wildly over budget.
2. It goes wildly over budget and is still being built in 2040.
3. It goes wildly over budget, and in a 2039 cost-cutting measure is “reimagined” as a runway that does not actually link to Heathrow airport, functioning as a sort of state-of-the-art road to nowhere, randomly located in the Harmondsworth area.
Anyway, to Davos. As mentioned, Reeves was at the World Economic Forum, maybe to visit some of the 10,800 millionaires who have supposedly left the country in the past year. Certainly, the chancellor who only last September thundered “we will end the non-dom tax loopholes!” had a message for those non-doms: namely, that the government was keen to reopen some loopholes. Or, as Rachel had it: “We have been listening to the concerns that have been raised by the non-dom community.” Please enjoy that non-doms have now become one of Labour’s “communities”. I wonder if, like the other ones, they have “community leaders”, who can turn up in the media to appeal for calm / denounce a small minority / call for an immediate end to disorder at the Hermès store.
Back to the runway, though, which could turn into a Éowyn-level shitstorm on account of all Labour’s climate commitments. How could you have both, some people wondered this week? That was simple, explained Rachel, because the growth mission “trumps other things”. Enlightening to hear there is a trump mission. Not a Trump mission, but a mission that automatically beats any of the other 437 missions, pledges or targets that Starmer has unveiled since coming to power. I would now like to see a hierarchy of Starmer administration buzzwords, or at least a working exchange rate. One mission equals two pledges, one foundation equals three milestones – that sort of thing.
As for the diehard opponents of a third runway, you’d think they’d include environment secretary Ed Miliband. Back in 2009, Ed “nearly” resigned from Gordon Brown’s cabinet over third runway plans, while as Labour leader he ended support for them, then voted against them in 2018 (along with Keir Starmer). “We owe it to future generations not just to have good environmental principles,” said Ed then, “but to act on them.” Yet on Thursday Miliband dismissed the suggestion that he might resign as “ridiculous”. Oh Ed. You can’t not do something because it’s ridiculous – it’s miles too late for that.
Then there’s Boris Johnson, who famously promised to “lie down in front of the bulldozers” to stop a third runway going ahead. Mate, there’s still time! Let no principled British person stand in your way (and, by potentially lethal extension, the way of the bulldozer). And yet, speaking of gates to the upside down, I increasingly fear that the portal to a world in which Boris Johnson returns in some form to British politics has not been entirely closed. Therefore, and despite his self-documented inability to get on with Ozempic, Johnson may not regard either being steamrollered wafer-thin or going full ecowarrior as best serving his immediate interests (his only metric).
For former future Labour-leader Sadiq Khan, it’s a more complicated moment. In 2018, the London mayor joined an action to take the government to court if parliament ever approved a third runway at Heathrow. He won the mayoralty for a third time last year on a similar platform and reiterated his opposition last week – only for Reeves to hint she was backing the runway this week. Pressed subsequently to explain how such a court case would be funded, Khan admitted: “there is no money set aside in the budget for a legal challenge”. He went on to decline to comment on speculation, a form of words that perhaps buys him a few more days to come up with a different form of words that will explain why he isn’t mounting a legal challenge.
Forms of words are, arguably, our other last great manufacturing industry. So expect record levels of production of them in the discourse now, as we open the debate on whether the third runway will be an economic magic bullet – or 21st-century Britain’s deadliest form of cakeism yet.
