HUNDREDS of people from all over Britain have demanded their MPs should tell the Transport Secretary to scrap proposals for Cliffe Airport.

In a mass lobby of Parliament last Wednesday, they urged the politicians to back a call from Medway MP Bob Marshall-Andrews to save the Hoo Peninsula from becoming runways, motorways and haulage terminals.

They were organised by the RSPB in what the conservation organisation's chief executive, Graham Wynne, described as a climactic swansong to the campaign to save the area from redevelopment.

Mr Wynne told campaigners: "The Hoo peninsula will be effectively destroyed if this is allowed to happen. There is no place for complacency."

Many local people have said the airport plan would never go ahead.

Alan Jarrett, deputy leader of Medway Council and chairman of Kent Wildfowlers, said: "I am not convinced that this is a dead duck."

The Secretary for Transport, Alistair Darling, is expected to decide before Christmas whether to back the controversial option of building the world's biggest airport on the Cliffe marshes.

It is one of a series of options that his staff have proposed to tackle competition from European airports determined to wrest the crown from Heathrow.

Among those in the delegation were No Airport at Cliffe campaigners from the village itself, from Cooling, Allhallows, and Gillingham.

Alan Hughes, a Cooling parish councillor who has opposed the idea from the very beginning, said: "I'm 73. I am fighting this for the benefit of future generations."

Mr Marshall-Andrews, who described himself as "a pretty amateur twitcher," denied that opponents to the airport were Luddites.

"It is impossible to imagine anything more manically deranged than a transport policy projected on the commercial imperatives of civil aviation," he said.

"It is a wild and inhospitable place, much of it flooded, and a most forbidding landscape surrounded by industry and power stations, but it is the most glorious place to watch wildlife outside Africa that I know."

PLONKING an airport on Cliffe Marshes was described as a ridiculous and half-baked idea by the chief executive of the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds.

Before lobbying began in the House of Commons, Graham Wynne said: "They say there will be a trebling of air transport over the next 25 years.

"I find that unbelievable and incredibly irresponsible."

Mr Wynne said there had been very little assessment of the impact on climate change.

The dangers from bird strikes from the 200,000 wildfowl that congregate on the marshes around the Thames estuary had been ignored.

"All governments are well rehearsed in coming forward with some half-baked ideas. I think this is the single most stupid one of all. It is without precedent," he said.

He promised that his organisation which owns large proportions of the ground under threat would take the issue through the European courts.

IF CLIFFE airport is built, the RSPB says:

• An additional 100,000 houses would have to be built in north Kent to accommodate airport workers.

• The largest heronry in Britain would be destroyed if the airport is built.

• The local economy would completely alter if an airport is built.

• Migrating birds, as many as 200,000 at any one time, would eventually die out from starvation if the airport was built. Those that survive within 13 kilometres of the airport would have to be destroyed to protect airliners from crashing.

• Flocks of rare Little Egrets that are breeding on the peninsula would be wiped out.