Public ejected from Council chamber

I've been meaning to update on last week - on Thursday there was news of Heathrow's third runway approval - later in the day all members of the public were ejected from a meeting of Gloucester City Council during a debate into an extension of Gloucestershire Airport's runway. Gloucester City Council have now approved the proposals for expansion.

Photo: this cartoon from Molly's blog seems appropriate - as we've said repeatedly on this blog before there are no economic or environmental arguments that support this expansion - indeed this is yet another example of profit before people and gross environmental exploitation. How can anyone seriously support airport expansion if they really have heard what scientists are telling us??

Public question time at the beginning of the meeting saw vocal exchanges as the debate over the plans went on. Kevin Lister, who was among the public gallery said: "This is not democracy, it's farce."

He also noted that the public had not been given their full 15 minutes of question time and that committee members had not answered questions sufficiently. At least Councillor Jonathan Whittaker (Hucclecote), voted against the proposals saying: "This isn't a safety project, this is the airport pushing forward a business proposal that increases its growth."

However the Airport have by no means got the full go-ahead - there is much they still need to do and much we can do to stop them. For example Councillors on Tewkesbury planning committee will be seeing the application and we can hope that they will see more sense than those last week in Gloucester.