'Man or mouse' Cameron challenged over Heathrow

A senior Conservative MP challenged David Cameron to decide if he is "a man or a mouse" over calls to expand Heathrow airport on Tuesday.

Former environment minister Tim Yeo, writing in The Daily Telegraph, asked if Cameron would preside "over a dignified slide towards insignificance" by Britain or if he possessed "a trace of Thatcher, determined to reverse the direction of our ship".

He added: "The Prime Minister must ask himself whether he is man or mouse....

"An immediate go-ahead for a third runway will symbolise the start of a new era, the moment the Cameron government found its sense of mission. Let's go for it."

The challenge came after Mayor of London Boris Johnson, who wants a new airport to be built in the Thames Estuary, accused Cameron of "pussyfooting around" on London's air capacity.

The call to expand Heathrow is largely driven by economic concerns. Housing minister Grant Shapps said last week that "all options" should be considered to ensure Britain remains a "great trading nation".

Conservative Party policy is against expansion, however.

Yeo, previously an opponent of expansion due to environmental concerns, said those fears were becoming groundless in the face of European Union carbon emissions caps that he said would force airlines to use cleaner planes to land at the airport.

"The environmental objections are disappearing," he said.

"Last January, greenhouse gas emissions from flying were brought within the EU cap. Indeed, we could cover the whole of Surrey with runways and not increase emissions by a single kilogram: if Heathrow expands, so remaining the European destination of choice, airlines will fly their newest and quietest aircraft to it."

Transport Secretary Justine Greening said there was cross-party consensus against a third runway.

"What we do need to do is to start the process of saying well, if we're not going to have a third runway, how do we make sure we have got the hub capacity that our country needs going forward?" she told BBC Radio 4's Today programme.

She added that a possible new hub airport was "clearly one of the options" to be considered instead.

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/man-mouse-cameron-challenged-over-heathrow-083355647.html

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