Great idea, Boris, but your airport can’t take off

In this capital, we never stop telling ourselves how wonderfully diverse we are. In other ways, we are not. London consists of two cities: the poor, largely in the east; and the unpoor, far more often in the west.

West London is socially mixed, the great melting-pot of liberal self-congratulation. East London, a few pockets aside, is a mono-class enclave with a significant BNP vote. Two east London boroughs have lower levels of employment and greater welfare dependency than the most deprived areas of the Tyne, Mersey or Clyde. Moving the airport would do more to shift the city's centre of gravity eastwards than anything else.

It would, in time, pull in many of the high-tech, international-economy companies clustered round Heathrow and the overheated Thames Valley (this plan clearly marks Boris's final break with Henley.) It would create hundreds of thousands of well-paid jobs east of London; many of those workers would move east. It would re-ignite the moribund Thames Gateway housing development at a stroke, and make the Olympics look the economic irrelevance that it is.

Opponents call Boris Island "impractical." What, and Heathrow isn't? With a high-speed rail link, Johnson International would be reachable from the City in about the same time as Heathrow is now, and with much less chance of a flight delay once you get there. Yes, fewer people could drive to the airport but surely that's a good thing?

Borisport might even be big enough to take the flights now handled by Gatwick, too. That would create a monster hub, making London the unchallengeable centre of world air transport and helping preserve our threatened status as global financial capital.

But the Johnson dream would be enormously expensive. Presumably to contain the cost, Boris has gone for an airport south of the Thames, which would need only a branch from an existing high-speed line. An airport on the northern bank — east of Southend, say — would cost more to serve but would do much more for the East End, and distance the jets from North Kent coastal towns.
In London, there would be losers as well as winners. Richmond and Putney would get quieter. But even if flights could come in over the North Sea, outgoing flights would have to leave in the opposite direction, over land, or the Thames estuary. And some flights come from places to the west. They would have to fly over more of London than they do now, perhaps disturbing vast new areas.

Yet the real obstacle may not be this, or money (a third runway at Heathrow would also cost billions.) It's the fact that this idea demands adjustments in previous thinking. It is against all the traditions of British government. It's also the fact that Boris doesn't own Heathrow, or the Isle of Sheppey, and has no control whatever over either place. I hope I'm wrong, but I fear Boris Island may never fly.