Quote: "Our politicians need to be told loud and clear that they haven't got a f*@ing clue about aviation, nor the service it provides for both London in particular and the nation in general. Expanding Stanstead will have naff-all effect on LHR's overcrowding, and naff-all effect on improving UK trade or the UK economy.
Unless they were proposing to build 6 new runways and three new terminals at Stanstead, of course, plus closing LHR. But I don't think that is what they had in mind."
Wouldn't put in the same way, but essentially, this is spot on!
Quote: “Not quite. The premium is due to being close to the airport, the blight is being under the flightpath.”
The blight is near the thresholds of the rwys, at places like Poyle and Cranford, and even those properties are not cheap! Any one living under the wider flight path will tell you, if they’re being honest, that the noise is not nearly as bad as the protest groups would have us believe, and certainly not in Putney and Clapham for heaven‘s sake! The noisy jets of the 1960s are long gone, and those that aren‘t are banned from all European airspace.
Quote: “You failed to see my point. Yes, New Labour became the daaarrrling of the hopelessly out of touch chattering classes, who needed a pet-political party to implement their dreamland policies, but it was not the chattering classes who kept Blair and co in power.”
What kept Labour in power for 13 years was a useless Conservative opposition with unelectable policies and unelectable leaders. Call it the credibility gap if you like. Exactly the same situation in reverse kept Labour out of power for 18 years.
It could said that those oppositions at those times badly let the electorate down, ironically leaving the House of Lords to be the guardian of democracy.
Quote: “The 'liberal intelligentsia' ** represent 0.005% of the voting public. Thus New Labour was kept in power by blue collar workers, who were too thick to understand that Blair was selling them down the river by flooding the country with cheap workers who would undercut every working man in the nation”
No, it was/is pressure from big business as unskilled immigration drives wages down. The present government faces the same pressures and takes the same actions. It‘s exactly the same all over Europe and North America.
Last edited by Fairdealfrank; 25th Jun 2012 at 20:21.