Video of yuppie City Airport demo

I love the sound of yuppies in the morning, and hope the people of Newham do, because there's soon to be thousands (well, 32) descending on them to take advantage of British Airways's latest scheme: a luxury business-class only flight to New York for people whose accounts departments really should be checking their expenses more closely.

As Fight the Flights, the anti-City Airport expansion group, have noticed, Newham Council and and London City Airport really care about the local people. LCA is overjoyed at the benefits that increasing flights by 50% will bring to a borough already suffering from below average air quality and higher than average asthma rates.

Not so overjoyed as to actually ask them for an opinion, mind. Their latest consultation seems to have been conducted on the don't ask, don't tell principle. Somewhere between 10,000 and 16,000 households were asked for their views, which the council claims cost them £130,000. Given that there were 92,000 households in Newham back in 2001, we can only conclude that the council decided to spend its money on gold-plated consultation papers costing about £10,000 per household rather than soliciting the views of everyone who lives in its area.

Fight the Flights has challenged the whole expansion fiasco, and is taking Newham to court for a whole host of charges, mostly related to not considering certain Government policies, not consulting properly, and generally being a bunch of tossers (that's a bona-fide legal term, in case you were wondering). Fingers crossed that they didn't save some of the consultation budget back to bribe the judge with, although I wouldn't put it past them.