A transformative political campaign? The new rhetoric of protest against airport expansion in the UK

This article explores the logic of political protest by focussing on how, and in what form, groups reproduce themselves. It analyses how HACAN ClearSkies, a local airport protest group, has challenged the dominant ideology governing British aviation policy by articulating a new rhetoric of environmental protest. What we deem a transformative campaign extends the particularistic demand of stopping expansion at Heathrow to a more universal struggle against airport expansion per se. Using political discourse theory, we argue that the campaign was prompted by HACAN's failure to stop the building of Heathrow's Fifth Terminal, the emergence of a new political leadership, and the construction of an innovative political ideology. In so doing, we focus on four discursive logics: the role and practice of naming; the drawing of political frontiers; the creation of equivalences; and the campaign's ideological means of representation. The article concludes by evaluating the challenges facing the campaign.