24 January 2025

Despatch: Heathrow airport – an allegory of our decline

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Heathrow shows why Britain can’t build…

Alongside CapX’s new weekly podcast The Capitalist, we’ll also be publishing a series of episodes, titled Despatch, which offer an audio version of some of our favourite pieces from the site.

This week, it’s George Trefgarne’s thoughts on the Government’s plans to expand Heathrow, and how Heathrow shows why Britain can’t build the infrastructure it needs. He points to the Heathrow Hub project – which was, absurdly, rejected because it cost too little – and analyses why Britain has stopped building.

If you try to book a long distance flight these days, you will see how the lack of spare capacity at Heathrow has made long distance travel astronomically expensive.

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The trouble is that, certainly in the last decade, we have not been sensible. With the exception of both the Elizabeth Line and the Thames Tideway super sewer, infrastructure has become hopelessly bogged down by politics.

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The most obvious political barrier has been new environmental regulation, including the legal Net Zero emissions target, which has not only made everything incredibly complicated, it is a litigants’ charter to object to just about everything unless it is loaded with ludicrously expensive safeguards, like HS2 (see £100 million bat tunnel).


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Marc Sidwell is editor of CapX.