The Department for Transport's new analysis predicting "major adverse" health effects for local residents has left me with no choice but to defend the vital, sacred right of business travelers to skip the layover.
Over a rather modest pan-seared sea bass at Scott's yesterday, a senior friend at the Department for Transport looked completely exhausted. He had just spent the morning reviewing the new environmental analysis for Heathrow's third runway, which concluded that the rapid expansion will likely cause major adverse impacts on the health, housing, education, and general wellbeing of up to three million people living nearby. I placed a comforting hand on his bespoke sleeve. It must be terribly difficult, I told him, to have to read such depressing statistics before lunch.
And it is. For weeks now, the chattering classes have been clutching their pearls over the official findings. We are told that the noise, the air pollution, and the sheer logistical violence of laying tarmac over entire communities will sever locals' access to healthcare and open spaces. We are told millions will suffer. But as I settled my bill and hailed a black cab back to my quiet, heavily pedestrianised neighborhood in South Kensington, I found myself arriving at a difficult but necessary truth: we are simply being far too sentimental about the respiratory health of people who chose to live in Hounslow.
Let us be brutally honest for a moment. Progress has always required sacrifice. During the Blitz, Londoners huddled in the Underground to protect the future of the free world. Today, the residents of West London are being asked to endure a permanent, deafening roar and a noticeable degradation in their life expectancy so that I do not have to endure a layover in Charles de Gaulle on my way to Singapore. Is the latter really so much less noble than the former? I submit that it is not.
The residents complaining about their children's education being disrupted by the scream of a Boeing 777 every ninety seconds are suffering from a chronic lack of perspective. Yes, your local primary school might now sit beneath a sprawling blanket of aviation exhaust. Yes, your access to open transport might be choked by a gridlock of freight lorries. But what of the access issues faced by the global business community? Before the pandemic, I once had to wait nearly forty minutes on the tarmac at Terminal 5 just to secure a gate. Forty minutes. That is time I could have spent contributing to the GDP of this great nation. To equate my lost productivity with a local resident's minor respiratory failure is the height of bad-faith populism.
The public simply does not understand the unbearable psychological toll of knowing you are mildly inconveniencing three million peasants.
Vance is exactly right. The true victims of the Heathrow expansion are not the three million locals who will see their neighborhoods turned into a dystopian sacrifice zone. The true victims are the ambitious ministers, the aviation executives, and the frequent flyers who are being made to feel vaguely guilty about it. It is exhausting to constantly carry the moral weight of other people's asthma.
We must look at the bigger picture. If we are to remain a premier global hub, we cannot allow the fundamental machinery of international commerce to be derailed by hyper-local luxury beliefs like housing, healthcare, and the right to a quiet night's sleep. When the government launched this rapid expansion plan, they correctly identified that the needs of the many multinational conglomerates operating out of Canary Wharf firmly outweigh the needs of the three million.
So I have a small request for the residents of Hillingdon, Richmond, and Wandsworth. The next time you find yourself coughing up soot, or staring blankly at a bulldozer tearing through your local park, I urge you to look up at the sky. Look at the magnificent metal bird soaring gracefully through the smog, carrying a mid-level marketing executive to a completely avoidable in-person synergy seminar in Frankfurt. Smile through the noise, take a shallow, particulate-filled breath, and take pride in your contribution to the economy. And please, do keep your complaints to a minimum. Some of us are trying to relax in the premium lounge.