I HAVE been a member of the Labour party since well before Tony Blair became party leader but I have now resigned my membership over the government’s decision on Heathrow, made without even a full parliamentary debate. I will be redirecting the subscription money to Greenpeace and the Green Party from now on. I admire the personal work by our local Southampton MP’s on Climate Change so it pained me to send my resignation letter via one of them. Only one in 5 flights are for business and most of the rest are for holidays. I have not flown for a holiday since 2004 precisely because of the overwhelming environmental damage from flying. One return flight to New York uses up three years of my sustainable carbon budget and it is mainly those with higher disposable income that indulge in holiday flights so this practice is in no way ’fair’ nor a ‘right’. I read that 80 per ecnt of the UK population is convinced of the current evidence of climate destruction such as ice shelf loss and sea-level rising, and the vast consensus of scientific knowledge that we must reduce the emissions from industrial countries dramatically, by at least 80% or 90% to avoid irrevocably undermining the global ecology and economy and the fabric our children’s and grandchildren’s lives. The expansion of a centralised airport by more than the size of any other UK airport bar Gatwick will certainly produce a vast increase in emissions and send a signal to the UK population and other countries that it is not really worth doing anything to avoid climate destruction. We should be encouraging job expansion in low carbon and thus sustainable (both environmentally and more likely to last!) industries not the very opposite.

Mark Hancock, Southampton.