Heathrow was a dinosaur by the '70s. No room to expand,rubbish infrastructure,approaches over the City at low altitude. The bullet needs to be bitten.Boris Island,incorporating a tidal barrier and improved transport links Kent to East Anglian? Bin Heathrow now, it will have to be done eventually,sooner the cheaper.
Yes, I believe we have the money for that. Let me just look down the back of the couch. Oh wait.....
As to LHR being unfit, I agree, it was awful, allowed to go to rack and ruin. However much of it has been torn down since the millenium. T2 has gone, T1 is going, T5 is open and the new T2 is coming. By 2015, the vast majority will be 21st century facilities or refitted post millemium. You can't "bin Heathrow" until your replacement is up and running. As to being "cheaper", Fantasy Island is going to be built on European Labour rates somewhere off the coast, also inflicting noise on East London that had hitherto not been affected. That penny has yet to drop, that East London then gets all the noise West London loses. The approaches, whilst predominantly over West London, change direction with the wind. Of course no one has mentioned this to the good people of the East.
Nobody, but
nobody has moved under the LHR flight path since 1947 without knowing there was a fricking airport outside Hounslow. Runway 3 is hardly ideal, but even the Green Tory, David Cameron, appears to have realised it is the only
*realistic and affordable* option. Any fool (yes I mean you Boris!) can blah about a fantastic new airport far from population centres plugged into London, but let's be real. His role is pretty much to stand there and look pretty, the mayoralty is run by others for him. Beyond his writing career, Boris Johnson has never run anything more than a bath. His shadow cabinet career was a joke and the hard work for the Olympics was done by others, yet there was Bojo taking all the credit. I am no fan of Ken but that must hurt.