BAA Stansted has abandoned its planning application and appeal for a second runway. This has happened just one week after I wrote to the airport managing director asking them to bow to the inevitability of the change of government and the Lib Dem-Conservative coalition’s confirmation that it would not approve an extra runway at Stansted.

This represents massive success for local campaigning. All credit must go to Stop Stansted Expansion plus all local people, including politicians, who from the outset in September 2002 knew that the Labour government’s policy was wrong. It all began with an overcrowded public meeting that I called at the Stansted high school in summer 2002.

Extra runways were wrong for local reasons; the wrong airport in the wrong location. They were wrong for global reasons; we have to reduce carbon emissions; not grow them through unconstrained aviation growth.

The battle was not easy. There were those in Uttlesford council who might have bowed to ‘the inevitable’. There were those who thought that local noise mattered but that carbon emissions concerns were ‘for the birds’.  Slowly, the argument was won that the previous government’s aviation white paper was unsustainable. I persuaded the Lib Dem conference back in 2002 to oppose extra runways. Then slowly and hesitantly the Tories came on board. So now we have a Lib Dem-Conservative coalition government that has sounded the death knell at Stansted.

 In the past we have won battles. Now we have won a war!