Third-runway activists protest on Parliament’s roof

Protesters against the plans for Heathrow airport’s third runway today demonstrated on the roof of the Houses of Parliament.

Gordon Brown today condemned the protesters during his weekly question time session, stating that decisions should be made within the house, not on its roof.

However the security breach comes as a slight embarrassment to the government being that security has allegedly been intensified over the last few years as a response to past incursions and the terrorist threat.

There were five activists all from the campaign group Plane Stupid. The protest had ended by midday when the activists descended from the roof.

Two banners had been clearly displayed; one proclaiming “No third runway” and the other with reference to Heathrow’s operator, “BAA HQ”.

All the activists have been detained and are to be arrested. Police mentioned earlier today that there was a strong likelihood that the activists had been the guests of parliamentary passholders.

Suspicions from sources at Westminster suggest that the banners could potentially have been stored within the Commons for collection from the group, seeing as the banners were too large to have been allowed through security. However Plane Stupid was adamant that the activists took them in.

One of the protesters, 27 year-old Richard George has stated that the group of activists simply walked through the main St Stephen’s entrance posing as visitors to attend a debate on the Palestinian occupied territories held at 9.30am. George maintained that banners were undetected by the airport-level security.

He stated that the group said they were there to watch a committee and proceeded to take a lift to a committee corridor then exited to the roof through a fire escape.

Once on the roof the activists made their way to the front of the building where they then chained themselves to a stairwell. Police moved quickly to remove the chains and faced a challenge in safely removing the group.

Plane Stupid’s previous stunts include ambushing the stage at various aviation conferences. According to George, this stunt was to illustrate a conspiracy between BAA and the government, over a consultation on Heathrow expansion that incorporated a proposal for a third runway. The consultation ended today.

In addition to Richard George protesters consisted of Greenpeace employee, Graham Thompson, 34; Tamsin Omond, 23, a graduate of Cambridge University and voluntary church worker; Leo Murray, 31, an animation student at the Royal College of Art; and Olivia Chessel, 20, a youth worker.

The protest comes two days after a protest by Greenpeace activists against the third runway, staged at Heathrow on the top of a British Airways jet.

Spokesman for the Society of British Aerospace Companies, Matthew Knowles, outlined the tiresome nature of the stunts, stating that the expansion at Heathrow will safeguard and create jobs not simply at a local level but in the City and across the country.

In 2005 the government passed laws banning protests from being held inside 1km of Parliament as a result of the anti-war protester Brian Haw from the square. Although at the time ‘security concerns’ were cited as a reason.