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EMA is the place to build a proper British hub.
Though strangely its owners don't seem to share your view - they didn't bother submitting a proposal to the Airports Commission.
They wouldn't have bothered submitting any proposal because it would have been a waste of time with all the 'London-centric' thinking that there is on all of this.
A British hub doesn't
need to be near London. It does need to be somewhere that has good transport links to as much of Britain as possible and being on the HS2 route should be a requirement (that will rule out anywhere that is cut off from the rest of Britain by that great barrier to free-flowing travel known as 'London'!). It
requires space for two runways to be able to carry out independent simultaneous instrument approaches in order to be able to maintain arrival rates in poor visibility (that will rule out places like BHX). But most importantly, it needs to happen fast in order to avoid air travel simply by-passing Britain (a dramatic reduction in that stupid APD would be a help).
Although I dislike the place, the only common sense option that could be available soonest is LHR. It needs that extra runway very, very soon in order to be able to maintain arrival rates and avoid cancellations whenever it is foggy. It needs HS2 to go
via LHR (the way that the main Amsterdam to Brussels and Paris high-speed line goes
via AMS). APD needs to be dramatically reduced.
Forget the 'noise lobby'. Aeroplanes are getting quieter all the time; anyone who was happy to live there in the 1960s and 1970s with the extremely noisy aeroplanes that flew then should be happy with the quieter aeroplanes that fly now. The everyday background noise of delivery lorries, buses, police sirens, trains and helicopters in London is immensely more than the quiet modern aeroplanes that will be the future air traffic into LHR and the third runway there will dilute the concentrations of that sound even more.
Britain needs an airport with at least two runways that can carry out independent simultaneous instrument approaches in order to be able to deal with the varieties of north-western European weather. Moreover, Britain needs to have modern air travel ambitions and intentions that match up to its level of modern development; backward-thinking places like Brighton should be left to rot back to the middle ages under their piles of Green waste but they should be ignored when it comes to the proper modern development of the country.
Forget any 'new airport'. That would just take too long to happen.