Almost exactly 36 years ago, on 28 June 1966, I was one of 400 passengers on a chartered train from Essex to London, to present a petition against the expansion of Stansted Airport to the President of the Board of Trade, Douglas Jay. The same forces, the same arguments, mustered on both sides in 1966 are today gathering around the British airports battle in 2002. A 'Stansted Area Progress Association' was formed by aviation workers who wanted more airports.
Professor Peter Self, chairman of the Town & Country Planning Association, denounced the Jay scheme: 'It seems insane to choose Stansted for a convenient airport site, just because it happens to come on a convenient patch of green. You must have some sort of evaluation of the countryside, you must be more accurate than merely forecasting a general growth of air traffic.'
In 1966, the anti-Stansted protesters won a brief tactical victory over the Government. They showed that its budgets, estimates and forecasts were founded on sand. In the 30 years that followed, however, Stansted has grown hugely. The aviation industry lobbyists won - as they hope to win again. This week's Government consultation papers float a range of dramatic options for the expansion of existing airports in Britain and the creation of new ones, to meet forecasts that air passenger traffic will triple over the next 30 years.
Environmentalists are appalled by the Department of Transport documents. They suggest acquiescence in the principle that there must be more runways and terminals. They imply that the Government intends to haggle merely about where these are built. Critics, prominently including the Council for the Protection of Rural England (CPRE), argue that Ministers have succumbed to lobbying by the aviation industry.
I sympathise with the dilemma of Alistair Darling, the Transport Secretary. Travel and tourism are boom businesses and big employers, at a time when other sectors of the economy are wobbling. Britain occupies a commanding position in European aviation. Airlines and tour operators will heap scorn on the Government, if it fails to meet their requirements to meet rising demand.
But this is not the whole picture. Over the past generation, most of us have come to recognise that the promise of earnings and jobs cannot alone be allowed to decide what happens in this overcrowded island. The cost to the environment, to the landscape in which we live, must be part of any planning equation. In Scotland, for instance, disastrous environmental mistakes have been made, by subsidising large-scale afforestation and inshore salmon farming. For years, Ministers were happy to rubber-stamp any proposal, however crazy, which promised employment in the Highlands. In the same spirit, they now enthuse about upland wind-farms, which despoil our diminishing wild landscapes in perpetuity.
The airports issue is, of course, much bigger and potentially more disastrous. The most important argument made by objectors is that the economics of international air travel are grossly distorted. Aircraft purchasers pay no VAT, aircraft operators pay no tax on fuel. Most of us accept the case for high taxation of motor fuel, to recognise the damage that cars inflict on the environment. Yet thousands of planes every day burn their way across the world's skies on untaxed fuel.
In effect, we are all subsidising air travel, most of it leisure rather than business-based, to the tune of £7 billion a year. Yes, there are serious difficulties in imposing taxation on airlines which operate across frontiers, and can threaten to move their business somewhere else, if any one nation imposes a tax on them. But it must be crazy to inflict huge damage on Britain's environment by building more airports to service more travellers, until those travellers pay a realistic price for their fares, which recognises the costs air traffic imposes upon all our lives.
When the history of the twenty-first century is written, our great-grandchildren are likely to identify the struggle to manage the tyranny of cars and aircraft as one of its central themes. For billions of people, cars and planes provide a new freedom. All of us who use them value that freedom highly. Yet most of us also recognise that the liberty to drive and fly as we choose cannot continue. There must be restraints, whether through congestion charges or fuel taxation. Over the last 20 years, I have attended meetings with a succession of Transport Secretaries, at which almost all have sooner or later muttered that it is political suicide to interfere with peoples' freedom to drive their cars where they want.
More than likely, Alistair Darling and his colleagues believe that the same political threat overhangs them now, if they seek to curb the appetite of the airlines industry. The Government got a fright two years ago, from the road fuel tax protesters. What now, if airlines start telling holidaymakers that fares are soaring, flights log-jammed, because a wicked Government has refused to plan 'sensibly' for the future of tourism?
Yet if life is to continue to be worth living in this island, sooner or later a government must display courage, in telling the country that public 'demand' is not the same as public 'need'. It is frightening enough to see housing strategy for this country in the hands of John Prescott, to perceive the success of the house-builders' lobby in Whitehall. Yet the latest airport proposals could inflict even greater damage, if much of what is on the table in the Government consultation papers is allowed to come to pass.
No one seriously doubts that air travel will soar in line with the latest forecasts - if air travel continues to be absurdly cheap, and if fares still fail to reflect the cost in noise, pollution and space-intensive infrastructure which go with it. Yes, the public loves to fly to Spain for £30, but it is the duty of government to recognise the bitter additional premium paid on that fare, by every hapless citizen underneath the flight path.
All governments face a huge challenge, in the new world of what the American academic Philip Bobbitt calls the 'market-state'. It is hard for a sovereign state unilaterally to impose controls and limitations upon great companies which operate across frontiers, and use their power to thwart the will of any single nation. Britain's airline industry is bound to say: 'If we can't play on a level playing field, if you disadvantage us against the world competition, then a few years down the track, Britain won't have an airline industry.'
It would be foolish to ignore this argument. The survival and prosperity of British Airways, for instance, is an important national interest. But if the airline industry is allowed to dictate the terms for its own operations, if its own forecasts are allowed to determine the building of new runways and terminals, then the environmental consequences for this country will be tragic. The audit of aviation for this country must not plan simply for an interminable national fly-past. It must recognise other needs and other priorities. If the Transport Secretary simply succumbs to the latest industry forecasts, and approves most of the proposals outlined in the consultation papers, then he will fail in his responsibility to the people of this country as citizens, whatever he may think he has done for them as air travellers.
· Max Hastings is president of the Council for Protection of Rural England
