Last night saw a historic rebellion over Heathrow in parliament. 28 Labour MPs voted against the government's plans to add a third runway to Heathrow - supporting an 'opposition day motion' brought by the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats. That's a bigger rebellion than we were expecting - it seems that Gordon Brown has a serious political problem over aviation expansion.
MPs hate to vote for motions brought by the opposition, so the scale of the rebellion was quite remarkable - it was the largest rebellion on an opposition motion since Labour took power in 1997. Even over the highly emotive issue of Iraq, only 12 Labour MPs rebelled against the government - clearly, Heathrow expansion is a critical political issue, and supporting it is going to come at a high cost for the government. With polling already showing that MPs will lose their seats over the issue [PDF] in any forthcoming election, our director John Sauven was clear about what last night's result meant: "This will have alarm bells ringing in No 10. Gordon Brown has got a problem on his hands here," he said.
Revolts.co.uk has an interesting break-down of what happened - a couple of points from there include the fact that three former Labour environment ministers - Michael Meacher, Chris Mullin and Nick Raysnford - voted against the motion, presumably because Heathrow expansion would be a climate change disaster and make it effectively impossible to meet the UK's carbon reduction targets. MPs with seats local to the airport were also strongly represented in the rebels. Given that a third runway would blight millions of Londoners with more noise and air pollution and flatten an entire community, it's difficult to see how any MP local to Heathrow could vote with the government and still represent their constituents adequately.
So who were the rogues and who were the heroes of last night? It's disappointing to see MP husband and wife team Alan and Ann Keen, both of whom represent constituencies local to Heathrow, not voting against the runway. Early last year they actually took out 4 page adverts in local papers stating that "We are opposed in principle to the third runway." In a leaflet available on Ann Keen's website, Alan Keen states: "I have previously supported expansion at Heathrow within the present boundaries because of the need for additional terminal space, but there has to be a limit. I believe that limit has been reached." Unfortunately, such devotion didn't extend to actually voting against the runway last night. Oh well, maybe it's just that principled stands have no place in politics these days.
Or maybe not. Heroes of the evening were two junior Labour MPs - Vierndra Sharma and Andy Slaughter - who stood up for their west London constituents and resigned from their government positions to fight the plans. While it's good to see MPs acting on principle and sticking up for their constituents, to be honest it's probably the smarter move anyway - they're jumping the rapidly sinking Heathrow expansion ship to become members of a wide and growing coalition of opposition to the third runway, and probably securing their chances of getting re-elected.
Whatever the government claims about the 'economic necessity' of a third runway, the fact that they're having such a hard time rallying support from their own backbenches shows that practically no-one apart from BAA and a few aviation die-hards in the cabinet actually want Heathrow expansion. Given the level of discontent demonstrated last night, and given that along with over 30,000 other beneficial owners Greenpeace own a bit of Gordon's runway down at the Airplot (get your own bit of it here) I'm not sure I can actually see the thing ever getting built.
