Tag: BAA

Pedal Power Bike Rush – 2009

Pedal Power Bike Rush: On Monday 1st June 2009 I put my Brompton on the train and came to London to photograph Climate Rush’s mass bicycle ride demanding the the UK government take effective action to counter climate change and global warning. As we have been feeling in recent days, neither our government or most others around the would has done anything like enough despite the great majority of scientific advice and the many protests such as this. You can read a longer account of this protest together with many more pictures on My London Diary at Pedal Power Bike Rush.

Pedal Power Bike Rush

Westminster

Climate Rush was a direct action group led and inspired by women, modelled on the Suffragette Movement of a hundred years previously and had first emerged in a rush to Parliament on the 100th anniversary of the 1908 ‘Suffragette Rush’ when 40 women were arrested as they attempted to rush into The Houses of Parliament.

Tamsin Osman

Then, as for this pedal power protest their key demands were an end to fossil fuel use and for the government to make policies in line with climate science and research.

Hare Krisha came with food and a sound system

Earlier in the day I had not been with them as they protested outside a conference at Chatham House in St James’s Square ‘Coal: An answer to our energy security’, attempting to block the entrance with a sculpture made of bikes and a banner ‘NO NEW COAL – CLIMATE RUSH’ demanding that no new coal-fired power stations be built – and existing ones shut down. (It was October 2024 before this finally happened, years too late.) Five of the protesters had been arrested.

I joined around 300 Climate Rush cyclists and a tandem-hauled sound system outside the conference venue and after around an hour of further protest there, with a short speech by Climate Rush founder Tamsin Osman we set off on a ride, pausing briefly outside BP’s headquarters where she spoke briefly about their huge contribution to global warming and related crimes.

Other climate criminals the ride halted at for protests and where people came to talk about their activities including the British Airports Authority at Victoria and the the government’s clumsily-named Department for Business Enterprise & Regulatory Reform (BERR), responsible for promoting much of its anti-environment climate warming activity.

Helpfully these were marked out by rows of police standing outside, and police pedal cyclists riding with the Climate Rush were also helpful in stopping traffic at various points to facilitate the ride.

More information about Climate Criminals 0utside the RBS in Lower Regent St
On The Mall

Many riders wore white dresses and hats evoking the Suffragette era with red sashes with messages including ‘CLIMATE CODE RED’, ‘DEEDS NOT WORDS’, ‘NO AIRPORT EXPANSION’, ‘ACTION ON COAL NOW!, ‘TRAINS NOT PLANES’ and ‘PEDAL POWER.’

At the Dept for Business Enterprise & Regulatory Reform

The riders also slowed down to hand out copies of a newspaper ‘HERE COMES THE SUN’, with information about climate change and what people can do as well as celebrity exclusives from Quentin Tarantino, Paris Hilton, Colin Firth, Vivienne Westwood, Daisy Lowe, Stephen Hawking, Giles Deacon, Gavin Turk, Katherine Hamnett and Queens of Noize, quotations from Gandhi, Einstein and more.

At the end of the ride, the cyclists went around Parliament Square and then onto Westminster Bridge where they brought out a very long banner with the text ‘Remember Remember the 5th of December’ – the date of the next National Climate Demonstration – and hung it over the side of the bridge before settling down to have a picnic. This was continuing when I left for home.

More at Pedal Power Bike Rush.

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Sipson Celebrates Third Runway Victory – 2010

Sipson Celebrates Third Runway Victory: On Saturday 28 August 2010 residents of Sipson and the neighbouring Middlesex villages of Harmondsworth and Harlington held a Family Fun Day to celebrate the successful end to their campaign against BAA’s plans to create a larger airport at London Heathrow by building a new runway and destroying their villages.

Sipson Celebrates Third Runway Victory

One of the first acts when the new Tory Lib-Dem coaltion came into power was to cancel the plans for the expansion of Heathrow by the building of a third runway, which had been agreed under New Labour. It was perhaps one of the few positive results from the coalition between the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats, with leading MPs from both parties at least those in the London area having earlier campaigned against the plans.

Sipson Celebrates Third Runway Victory

The fight against expansion had been long and hard, involving what leading campaigner John Stewart of HACAN described as ‘a ‘Victory Against All The Odds’, putting “success down to three main things: the building up of what it calls the largest and most diverse coalition ever to oppose expansion of an airport in the UK; a willingness to challenge the economic case for expansion; and a determination by the campaigners to set the agenda.”‘

Sipson Celebrates Third Runway Victory
Local MP John McDonnell talks with John Stewart of HACAN and then London Assembly member Murad Qureshi

In 1999 the owners of Heathrow, the largely Spanish owned BAA plc – the company formed by the privatisation of the British Airports Authority and now the Heathrow Airport Holdings Limited, had pledged at the Terminal 5 inquiry that they would never ask for a third runway. But only three years later they had brought forward massive plans for airport expansion, including a third runway.

Sipson Celebrates Third Runway Victory

And although again they had promised they would not call for a sixth terminal the plans soon included one, along with ground areas for standing aircraft and a relocated motorway spur that would cover most of Harlington, Sipson and Harmondsworth, as well as subjecting a further area of West London to increased aircraft noise and excessive pollution. BAA even declined to rule out making a request for a fourth major runway at Heathrow.

The first large-scale protest march took place in June 2003 and their were many further actions, including a mass protest at Heathrow in May 2008 and many smaller events, lobbies and meetings. The Climate Camp had come to Harmondsworth in 2007, Greenpeace who bought a local orchard as their ‘Airplot’ and direct action campaigners such as ‘Plane Stupid’, ‘Camp for Climate Action’ and ‘Climate Rush’ all gained publicity for the case against expansion.

John Stewart of HACAN

But Heathrow didn’t give up, and kept up the lobbying to persuade the Tories to give the project the go-ahead. The government set up an Airport Commission with a employee of one of Heathrow’s major owners having to leave his job with them to chair it. As intended this came up with preferring expansion at Heathrow in 2015, and this was adopted as government policy in 2016. But when it became clear that Heathrow would have to come up with the money, their plans were cut down – and in 2017 they dropped the plans for Terminal Six.

Geraldine Nicholson, Chair of NoTRAG

After a judicial review in 2020 ruled that the plans for expansion were unlawful because they had not taken into account the commitment to combat climate change, the government announced it would not appeal. But Heathrow did, took the case to the Supreme Court who in December 2020 lifted the ban so the planning application could go ahead.

Covid then came to the rescue, with the drop in passenger numbers meaning plans were put on hold. But according to Wikipedia, from which some of the above information comes, “as of June 2024 the third runway is still planned with a projected completion date around 2040.”

Back in 2010, although celebrating victory, campaigners and local residents were clear that the fight had to go one, and it has done. It seems rather unlikely giving the increasingly clear nature of our global climate catastrophe that Heathrow will ever get a third runway. Although the celebrations in 2010 may have been somewhat premature I think it was then that Heathrow really lost the battle. Since then we have been seeing the thrashings of a dying great beast.

You can read more about the Family Fun Day, organised by Hillingdon Council and NoTRAG on 28 August 2010 and see many more pictures on My London Diary at Sipson Celebrates Third Runway Victory.