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Gordon's sticky moment with Plane Stupid
Posted by saunvedan on 23 July 2008.
Gordon Brown's been in some sticky situations over his Heathrow expansion policies but yesterday he found himself super-glued to the sticky hand of Plane Stupid activist Dan Glass.
Strangely, Dan was invited inside Number 10 Downing Street to receive the Sheila McKechnie Award for campaigning against airport expansion. Given the opportunity to get inside the Fort Knox of Downing Street, Dan decided to live up to his credentials and smuggle in some superglue in order to take his message right to the top.
When the time came to shake hands with the prime minister, Dan glued his spare hand to Brown's jacket and asked him not to build a third runway if he is serious about tackling climate change. But Brown shook off the glued hand like an expert, just as he has tried to shake off his responsibility to cut carbon emissions. Dan did however manage to squeeze in a little speech while being stuck to the prime minister about the climate emergency we're facing and Heathrow's contribution to it.
Downing Street underplayed the incident and laughed it off just like it does regarding all things environmental, saying, "There was no stickiness of any significance." It seems to me that the government is either in denial about the problems associated with building the third runway or that it simply doesn't care about what local people think. Perhaps if Dan's hand was a little stickier, we would have seen how much effort Gordon Brown would have taken to shrug off something as sticky as climate change.
As a special dignitary that evening, Dan wasn't thrown out or jailed but allowed to stay inside for another 40 minutes. Once outside, however, he tried sticking to Number 10's gates but was prised off by a policeman. He then called it a day. "I didn't have much glue left by that point," said Dan.
But we're going to mount more pressure on this government by helping to plan the next steps at the Heathrow Conference this Saturday. Join us in prising Gordon Brown away from the sticky hands of British Airways and BAA which lets face it are much stickier than Dan's.