Ha. It turns out I was trying too hard to find a contrarian "actually this specific thing she did was good" angle but I read more into how Manchester Airport ended up having its direct flight to Singapore and I can't tell an "actually Thatcher was good in the end" story honestly.
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Reading all the debates and reports about UK airport policy in the 1980s and 1990s is fascinating to me. I'd been told a lot of it by the wise old women and men of the North in pubs in Manchester and Leeds, but to read it all,...
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Especially with the help of AI to pull together the sources, put them on a timeline, suggest contexts that are lost in history. There are whole bodies of substantial importance such as the North of England Regional Consortium that don't even have a Wikipedia page today.
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You can find small snippets of it. The obituary of John Gunnell MP in The Times notes that "Between 1984 and 1992 he also led the North of England Regional Consortium". thetimes.com/uk/politics/art…
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I'm not quite sure what to do. It deserves a Wikipedia page. That's how I would have found out about it in the past. But it doesn't have one. So how now do I create one? I have to be honest and say that I'd create it with AI today. But that would just feed the AI with AI.
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I think realistically the best option is to pay a historian, someone like @HiddenYorkshire to research and write the Wikipedia page.
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The North of England Regional Consortium was formed in 1981 to "remove regulatory barriers to passengers in the North flying directly abroad rather than travelling through Heathrow/Gatwick" because at the time the UK government blocked such flights to support London airports.
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In 1985 the NOERC has amassed unprecedented cross-party support to beg the UK government to let the North compete and to lift the de facto ban on long-haul flights from outside of London, instead of spending public money expanding Stansted. api.parliament.uk/historic-h…
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Top stuff. A Conservative MP is slamming the Conservative government for protecting London airports from Northern competition. "We have a Secretary of State preaching competition and freedom of choice while the Department seems to practice protectionism." api.parliament.uk/historic-h…
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"the answer to all this — it would be welcome to Manchester and take much pressure away from Heathrow— is to allow Manchester international airport to have more international flights" ,...
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"Two airlines have recently said that they would like to fly to Manchester. The first is Malaysian Airline System and the second is Singapore Airlines... yet the government have refused the Malaysian application ... and the case of Singapore Airlines is even worse"
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"The DfT says that there are too few passengers to justify more flights. That is a bit of an old chestnut. If Singapore Airlines, thinks that it makes commercial sense to fly to Manchester, who in the Department of Transport thinks he knows better?" > 🤣🤣🤣
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