As the eyes are the window to the soul, so a country’s airport is the face it chooses to show the world.
Last week our flagship airport, Heathrow, was ranked 99th in the world, coming in below such famous fleapits as Calcutta, Moscow and Johannesburg.
The global travelling public complained about Heathrow’s long security queues and crummy “ambience”. I can’t say I was surprised. I mean, have you been there recently?
Last week a New York-based head honcho at the accountancy firm Price Waterhouse Coopers was moaning to a table of other big-business types at a conference I was attending about how he dreaded being routed through London because of the delays, dirt “and that terrible transit”. Those round the table nodded in recognition and started swapping grisly tales of seemingly endless waits, the arrogance of the staff, the perils of slogging from terminal to terminal with heavy luggage and the interminable security checks. Ashamed, I kept uncharacteristically quiet.
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The poor state of Heathrow (and let’s not even go there on Luton, a dismal hangar, or Gatwick, with its queues and buses) isn’t just a dent in the collective ego — it matters. This international dissing of what is meant to be our gateway to the world is the aviation equivalent of Britain collectively being caught by the paparazzi in leggings, a scummy old sweatshirt and no make-up. In fact it’s worse than that, because it’s not just embarrassing; it’s worrying.
We have a big history and, consequently, a lot of self-aggrandising ideas about our place in the world. But I’m afraid our substandard airports tell it how it is. From the perspective of the rest of the globe, Britain is an ageing beauty trading on the conquests of the past, not even bothering to scrub up and make the best of the assets she has.
Now I’m not usually one to be so gloomy. However, a recent trip to China has forced me into a change of perspective. Leaving from Heathrow, I arrived 11 bleary hours later in Shanghai. It looked like the future. The scale of the place is mindboggling. Even from the air, China’s industrial super-city — population 20m — seems to go on for ever. The identical blue-and-green tin-roofed factories are apparently infinite in number, the spanking new tower blocks, like Lego buildings, evenly spaced on an endless toy-town grid. And the airport ...
I’d left from Heathrow’s newest, swankiest addition, terminal 5, which was rammed and sweaty with delayed travellers stretched out on every conceivable surface, like a Third World bus terminal. By contrast, Shanghai was sparkling clean, a vast array of glass; built above a network of canals, it has two brand spanking new terminals, each of which made terminal 5 look like a small, grotty greenhouse. The many runways are a tarmac continent of their own.
The Thames estuary airport is just the kind of amibitious project of which China would approve I thought about the fuss back home about building one more runway at Heathrow, and the debate about whether we should build a new airport in the Thames estuary. The latter seems a no-brainer, and the kind of ambitious project of which the Chinese would approve.
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Without the need to fly over central London, planes could land day and night on four runways, not three. Arriving passengers would be just minutes from the high-speed train link to Europe. And in the short term, tens of thousands of construction jobs would be created. But the project remains on ice, showing the paralysing lack of urgency here compared with the can-do vibrancy of the world’s fastest-growing big economy.
In China, high-speed rail is being built at a staggering speed; the aim is to join up the key cities and boost trade and jobs. In the past decade the authorities have built a mighty network of motorways. Admittedly all this is done with cheap labour unavailable in the West and under a repressive regime, but everywhere there is progress and dynamism and a hunger for trade. How, I wondered, was Britain making the most of this?
One of the business people I met in China was the peanut industry’s answer to the man from Del Monte. He buys nuts for Planters and has been going to China for 20 years. Mr Peanut described how, when he first went there, Britain was ahead of the pack when it came to penetration and trade. He shrugged. We aren’t any more. The French, Italians and Americans are everywhere.
The Chinese are obsessed by western brands: it will soon be the biggest luxury goods market in the world. In Shanghai airport there is a Kiehl’s cosmetics concession, Bonne Maman jams are served in the hotels, French cosmetics are flogged on the planes, young Chinese women sport with great pride Fendi and Chanel bags and Louis Vuitton clutches.
But amid the consumer frenzy and the passion for fashion — “very fashion, very luxury” is one of young China’s favourite catchphrases — where were the British brands? I spotted some fake Burberry raincoats (it shows there is an appetite) and an article describing how a sign that you have made it is owning a Range Rover. But precious little else. I know David Cameron led a trade delegation to China in November and the Chinese came here in January, but the headline deals were for BP to do oil exploration in the South China Sea and for two pandas to be lent to Edinburgh zoo.
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We need to be much more dynamic. Young Chinese learn English (the global language of business), they wake up at 3am to watch our Premier League matches live, they worship David Beckham and his wife Victoria (slender, dark, very fashion, very luxury). Britain has an inbuilt advantage: we should be seizing it. China will one day become the world’s biggest consumer market, so why are British companies so pathetically absent?
Well, I reckon our failure to capitalise on our early head start in China is symptomatic of a national lack of ambition, a failure to mobilise ourselves and put our best foot forward to win ourselves the future we deserve in these massive Far East markets.
Britain has become complacent and lazy, bloated with welfare and entitlement. Our patched-together airports and the massive resistance to improving them or even having a coherent plan for how we can increase flights to help our businessmen reach these new markets is all part of the same malaise.
The future is accelerating away without us; we need to wake up to the opportunity and reawaken a bit of imperial urgency if we’re to have a chance of catching up.