Hi W,
I wouldn’t like anyone to think I am someone who believes airports should be allowed to expand any way they wish.
It’s just that I believe Bristol’s proposals are entirely reasonable and, if anything, a touch modest.
In any negotiations you usually ask for more than you expect to get and the ‘other side’ then feels it has justified itself if it knocks you back a bit. In this case BRS has already pared what it might have reasonably sought but will still face huge challenges from objectors.
Why not ask for more and finish with about what they are actually asking for now? The danger is that this will still be reduced in some way or ways to satisfy the bargaining by compromise principle.
The hypocrisy of some people also infuriates me. Apart from the objectors’ case being full of selective ‘facts’ and at times downright inaccuracies, at least one of the people associated prominently with the group is a regular leisure user of the airport, and outbound tourism is one of the planks of the antis’ argument.
I remember this man campaigning in 1993 in dear old Les Wilson’s days - I know Les wasn’t everyone’s cup of tea but what an enthusiast and publicist for the airport he was and, apart from the obvious grief to his family and friends when he was killed in a motor accident, the local aviation scene also lost something good.
At that time the airport first put forward plans for a new terminal (they had to wait until the airport was partially privatised four years later before it got under way) that was going to public enquiry.
I have some glossy brochures of that period outlining the future plans – indeed the airport’s target in 1993 when it carried one million pax in a year for the first time was two million in 2003. The actual total became 3.8 million in 2003 but few could have predicted the rise of low cost airlines then.
Anyway, all this led to certain groups predicting the end of life as we know it for the residents in the surrounding villages and even further afield.
They were saying that two million passengers a year would mean jumbo jets circling over south Bristol, huge traffic jams and unacceptable noise and air quality levels for local people.
I remember having a heated argument with a group of protestors in a south Bristol shopping precinct at that time.
The current anti-expansionists are using exactly the same tactics: distorted truth, lies and a wish to scare-monger.