Why can't London airways be encouraged to show an interest in the regions again with mini hubs being set up again (as LH does in Germany) at Birmingham and Manchester.
Essentially down to hypotrophia (although I can currently only find reference to that term in medical use, I am sure it equally applies to geography ) - basically London and Paris are enlarged significantly above their next nearest cities, both in terms of population, and their status as transport hubs. Why do people want to live in London? Because everyone else wants to live in London, because many sectors of the economy are centrered on London, therefore more people move to London, and so on.
This simply does not apply to the structure of Germany, where there are 5 or 6 major cities, each performing well in certain sectors.
When it comes to aviation hubs, the tendency of hubs to suck in more traffic, and in turn to create more demand for routes means that airlines want to be at Heathrow, if they can get the slots, and after that, they will settle for another London airport. The power of the network has a squared relationship with the number of routes offered - therefore, whilst non-UK airlines will often open new routes from BHX, MAN, GLA etc in to their own respective hubs, none of these airports has significant appeal for a hub and spoke operation (as opposed to the low cost bases they can sustain quite happily)
SS,
If you had a little more knowledge about the airline industry (low costs airlines being dangerous), I'd consider debating your AGW conspiracies, in the mean time, I'm still trying to work out how LHR can be sold for more than the cost of building a new airport.