Londoncentric Cloud Cuckoo Land

Norman Foster's Vision for the new airport

As yesterday's news about recession in Europe (-0.3%), unemployment in Britain (8.4%), retail decline and more austerity sinks in, we were treated to the news this morning that Goldman Sachs had protected their employees' bonuses by sacrificing profits. Stephen Hester, the generally well-regarded CEO of RBS, is likely to be voted a £ 7m-a-year package by the RBS Board despite share prices plummeting by 40%.

The boardroom elite, a self-perpetuating club which includes our pension fund managers, just don't seem to get it as they continue to live in a world where it is normal for the ratio of top pay to the lowest pay of full-time employees to exceed 100. Even the much idolised John Lewis Partnership have a regressive ratio of 30. Most public service organisations have relatively progressive ratios of between 6 and 12 between CEOs and the lowest-paid staff, but they get routinely savaged by the media for this profligacy. Meanwhile, Paul Dacre, the editor of the Daily Mail, was paid £1.7m in 2012, approximately 150 times as much as the lowest-paid staff. The prime minister gets about a more modest 15 times as much as the lowest-paid civil servant. 

Back on Planet Westminster, our political leaders are competing today in a game of 'responsible capitalism' that is clearly aimed at pacifying disgruntled voters in the real world.  The prime minister is even talking about cooperatives.  Talk about shifting the director's chairs on the Costa Concordia.  Because I have little faith in the government doing anything about this, I have decided to extend my portfolio of more responsible citizen actions instead.  I have closed my RBS account today on the back of the CEO's pay deal to add to my long-term boycott of News International, Coca-Cola, Ryanair, PayPal, PC World, Amazon, Starbucks, Asda, McDonald's and any company that I discover to operate out of a Channel Islands tax haven. 

George Osborne is meanwhile handshaking 'comrades' in China and looking for the Chinese to invest in Britain on the government's latest wheeze: a new airport in the Thames Estuary.  It is only a consultation exercise at this stage, but it took our attention away from the triple whammy of bad news yesterday.  The gist of the idea is that all that accumulated capital in South East Asia would provide investment to replace government expenditure and this would enable the UK to remain at the epicentre of the world's financial markets by virtue of its mega hub airport.

It would have been a good idea thirty years ago, and indeed Foulness was considered in the 1970's, but that was before the Heathrow expansion and the building of Stansted. But does London really need 6 airports?  The nerve-wracking and time-consuming scurry around any of Heathrow, Gatwick or a future Boris Island terminal - dodging through the shopping malls and trying to make connections whilst queuing at Border controls - would make it ever more likely for us to use regional airports.  For long-haul flights, there are less confusing hubs such as Amsterdam, Frankfurt or Paris. 

The London-centric tendency of the government is palpable, but the UK is a nation with constituent countries and city regions; it is not meant to be a megalopolis. The proposed new airport is another example of burlesque gesture politics that suggests the government are creating a disunited kingdom with more than a twist of cloud cuckoo land about it. A new airport in the Thames estuary with a planned turnover of 130million passengers a year, and as far away from the proposed HS2 rail line as it is possible to get, is bizarre and will no doubt be used to justify Crossrail 2.  What other country would want to build an airport in an estuary that is slowly sinking, on a protected bird reservation at the opposite end of the capital city from the vast majority of its and the nation's population?  As the tagline for the coalition policies goes: 'you couldn't make this up'. The Lib Dems will never be able to live this down.

The posh boys crash hats look ominous