Not everyone recognises the threat to our peace and quiet over here in Suffolk. To them I say, just wait until there's two runways, handling 80 million passengers a year, two new stacks and hundreds more planes descending over your homes.

This week the Government's own green advisers produced a report urging ministers to put on hold further growth in aviation.

The report is by the Sustainable Development Commission, set up by Labour to advise on disputed environmental issues.

It argues that there is no agreement over the economic case for expanding Stansted or Heathrow, let alone over aviation's effect on global warming.

Such huge decisions as that over a second runway at the Essex airport, says the SDC, should be delayed until a far-reaching commission has distilled the facts from the propaganda.

Sadly, the SDC's idea seems dead from the outset.

A Department of Transport spokesman voiced the Government's disagreement with it before the ink had dried on the page, saying there was no need for three years of further debate.

The Government's obviously in thrall to BAA's doom-laden, profit-driven warnings about the collapse of the British economy if we don't roll over and let it expand Stansted as soon as possible.

I HAD intended to write more about People's Park than Stansted Airport. But what is there to write? A long saga seems to boil down to the following.

The NHS acquired the land from Sudbury to build us a new hospital.
The hospital was never built and the town's health services have continued to suffer for years at the hands of successive NHS apparatchiks.

Now the health trust wants to flog the land for houses and no doubt, make a tidy profit.

It is unlikely that the money will benefit Sudbury. It will probably disappear into a big NHS black hole.

So if we can't have the hospital, we'll keep People's Park as a precious green space, thanks all the same.