The Flying Scotsman

The train pulled out of St Pancras International exactly on time. I've got a glass of champagne and am gliding smoothly through Kent at 186 mph. It's shiny and comfortable and fantastic. But Gordon Brown must be worried. The city of Nice is now closer to Westminster than Kirkcaldy! This little piece of continental bliss extending over from France means that a Parisian can now be at Luton airport more quickly than a Londoner can get to Charles de Gaulle airport by air.

Eurostar is clearly eroding our Britishness and could very well undermine our position as the world's top flyers. Furthermore, the only decent train route in Britain has to suffer the humiliation of having one end in France. I'm surprised Gordon didn't put a stop to it.

British flyers emit far more per head than anyone else in the world - about 40% more than the second-placed country, Ireland. You might think it's because we're on an island. But another island people, the Japanese, fly significantly less than half of what we do.

Paris is the number one destination to reach from Heathrow with more than 60 flights a day from London. Manchester, Amsterdam, Edinburgh, Brussels and Leeds are all top destinations, too. Despite these air journeys being more than 10 times more damaging to the climate than the equivalent trips by train, Brown prefers them. Perhaps he sees them as more British. Maybe that's why he appointed the aviation lobbyist and former BAA boss, Joe Irvin, as his special adviser and not Bob Crow.

Actually, as every schoolboy knows, the train was invented by Stephenson and is in fact British. The plane on the other hand is American - just like the nuclear bomb, the machine gun and the incandescent light bulb. All of those devices need phasing out.

While the plane may still come in handy for many journeys, there certainly isn't the need for new runways to provide for these short-haul trips and so today's arrival at St Pancras offers some rare good news on the emissions front. Since aviation already contributes 13% of the UK's climate impact, Eurostar's new facilities could see that figure seriously dented as more sustainable rail travel becomes quicker and more accessible. We already know that when the west coast mainline was redone, the proportion of people flying to taking the train to and from Manchester went from 60:40 to 40:60.

While government revision of airport expansion plans is well overdue, it wasn't just today's train that arrived on schedule; the entire line is the biggest construction project in British history and yet it arrived on time and on budget. Now if that isn't an attack on the British character, I don't know what is.

This article was first published on commentisfree