Flying start for UKIP

Too important for politics
Express & Star Letters
Jun 7, 2005, 10:58

Paul Kalinuakas, the Labour candidate in the South Staffordshire Parliamentary election, must be somewhat desperate for a cause if his protest appearance at the gates of Halfpenny Green airport on May 31 is anything to go by.

On that day, Malcolm Hurst, the UKIP candidate, held a Press launch at the airport.

He did so because he is a qualified pilot who has flown from the airport in the past and wished to enable the Press to view the constituency from the air, in order to show the beauty of the South Staffordshire and the importance of maintaining the green belt.

No sane person who knows South Staffordshire would support the proposals to develop Halfpenny Green as a large scale airport for business and commercial traffic.

South Staffs itself is a beautiful rural area.

Its infrastructure is entirely inadequate for a larger airport, and any provision of such infrastructure would destroy the very qualities for which the area is valued.

As for the need for air transport, there is already a great deal of spare capacity in the air transport industry, so much so the newspapers are full of advertisements for flights all over Europe at under 20 a head.

Further, if we are to believe Mr Blair, employment is so high that many new jobs such as those in a larger airport would have to be filled from workers from abroad, so there is currently no significant local need for a very large new employer is South Staffs.

Halfpenny Green Airport is a very good general airfield and will naturally improve over time to meet the needs of its existing users.

The pointless and destructive nature of proposals to expand the use of the site have been very effectively laid bare by local people opposed to the development whose valuable work over the past years cannot be made the property of any political party.

Mike Lynch, UKIP South Staffs. Suckling Green Lane, Wolverhampton.