Flying Matters

Imagine you run BAA. You quite want a runway at your airport, but no one else does. Your runway will require a whole village to be flattened, including three schools, a graveyard and 750 houses. Building the runway will make it very difficult to meet our climate change targets. But you really, really want the runway, because then you'll make loads of cash. What do you do?

Simple - you hire lots of ex-Labour apparatchiks to work at your company, and use their contacts ruthlessly. Meanwhile your mates in government hire a whole bunch of your ex-employees, until you've created one big incestuous family and blurred the lines between your company and the people who run the country. Sorted!

Poor Brian Wilson, former Labour energy minister and chair of Flying Matters. In what should have been a classic opportunity to get their feet further in Brown's door, the comedy lobby group funded a meeting at the Labour conference by Brownite think tank the Smith Institute.

That's where it all started to go wrong. According to Private Eye, Wilson launched into a tyrade in favour off airport expansion - particularly Heathrow - and denounced opponents of unrestrained growth as "imposibilist". Sadly for Mr. Wilson, the topic of the debate was "'Going Green', and everyone - including his co-speakers, inclluding Lord Whitty and Babara Young of the Environment Agency - turned on him.

The chairman of the meeting tried to bail him out, crying "This is rapidly turning into a bashing Brian exercise, which is very entertaining, but we need other questions", but by then it was all too late. Brian just had to sit back and smile his way through the rest of the talk.

"Its always a sign that someone is losing an argument when they start making unfounded allegations." So says our arch-nemesis Flying Matters, accusing us of lying to the Times, which last week published an article claiming that they were spying on us.

Only problem is that we caught them at it. Earlier this week FM Director Michelle Di Leo sent an email to the administrator of an aviation campaigners discussion list, pretending to be an Italian campaigner against airport expansion. Calling herself 'Bella Regazza', she asked to be included in the mailing list.

No one said Flying Matters were shrewd at public relations. Their last attempt at advertising consisted of a smear campaign on an Inuit leader - guilty only of caring that his people are suffering from our addiction to weekends in Spain.

But their latest garbled comment, in today's Times article, is a classic attempt to make aviation into the saviour of humanity:

"[Plane Stupid's] actions impact most on those they profess to be protecting: families who holiday once a year, ethnic minorities who rely on air transport to visit family, and farmers in the developing world reliant on UK consumers.”