Farnborough airport's biggest critic silenced as expansion plans continue | Hacker News Reader

Farnborough airport's biggest critic silenced as expansion plans continue

theguardian.com

67 pointsjchanimal76 comments

> For four years, Colin Shearn, a 62-year-old retired corporate executive, led the Farnborough Noise Group, a watchdog for locals worried about the operations of Farnborough airport, the UK’s busiest private jet airfield.

> Then, one day in August, police came knocking at his door.

> Shearn, they claimed in a 92-page document, had conducted an “aggressive and relentless campaign against Farnborough airport”. He was accused of “bombarding” the airport and relevant authorities “with endless questions about air traffic”, while “adopting a belligerent and aggressive style, distorting or misrepresenting a point of view to suit his agenda”.

> With just seven days to prepare for a court hearing, he was unable to persuade a judge to deny Surrey police’s application for an antisocial behaviour injunction (asbi) – the successor to the much-derided asbo. He was ordered to stop “causing any harassment, alarm or distress, nuisance or annoyance to any person” in Surrey or Hampshire, or face jail or a fine, or both.

> Three weeks later – just as Shearn, its chief critic, was silenced – Farnborough announced that it planned to double weekend flights.

Wow. With stuff like this, the recent laws against protests, the draconian gun control laws, and excessive surveillance it seems like the UK is on its way to becoming an authoritarian country.

There is nothing wrong with peaceful protests, but blocking traffic and people glueing themselves to roads and trains are not passive acts. The police have been escorting just stop oil protesters for their own safety, as the public started against protester.

Why does anyone need a gun in the UK!? The US has 3.6 gun related deaths per 100,000 people, while the UK has 0.3. Politician in the US would have you believe knife crime makes up for the lack of gun crime, but the truth is that the US has 4 times rate of violent crime than the UK. There really is no legitimate need for civilians to own handguns.

It's true that the UK has a large number of surveillance cameras in towns and cities, but that's more of a reflection in the cuts to number of police over the years.

One might argue that having guns for self-defense is crucial because the police may not always be immediately available, especially in rural areas. Individuals have the duty and right to take proactive measures to protect themselves and their families in emergency situations. That becomes even more important in the face of the police cuts that you yourself mention.

One might also note the positive aspects of shooting sports, such as target shooting or competitive events, which can foster discipline, concentration, and responsible firearm handling. They provide an avenue for skill development, camaraderie among diverse groups of people from different backgrounds, and the enjoyment of a traditional and culturally significant pastime. Responsible participation in these activities contributes to the overall well-being and mental health of individuals involved, bolstering the strength and cohesiveness of the UK overall

Are there any statistics about the UK and how often a personal weapon was crucial for self defense? For me it seems like a rare occurrence, but I don't know.

> shooting sports

I currently live in Denmark where we have some of the very strict weapon laws. No switchblades, no throwing stars, no carpenter knife for carpenters on person unless he drive between jobs sites etc.

And we still have sports shooting. Even with no license I know a gun range that is inside a normal school where we had a team building exercise :) Was fun shooting.

You can't do that currently in the UK or what?

Yeah you can do all sorts of sports shooting in the UK, people do clay pigeon shooting or target shooting or even hunt birds (pheasant and grouse) and the like in the UK. We just have sane (or if you're American, draconian) controls on people owning guns.

Handguns must be stored in a locker at the shooting range, I believe. You’re not allowed to take them home.

Farmers can keep a shotgun for pest control, so it’s not a total ban on all home ownership of guns. But there is not seemed to be any legitimate purpose for owning a handgun in your home. Ditto an AR.

> There is nothing wrong with peaceful protests, but blocking traffic and people glueing themselves to roads and trains are not passive acts. The police have been escorting just stop oil protesters for their own safety, as the public started against protester.

Heaven forbid their safety should be in danger, they might get trampled by a horse.

I think peaceful protests are great, and from time to time civil disobedience is needed to get the point across. But while blocking main highways with your protests might get attention to your cause, I think it will backfire with the common people just trying to get to work associating your cause with being the reason you got fired from your job for being late. It's very short-sighted and self destructive to any progress.

People always say that they're ok with protests as long as they don't cause them any inconvenience, and I think they're mostly being honest with what they feel, but I also think that protests are about generating mindshare, and if they're freely ignorable, they don't work. It sucks, but the average person isn't going to care about something that doesn't affect them, and sometimes the best way to make them care (enough to actually look into the issue) is to make it affect them. And even if they go into it with a perspective of "Wow these protesters are annoying assholes", if they look into the cause and see a bunch of people online saying "We don't think our allies should have blocked the freeway, but also look how fucked up this is" enough people might be converted to make the disruption worth it.

It's super easy to say "this was bad tactics because I personally was not converted" (and I'm very prone to feeling that way with irritating or intrusive advertisements), but I don't think it's actually a very useful way of thinking about things.

I agree with you on principle, but in reality it seems like it just gives the media more ammo to villainize the cause even more. Or worse, block ambulances from getting to where they need to be. I highly doubt the family of a person who died because they couldn't get to the hospital, or got fired from their job is ever going to look positively on that cause.

Shutdown a courthouse or government building or something instead, I guess is my point.

> Shutdown a courthouse or government building or something instead, I guess is my point.

That's reasonable, but you also know that you can always come up with a justification for why this protest in particular was unacceptable.

Shutdown a courthouse? You're ruining people's weddings, you're preventing trials right before the statute of limitations expires, you're keeping people in jail for longer than they had to otherwise and then what if they commit suicide because jail is so bad?

People (justifiably) really hate being inconvenienced, but that's also kind of the point of this kind of protest.

depends on the context, an airport expansion? yeah dumb, protesting something as huge as genocide or climate change? then the inconvenience cause will be a fraction of what climate change will cause (or genocide is)

common people are often short-sighted and self-destructive to their own progress

How is protesting an airport expansion not a protest against climate change?

>The police have been escorting just stop oil protesters for their own safety, as the public started against protester.

I didn't agree with their blocking of roads, but there has been a hysteria whipped up online and by tabloids about them. to the point where a small minority of people think being late is a valid excuse to run their SUV over these protestors.

Go to comments on news websites covering these stories and you'll usually see a few suggestions to run them over.

I think you figures are a bit off for gun deaths. The ones here are 10.84 per 100,000 in the US, 0.24 in the UK. https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/gun-death...

About gun control and freedom, I have the following opinion:

We need to be realistic. The only way armed citizenry can fight against a powerful government is through guerrilla warfare/terrorism. You're not going to fight a professional army that comes with ISR capabilities, air assets, artillery and heavy weapons by assembling a ragtag of your subdivision patriots while counting on the prowess of the hunting ability of Mr. Eckhardt in a tree to snipe the "enemy" officers. This makes good post-apocalyptic fiction, entertaining movies but it would mean the complete obliteration of your group, all of your family and all your neighbours with just a few artillery shells. Any kind of stand by civilians against a professional army from the most powerful military in the world could only have one result, and it would not be good for the "citizen's militia".

So, the only credible scenario for fighting an occupier/tyrannic government/alien invaders, as proved by countless examples in history of liberation movements facing a far more powerful enemy, would be good old terrorism (once you win, if you win, presumably you can call it freedom fighting), sabotage and other such hit and run tactics.

And once someone crosses this bridge, they don't give a fuck if they can buy their guns at Costco or in the back of van in a dark alley. Indeed, buying in the dark alley is preferred.

Nobody is going to fight the government using legally bought guns while using their government provided callsigns to communicate using their legally licensed ham radios.

So, legal gun ownership as a safeguard against an oppressive government is a fucking illusion, a feel-good excuse to have cool (even if dangerous) toys.

Revolutions and insurrections are made by people who don't give a flying fuck about laws and the current order, and 99 times out of 100, they lose and die in mostly horrible ways.

> while counting on the prowess of the hunting ability of Mr. Eckhardt in a tree to snipe the "enemy" officers

In an actual modern civil war, I would assume guerillas would be mostly using gun turrets built out of LEGO Technics or the like; suicide quadcopter RC drones (carrying e.g. grenades); and other extremely-low-cost impossible-to-restrict solutions to “leverage” ordinary weapons into being credible threats against a nation-state. (See also: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lFMvesTUjAA)

And I would assume that modern thought on the meaning of a “well-armed militia” that can fight back against attempted civil incursion, would thus be a militia that has both access to the materials for — and training in the use of — these sorts of improvised "leveraged" weapons systems.

I would go further to say that, in the modern day, if possession of any of the aforementioned "leveraged" weapons systems — for purposes of home or firing-range training in the prevention of civil incursion — is considered illegal, then you don't really have a "right to bear arms", you just have some lip-service for gun nuts.

> suicide quadcopter RC drones (carrying e.g. grenades); and other extremely-low-cost impossible-to-restrict solutions to “leverage” ordinary weapons

grenades are illegal to own for a civilian in the US, so that situation isn't that hard to restrict.

Sure IEDs are a thing, but not quite as easy or low cost.

In the case of an outright revolution you're mostly correct, although i would argue that having guns legal and prevalent before the revolution makes it much much easier for them to be bought out of a van in an alley. If guns were illegal beforehand then the van method requires either making them, which is usually subpar, or smuggling them in from another country, which is risky. Having a large number of them locally available and just around means they can be easily repurposed or acquired.

Also, i'm unsure what you mean by "Nobody is going to fight the government using legally bought guns". One of the points of US gun ownership is that there is no easily accessible database of who owns guns. So once you own a gun legally you can then use it in the revolution.

However, there is an advantage to having guns even in the case of non-revolutions! Ruby Ridge is a perfect example of the use of guns to prevent future government overreach. The outcomes there have instilled a years long fear in government agents of going out to seize weapons from citizens.

> In the case of an outright revolution you're mostly correct, although i would argue that having guns legal and prevalent before the revolution makes it much much easier for them to be bought out of a van in an alley. If guns were illegal beforehand then the van method requires either making them, which is usually subpar, or smuggling them in from another country, which is risky. Having a large number of them locally available and just around means they can be easily repurposed or acquired.

Myanmar is a case in point. There's currently an armed rebellion against the the military dictatorship there, but (at least a few years ago) is was hobbled by Myanmar's strict gun control laws. IIRC, when the military started shooting protesters, they sometimes tried to resist with single-shot hunting rifles, but were predictably beaten. An NPR story I heard a few years ago described how they were trying to smuggle stuff like AR-15s from Thailand, but the quantities were so inadequate the protesters-turned-rebels had to train with wooden mockups.

This looks like a more recent article on it, and it sounds like things are getting better: https://asiatimes.com/2023/05/myanmar-pdfs-getting-the-guns-.... However, I bet the rebellion would be farther along if Myanmar had a healthier supply of privately-owned, capable guns to draw from. Here's a quote:

> Over the dry season months, [Myanmar Air Force] jets and helicopter gunships ratcheted up the tempo of daily strikes which in addition to supporting the regime’s embattled ground troops also deliberately targeted villages, clinics, churches and even camps where hundreds of thousands of internally displaced people (IDPs) have sought precarious refuge.

> But for all the publicity and outrage they have drawn, the [military government's] Russian-built Yak-130 jets and Mi-35 gunships were not in fact the most important killers shaping the course of the conflict in recent months. That lethal accolade should rather go to the humble assault rifles and grenade launchers now turbocharging resistance across the flatlands of central Myanmar.

> Over the past five months of this year’s dry season, an accelerating proliferation of automatic rifles and other small arms seldom seen in 2021 and 2022 has wrought a striking if virtually unreported transformation of the war.

To summarize a common counter to this doomerism.

You cannot control an entire country and its people with tanks, jets, battleships and drone or any of these things you believe trump's citizen ownership of firearms.

A fighter jet, tank, drone, battleship or whatever cannot stand on street corners. And enforce "no assembly" edicts. A fighter jet cannot kick down your door at 3am and search your house for contraband.

None of these things can maintain the needed police state to completely subjugate and enslave the people of a nation. Those weapons are for decimating, flattening and glassing large areas and many people at once and fighting other state militaries. The government does not want to kill all of its people and blow up its own infrastructure. These are the very things they need to be tyrants in the first place. If they decided to turn everything outside of Washington DC into glowing green glass they would be the absolute rulers of a big, worthless, radioactive pile of [excrement].

Police are needed to maintain a police state, boots on the ground. And no matter how many police you have on the ground they will always be vastly outnumbered by civilians which is why is a police state it is vital that your police have automatic weapons while civilians are unarmed.

BUT when every random pedestrian could have a Glock in their waistband and every random homeowner an AR-15 all of that goes out of the window because now the police are outnumbered and face the reality of bullets coming back at them.

If you want living examples of this look at every insurgency that the US military has tried to destroy. They're all still kicking with nothing but AK-47s, pick-up trucks and improvised explosives because these big weapons you talk about are useless for dealing with them. And the US wouldn't be dealing with one major insurgency it'd be dealing with hundreds spread across thousands of miles with different demands, motivations and M.O.s.

Or you get the armed version of Hitler's 1925 Sturmstaffel and Saalschutz/SA pre-military militias that helped a crazy dictator rise to power believing they were doing the "right thing", opposing the corrupt government.

This kind of military superiority argument lost the US 2 wars. Yes, you can absolutely flatten a city block with ease, but if the US couldn’t do it to people 1000s of miles away in dirt poor countries, they’re going to have a hell of a time convincing enlisted soldiers to shell their neighbors.

Regardless of the practicality, the second amendment explicitly calls for the regulation of government via militia. The Supreme Court has continually held that right extends down to individual citizen’s right to own firearms. From your perspective, perhaps citizens need access to more powerful weaponry to fulfill the 2nd amendment’s mandate. Currently, laws like the NFA restrict practical access to automatic weapons, and introduce licensing requirements for specific weapons and accessories, such as suppressors and short barrel rifles.

Whoa whoa whoa! You're being way too rational about this issue.

How do gun control laws make a country authoritarian? For the rest yes it is not sounding good for UK citizens and residents.

I’m not a 2nd Amendment zealot in any way but an armed population is, among many many other (mostly bad) things, a real counterweight to government overreach.

An armed population would not improve the UK government in any way.

I would even suggest that despite the USA having guns, their government is just as bad. I'm not sure that plans to develop a new airport runway would be 'stopped' by civilians turning up armed.

The US obviously has much, much, much stronger free speech protections. The extent to which that’s preserved by threat of an armed populace seems pretty tricky to figure out.

I agree I wouldn’t propose arming the UK public as a solution here.

> The US obviously has much, much, much stronger free speech protections.

Does it? I don't know enough about the subject to say one way or another.

People are frequently jailed in the UK for saying mean things on the Internet. This does not happen in the US. Even cases of people making specific threats against government officials are incredibly hard to act on.

> People are frequently jailed in the UK for saying mean things on the Internet.

I'm not sure that's true.

That's ridiculous, or scary. Are you one of those people who would shoot the police if they came to your door to enforce the law?

I can't think of any lawful way a gun can help you with dealing with a disagreement with the government.

> I can't think of any lawful way a gun can help you with dealing with a disagreement with the government.

No rebellion is lawful. The American Revolution was highly illegal and the American Founders were traitors to the British crown. Even the possibility of one puts a check on government overreach. For an extreme example, a government is probably not going to routinely shoot protestors if they will start getting return fire (though they can probably get away with it once or twice before retaliation starts).

> Are you one of those people who would shoot the police if they came to your door to enforce the law?

I suppose it depends on the law, doesn’t it? If you can’t imagine a law that would justify such a response, you’re lacking both in imagination and historical knowledge.

But no, as far as the meme version of an anti-government hick, or whatever you have in your head now, no I am not one of them. My comment history will reveal that I’m generally very pro-government (the secular, western, liberal democratic versions at least).

> you’re lacking both in imagination and historical knowledge.

Apparently, but the real problem is you don't actually give us an example, then I wouldn't need those elusive skills. It's hard to get to the point without something concrete.

Besides the moral question of killing someone doing their job due to an unjust law, there are the practical matters. If you kill one person, there are others who do the same job. Governments hire thousands of people. There is the question of subjectivity. If you think that's justifiable, what about if you're delusional or just wrong? Once you cross that moral line you're killing people just because you think

But maybe you're talking about the government coming to kill you and acting in self defence. This definitely happens, but it has practical issues. We've seen black people more or less executed by police more than once. Should black people shoot police defensively? At what point do they know it's justified? What if they're just scared and over-reacting?

Maybe you're talking about something broader, then that's armed rebellion, or civil war. That may be justified, and doesn't have the subjectivity so much, but then you're up against an enemy that is well armed. How are you going to get your hands on jets, tanks and nukes?

Maybe you don't present an example because you don't have one. You then just have an amorphous concept that sounds good in theory but makes no sense. Thus my comments and the danger of actually being one of those people you mention.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Holocaust

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khmer_Rouge

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_Inquisition

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Purge

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Brown_(abolitionist)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iranian_Revolution

> but there are practical matters

You're arguing as if I said this is a good solution. It's not.

> but then you're up against an enemy that is well armed. How are you going to get your hands on jets, tanks and nukes?

How did the Taliban succeed? How did the Viet Cong succeed?

> the danger of actually being one of those people you mention

Lol. I don't think my views being willfully misrepresented by a stranger on the Internet is "dangerous."

The second you'd take up arms against the government you'd be labeled a terrorist and taken out with a drone. Being a counterweight against the government only works if you have the same arms as the government.

> Being a counterweight against the government only works if you have the same arms as the government.

I'm all for relative strict weapon and gun laws, but I think ^ this might be false.

IRA ~troubles~, Myanmar / Burma, French Indochina War maybe?, Cuban Revolution, Wounded Knee 73 all got results while being undergunned. Burma still pending.

Afghanistan is an empirical disproof of this claim. I used to believe it too though!

There is zero evidence an armed polulation does achieve that goal. It is a nice narrative so.

would a firearm have helped this man?

Not sure there is much evidence for that historically.

wounded knee 1973 and .. mhh .. "the troubles" maybe?

Also not sure if it "counts" if they got the weapons from other means. I think IRA got tons of weapons from Gaddafi. Which would make it a counter points as you can resist even with stronger weapons laws?

What exactly do you think the IRA achieved?

The first thing authoritarian governments do is take away citizens’ weapons.

It doesn’t mean that disarmament means that the government means to turn authoritarian, but in the last century, we have yet to see a case where it didn’t.

You can own guns in the UK, but few people do as there is no need. There is a shooting range no far from me, but it's simply not poplar here. I guess that why the US has approximately 160 times the gun death rate of the UK!

>there is no need

I'll be the judge of that, not you.

People think that guns give them protection, or power, but in reality they mostly increase your chances of getting shot.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/apr/07/guns-handgun...

To be fair it's not difficult to get a firearms licence in the UK. That people (generally) don't show there are very few people who care about it enough to go through the faff to get one.

Nope. You want to live in a society, then you abide by that society's collectively decided rules. You're not the only one impacted by your decisions.

It's too bad it's between you and them, you'd really think the general voting population of the UK would get a say.

> With stuff like this, the recent laws against protests, the draconian gun control laws, and excessive surveillance it seems like the UK is on its way to becoming an authoritarian country.

(Circa mid-1980s) Wow. With all the murders, necrophilia and recent cannibalism, Jeffrey Dahmer is on his way to becoming a not-so-nice person.

It also seems like the UK has a more serious NIMBY problem than most countries -- presumably because most of the country is already someone's backyard.

E.g. some of Clarkson's Farm Season 2 is a bit ridiculous.

There needs to be a balance between economic development and preservation. Everyone can't live and work in a museum.

> Wow. With stuff like this, the recent laws against protests, the draconian gun control laws, and excessive surveillance it seems like the UK is on its way to becoming an authoritarian country.

Hyperbole helps no-one. Particularly citing gun control here: the vast, vast majority of the UK population wants it and supports it. You're projecting a certain set of American values onto an entirely different situation.

Even the police unions are against cops (aside for a small number of specialists) carrying guns.

Fun fact: you can own guns in the UK and recreation is a valid reason. Most people simply don't want to, unlike the odd obsessions Americans seem to have with guns despite the fact that no one has actually stopped any tyranny with rifles over there. Shooting at cops would probably be a pretty bad idea I imagine.

> ...despite the fact that no one has actually stopped any tyranny with rifles over there.

I suppose they didn't cover the American Revolution in much depth in your history classes. It was not a peaceful protest.

Sounds a bit like a SLAPP. He should contact the Free Speech Union.

There have been protests out the wazoo in the UK recently and the police have done nothing. If anything, the police seem to concentrate on pursuing easy targets like the subject of this article. Anti-social behaviour, especially in the younger generations, is out of control across the UK. Everybody is unhappy with the police, even the police.

I can't find the 92-page document, or a transcript of the court hearing. If he was unable to persuade a judge he wasn't wasn't aggressive and relentless, then I'd bet he was.

> aggressive and relentless

Yes, that's what groups campaigning on issues do, something we allow in democratic and free societies. Asking questions? How terrible!

Funny how a corporation can be relentless and aggressive in its expansion with no regard for other parts of society though.

Comments like this make me think the UK has the exact kind of government it deserves.

Right? I live near this location and appreciate that there is someone who vigourosly takes the other side to the rich backers of the expansion.

I do realise that a judge is very likely unbiased, so maybe he was overstepping the mark, but I am also very sceptical about due process of this sort of stuff in the UK at the moment. I'm not native to the UK and I had a very high opinion of this country when I first arrived. But over the years I've watched our politics become so poisonous and incompetent that I now have a lot less faith in the UK systems.

I would like to read that too. Is there a way one could request it?

> then I'd bet he was

I wish I could that confident on this as you are.

Ideally court transcripts would be easier to access. It's possible to get them by filling out a form and paying.

The confidence would be determined by the size of the bet. As I have no information, it wouldn't be a big bet.

Incredible.

> Three weeks later – just as Shearn, its chief critic, was silenced – Farnborough announced that it planned to double weekend flights.

I'm not convinced these 2 things are connected. He can still be critical, he just can't harass anyone.

I'm shocked, really shocked, about the poor state of free speech in the UK. Anti-Corporate interest free speech to be more specific. Maybe I shouldn't be, it's been ramping up slowly but steadily for a while.

> Planes using Farnborough airport carry an average of only 2.5 passengers per plane and 40% of aircraft fly empty.

A contraction plan for the airport would be much more appropriate.

Failing that, some drones hovering nearby would make a good protest.

Aircraft are very expensive to operate, so it's unlikely that aircraft are being flown without good reason. It also depends on what the definition of "empty", as an aircraft is never empty, as it always have a crew. There are many small aircraft at Farnborough.

What about cargo planes, as they no not have passengers!?

"Empty" means with no passengers. That should be obvious. Defend millionaires and their private jets if you like, but don't hide it by twisting words.

Typical empty flights are to move a private/corporate jet. The plane flies someone to Brussels, flies back empty, flies someone else to Edinburgh, flies empty to Brussels, brings the person back, etc.

This airport doesn't have bulk freight flights. They mention "time-sensitive logistics", which is presumably the private jet version of using FedEx etc, and bottom of their list of activities anyway.

This is bad, but the right way to fix it is by taxing empty flights or better CO2 emissions per-flight, not by targeting the proxy metric of “flights from this one airport”.

Would the mega-rich pay extra if they needed to? Sure. At the margin they would fly less, and you could use the tax revenue to buy CO2 offsets or invest in infrastructure projects that will have the same effect like renewable energy generation.

Farnborough is ridiculously expensive for small aircraft. Not just expensive like for example Amsterdam Schiphol which is about 10x more than a small airport, but 10x more expensive than even Amsterdam. It's really a private jet only kind of place.

>to shuttle dogs and their owners to Dubai and back.

You can't get much more essential than that.

>it's unlikely that aircraft are being flown without good reason

You mean like picking up a billionaire?

Do you by gulf stream have a facility at Farnborough? Could be that a lot of flights are just for maintenance/test purposes? Not sure if there is a breakdown of passengers/plane by Farnborough-Farnborough flights and Farnborough-Elsewhere flights.

I think many of you are missed the point. Someone powerful used the police to stop this guy protesting. This is an airport in a wealthy area and Mr Shearn is clearly an upstanding citizen with considerable local support.

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