Parliament rooftop protest against Heathrow 3rd runway

27th Feb­ru­ary 2008
Cli­mate cam­paign­ers hang ‘NO 3rd RUNWAY’ ban­ner before PMQs

Cam­paign­ers opposed to Heathrow expan­sion have scaled the roof of the Hous­es of Par­lia­ment and hung protest ban­ners from the build­ing before Prime Min­is­ter’s Ques­tions is due to begin.

The three men and two women from cli­mate action group, Plane Stu­pid, opened an out­side door before walk­ing along the roof and drop­ping two ban­ners. The non-vio­lent direct action comes on the day a gov­ern­ment con­sul­ta­tion into Heathrow expan­sion ends. The pro­test­ers are mak­ing paper aero­planes out of con­fi­den­tial White­hall doc­u­ments that reveal the process is fixed, and glid­ing the planes into the MPs’ car park below.

The doc­u­ments – obtained under the Free­dom of Infor­ma­tion Act — prove that air­port oper­a­tor BAA wrote parts of the con­sul­ta­tion doc­u­ment and that the gov­ern­ment has already decid­ed to build a 3rd run­way and 6th ter­mi­nal at the world’s biggest inter­na­tion­al air­port.

One of the ban­ners, fac­ing Par­lia­ment Square, brands the House of Com­mons ‘BAA HQ’ while the oth­er says ‘NO 3rd RUNWAY’. Richard George, 27, from Lon­don is on the roof. He said:

I’m stand­ing on the roof of Par­lia­ment because the demo­c­ra­t­ic process has been cor­rupt­ed. The avi­a­tion indus­try has tak­en full advan­tage of a weak Prime Min­is­ter to get the Heathrow con­sul­ta­tion fixed. It does­n’t even con­sid­er glob­al warm­ing, despite every­thing Brown has said about the envi­ron­ment and despite the mas­sive impact that avi­a­tion has on the cli­mate.

He con­tin­ued:

This Prime Min­is­ter does­n’t even have the courage to ask Lon­don­ers the very sim­ple ques­tion, do you want a third run­way? Instead his gov­ern­ment pub­lished a con­sul­ta­tion doc­u­ment full of gob­bledy­gook and indus­try spin. Now the con­sul­ta­tion is over we can safe­ly ignore the fixed result and get on with the job of stop­ping this new run­way being built. A huge coali­tion of local res­i­dents, Lon­don­ers and envi­ron­men­tal­ists is com­ing togeth­er, sup­port­ed by all the major may­oral can­di­dates, to stand against Gor­don Brown and say ‘no more’.

BAA and Brown want to see a sixth ter­mi­nal and third run­way built over homes, schools and church­es in the vil­lages of Sip­son and Har­mondsworth. This would increase the num­ber of flights from 480,000 a year to at least 702,000. Two mil­lion Lon­don­ers face increased lev­els of noise, while CO2 emis­sions from the air­port would shoot up despite claims by Brown that he’s com­mit­ted to fight­ing cli­mate change.

The rooftop occu­pa­tion comes two days after Green­peace pro­test­ers scaled an Air­bus A320 which had just touched down at Heathrow from Man­ches­ter.

The pro­test­ers have brand­ed Par­lia­ment ‘BAA HQ’ because of the extra­or­di­nary lev­el of col­lu­sion between the avi­a­tion indus­try and gov­ern­ment. Secret doc­u­ments obtained under Free­dom of Infor­ma­tion leg­is­la­tion reveal the exis­tence of a pre­vi­ous­ly unknown body called the ‘Heathrow Deliv­ery Group’ – com­prised of gov­ern­ment and BAA offi­cials. The group is charged with get­ting the new run­way through the con­sul­ta­tion process and neu­tral­is­ing ‘risks’ to the project such as Lon­don­ers who oppose Brown’s avi­a­tion pol­i­cy.

BBC news video 1

BBC news video 2

http://video.publico.es/videos/0/4705/1/recent