SBAE and all that
SBAE is composed of basically three disparate groups: the 'professional' campaigners such as Friends of the Earth and the Protect Rural England people who will use any weapon that comes to hand to further their causes, including expansion of airports; some local elected representatives who for whatever reason(s) are against expansion; nimbys - some of these may also be found within the other groups of course.
The members sometimes make uneasy bedfellows, with the professionals' planet-saving (in their view) moral high ground not infrequently compromised by some nimbys' unashamed desire to prevent expansion because they don't want a biggish airport as a neighbour, and are content if flights and passengers are displaced to other airports which will still produce the same amount of the planet-savers' dreaded emissions.
SBAE has been issuing window and car stickers and posters since it came into existence but when I strolled round part of Wrington (the largest of the airport's neighbouring villages and the parish in which BRS is situated) a few weeks ago I saw only one anti-expansion poster displayed and I passed about two hundred houses . It wasn't a a scientific count but, nonetheless, may be more indicative of the general local view rather than the noise emanating from the committed anti-expansionists.
Indeed, as one who grew up in and around Wrington in the late 40s and 50s I have seen it turn into a near small town since then where people have moved onto new estates, some built on green field sites. Some of the very people who have been responsible for this significant village expansion who commute daily to and from Bristol emitting their own carbon gasses (but that's all right because it's only other people who have to be kept in check), and by commuting ensure the A 38 is at its busiest at those times, are the most vocal when it comes to opposing airport expansion and an extension of its boundary into adjacent Green Belt land.
The spokesman for SBAE seems to be a character called Jeremy Birch. He was on the local telly this week asserting there is no need for expansion because passenger numbers are falling and will never again reach the previous peak. Why should this concern him? The airport owners are taking the financial risk, not him.
Another one who loves the local media spotlight is local parish councillor Hilary Burn. It was only last year that she complained at an airport consultative committee meeting that the airport's passenger figures had got ahead of its master plan projections. The airport is damned for losing passengers and damned for gaining them so far as SBAE is concerned.
I'm not sure who is the intended target of the remarks concerning Filton.
With hindsight it can easily be argued that Bristol City Council made a hash of moving its airport when the celebrated wartime Whitchurch became too small in the 1950s.
I am one the council's biggest critics (on many things) but it must be said that few people if anyone could then have predicted BRS's rise into a significant mid-ranking UK regional airport. Indeed, as late as the mid 90s I doubt that many would have said BRS would be handling over 6 mppa by 2008. I have the airport's ten-year plan issued in 1993 when its aim was to double its then 1 mppa by 2003, and that looked ambitious in 1993.
I have read that the city council could have had Filton instead of Lulgate when Whitchurch was closed. However, they would have been tenants of the resident aircraft manufacturers instead of owners and who knows how that might have worked out down the ensuing years?
That wonderful gift on hindsight now tells us that Filton would have been a much better bet than Lulgate with nearby motorway and rail connectivity, a bigger site (though about to be made smaller with housing development), a longer runway, better weather and situated nearer much more of Greater Bristol's industry and commerce than rural Lulsgate.
However, so far as I am aware the only time a serious bid was made to turn Filton into a civil airport was in the mid 1990s when Bae applied to develop it as a city airport. After a public enquiry the then relevant government minister rejected the application.
I don't think the citizens of Bristol (in its wider sense because Filton is not actually in municipal Bristol although it is in the contiguous urban area) opposed the application in huge numbers. The BRS management did so, for obvious commercial reasons, as did the usual crop of objectors whose type we are seeing now in regard to the BRS expansion.
There may have been more nimbys because Filton sits near many thousands of people's homes whereas Lulsgate is neighbour to villages.
I hope the expansion applications will be decided on their merits rather than aligned to the views of those who make the most noise. We know that life is not like that though, especially with politicians (local or national) involved.