Set aside the climate change impacts for a moment. (Yes, I know, that’s one of the most batshit sentences anyone can write – “other than the gunshot wound, Mr Smith, how else are you feeling?” – but, you know, try). Set aside the impacts on the Heathrow area. Imagine that pipistrelle bats and greater-crested newts are, as the chancellor Rachel Reeves seems to believe, valueless. Expanding Heathrow is still a bad idea, even on her own terms: the economy. 

The UK already has Europe’s worst regional inequality. Inner West London has a per-capita GDP nearly ten times that of West Wales and the Valleys, a difference unlike any in Europe. And it’s not just that one’s rich and the other’s poor. One is rich because the other is poor. 

Much of Britain’s economy works as a wealth extraction machine. More than 70% of UK mortgages, for example, are paid to companies based within an hour of Heathrow – almost all in central London. Huge portions of people’s wages are paid to bolster bankers’ salaries in London. Most FTSE 100 companies are in London or its expanding hinterland, meaning that when people in, say, South Shields buy groceries, pay bills, or fill up their cars, the surplus value they pay doesn’t just shift up the class system to shareholders (though it does). It also moves geographically, into high-salaries in those London HQs.

Of course, it doesn’t trickle down within London: Inner West London also hosts the stub of Grenfell Tower, whose victims largely serviced the hyper-wealth around them, without ever seeing much of it. Rather, much of it is then sucked up, offshore, into tax havens, or whisked across the Atlantic.

Again and again, the government has tried to solve the UK’s economic problems – astonishingly low productivity, stagnant wages and income inequality are siblings to regional inequality – by investing in London on the grounds that it’s the most productive region, and so will produce the biggest bang per pound. In 2023/24, infrastructure investment per person in London was £2,237 (the UK average was £1,428). Again and again, this hasn’t worked. 

Heathrow expansion is designed to make the wheels of the UK economy turn faster – and it will. But given the machine is largely built to move wealth from periphery to core, this is what it will accelerate. 

First, it’ll mean more money being extracted into London. While most Heathrow departures are international, an eighth are domestic. The airport is, for example, the main destination for Scotland-England flights, and there are eight flights a day from Manchester to Heathrow.

Conventional economics claims that connectivity produces win-wins, that everyone will benefit. But that’s the same theory which thought that wealth would trickle down. In practice, Heathrow expansion will likely mean integrating Scotland and the North of England further into London’s extraction machine. 

Second, Heathrow is also an important part of the nexus sucking wealth out of Britain and offshore, with regular flights to Bermuda, Jersey, Gibraltar, the Isle of Man, etc. In 2014 (I don’t think anyone’s looked at this since), academics at the Tyndall Centre found that 15% of British people took 70% of all flights. Among this group, the most popular destination was tax havens.

Ultimately, building a third runway at Heathrow is reliant on the basic mistake of trickle down, because it’s a piece of infrastructure for rich businessmen (and, having been on a flight to Gibraltar, I can confirm it was almost all men), supported on the assumption that if they can get around faster and do their business quicker, we’ll all benefit. Once you realise that much of what they’re doing is extracting the wealth the rest of us make and pumping it, via London, into offshore havens, it seems less sensible.

Britain does need major infrastructure investment. But this shouldn’t mean centralising our economy further into London and then connecting it more to the global oligarch-sphere. It should mean radically improving transport within cities across the country, investing in rural bus services and cycling infrastructure. It should mean beautiful new council estates, with district heating schemes and solar and wind farms. 

Labour’s plan for the UK economy seems – as well as being climate incinerating – to be predicated on the silly idea that wealth comes from rich people and companies investing in you, and you need to attract it by rolling out runways for them. But in reality, those people and companies got rich by extracting wealth from other places, and that’s exactly what they would do to the UK, too. 

Wealth is something we all create. The UK’s transport problem won’t be solved by giving frequent fliers even more frequent flights. It’ll be solved by building the mass transit needed to make your morning commute shorter.