Modern Movement calls itself a "a national, grassroots campaign group calling for 'faster, cheaper, better transport for all'" and around 20 mainly young professional people turned up for a demonstration in favour of building a third runway at Heathrow.

It's hard to understand people who appear to feel that the freedom of a few of us (and it is a very small fraction of the world's population) to take cheap holiday flights if we chose to is somehow our most basic human right. As I could hardly believe, Alex Hochuli, one of its co-founders, said on Worldbytes ( http://www.worldbytes.org/programmes/005/005_011.html) "the ability to travel, to see the world, to work abroad, to live abroad, to have other people come here is more important than dealing with climate change."

So there you have it. The planet can go hang just so long as a few of us in the rich worlds can have cheap air travel. The group seems to be linked to the (former) So there you have it. The planet can go hang just so long as a few of us in the rich worlds can have cheap air travel.

The Modern Movement - like the web magazine 'Spike' in which you can read a piece by Hochuli about it, appears to be a child of the former Revolutionary Communist party, which once published Living Marxism, but changed its name to LM as it lurched precipitously towards an ultra-right free market future.

Plane Stupid's placards, claiming to be from the 'Living Marxism Network' and the 'Revolutionary Communist Party' stating 'Down with the Ice Caps', '99% of Scientists can be wrong" and "One Solution: Aviation" could hardly have been objected to by the Modern Movement, and demonstrated it was impossible to outflank their lunatic views.

Their presence of a few people from Plane Stupid in Parliament Square caused a security scare, with a general alert going out to all security staff in the GSZ (Government Security Zone) to watch out for "a possible impromptu demonstration from the 'plane stupid' group". One of the two people who tried to join in the demonstration with her placard was looked after by a couple of officers for most of the time I was there (somehow it took them around half an hour to notice the second) and they refused to allow her to join the group, threatening her with action under SOCPA.

A couple of hundred yards down the road opposite Downing St was a much larger crowd - my estimate was around a thousand people. It was a much more disparate group in terms of age and background, with people from the Green Party, environmental groups and others, and including many local residents from Sipson, Harlington and Harmondsworth, as well as from the large area of London that will be affected by increased aircraft movements.

There were several MPs present, including Susan Kramer, MP for Richmond Park and North Kingston and Labour MP for Hayes and Harlington, John McDonnell (who apologised for not bringing a mace with him) and London Green MEP Jean Lambert.

More pictures shortly on My London Diary  http://mylondondiary.co.uk/2009/02/feb.htm#runway