LONDON BRIEFING:Gordon Brown's hopes of an economic Christmas present are cruelly dashed

AS IF the snow and strike threats weren’t enough, a new fog of uncertainty has descended on Britain’s airports after an embarrassing bungle by the Competition Commission.

The competition watchdog ruled earlier this year that BAA, Britain’s dominant airport owner, should be broken up, ordering it to sell three of its seven airports – Gatwick and Stansted in the south east of England and either Glasgow or Edinburgh in Scotland. The ruling came after a two-year investigation and was welcomed both by the airlines and the travelling public, long fed up with the state of the airports and the poor service offered.

Now, however, the entire process has been thrown into confusion following a successful appeal by BAA to the Competition Appeal Tribunal over possible bias in the enquiry. It turns out that Prof Peter Moizer, a member of the competition watchdog’s six-strong panel, was also acting as an advisor to a local authority pension fund that owned Manchester Airport and which put in a bid for Gatwick.

Prof Moizer made a full disclosure of his involvement with the Greater Manchester Pension Fund at the start of the enquiry into BAA, which also owns Heathrow.

That was the right thing to do; unfortunately, no-one at the competition watchdog – now being referred to as the Incompetent Commission – appears to have realised that his links with a potential buyer of one of BAA’s airports would leave the commission wide open to charges of bias in favour of a break-up of the business.

In the meantime, the sale of Gatwick has already gone ahead – and for a knockdown price, reflecting the dire state of the global airline industry. The buyer, London City Airport owner Global Infrastructure Partners, paid £1.5 billion, some way short of £1.8 billion BAA’s owner, the Spanish construction firm Ferrovial, had initially hoped for.

So what happens now? Although its appeal was won on something of a technicality, BAA’s position has certainly strengthened, particularly as it has gone ahead with the Gatwick disposal. It may well seek to have other parts of the break-up ruling overturned, such as the two year deadline for the disposals, or even argue that it should be allowed to retain one of the other airports. At the very least, it has won a further delay.

The Competition Commission, meanwhile, could launch its own appeal, or the entire investigation could be carried out again. That would be bad news indeed not only for Britain’s airport industry, which can ill-afford to wait another two years for an injection of competition, but also for the over-burdened taxpayer, who ultimately pays the bill for these time-consuming investigations. No figures have been given for the cost of the BAA probe but it will undoubtedly have run into several million pounds.

For downtrodden air passengers, the delay caused by the Competition Commission’s incompetence means it will be even longer before they can enjoy an improved service as they sit out the snow delays.

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ANY hopes harboured by Gordon Brown for an early Christmas present in the shape of some good news on Britain’s battered economy were cruelly dashed yesterday. Instead, official government data confirmed the recession not only as the longest, but also the deepest in Britain’s post-war history.

Piling on the gloom was another ratings agency warning of downgrades ahead if Britain fails to deal with its debt mountain. Fitch Ratings urged Britain to come up with more credible plans to cut spiralling government debt, warning that the country’s triple A credit rating remains very much at risk.

Most City economists had been expecting the figure for third quarter GDP to show an upward revision from -0.3 per cent to -0.1 per cent. But some analysts went out on a limb, forecasting a return to growth, albeit a modest 0.1 per cent. Modest or not, it would still have enabled the beleaguered prime minister to don his Santa suit and declare the recession officially over just in time for Christmas.

Instead, the data showed a drop of 0.2 per cent over the three months to September, the sixth consecutive quarter of contraction, meaning Britain remains the only G20 nation still mired in recession. The contraction since the start of the downturn early last year is just over 6 per cent, a bigger fall than was seen in the recession of the early 1980s. But even if the figures had revealed a return to growth yesterday, would it have made any of us feel any better?

There’s little doubt that the road to full recovery will be a long and difficult one, and that once the general election is over there’ll be some very tough medicine to take. For most of us, it will require a bit more than a single quarter of 0.1 per cent growth before we start celebrating.

Fiona Walsh writes for the Guardiannewspaper in London