Robin Wilton's esoterica

In a couple of weeks, as a token of my dedication to my work and my employer, I will once again put my life in the hands of others and enter the high-risk environment that is Heathrow Airport. Today, following up on Gordon Brown's speech, Transport Secretary Ruth Kelly has announced plans for changes to the security measures in place at the airport.

Apparently UK airports are to be allowed to relax the current rule which specifies that passengers may take only one item of hand luggage on board. Hurrah.I specify UK airports, because they are the only ones to think this policy makes sense.

The same restrictions will apply to what is inside the hand luggage (no liquids, creams, lotions, potions, balms, liniments or embrocations, etc.), and as at present, once you're through that screening you can buy as much volatile liquid as duty-free will sell you, whether in the form of booze, aftershave or whatever.

However, there are conditions: before they are allowed to relax the restriction, airports will have to demonstrate that they 'have the facilities to handle the extra baggage'. Ms Kelly expects this to encompass 'new technology, operational improvements and unexploited capacity in the system'. With all due respect to the Minister, doesn't she think that if Heathrow had those options they would have tried them by now?

I have a couple of issues with the security screening arrangements as they stand at the moment anyway. Mostly, they boil down to the fact that much ot the screening is either senseless or actively risk-inducing. Let me give you a couple of examples from recent experience.

First: you can take, say, a small tube of toothpaste with you in your carry-on luggage, provided you first remove it from your bag and put it in a clear zip-lock one. This is clearly far more secure than declaring that you have a small tube of toothpaste, showing it to the screening officer and putting it through the x-ray tunnel. My small tube of toothpaste was confiscated at Bristol Airport because I did not have a zip-lock bag to put it in. If I had been able to put it into a zip-lock bag in front of the officer, I could have kept it.

Second: does it make any difference whether you take one bag or two on board with you? Clearly not; the first time I encountered this rule I had two things with me - a computer back-pack, and a smaller bag with a paperback, MP3 player, earplugs, etc.. With a little effort, I simply jammed it on top of everything in the back-pack. I still took the same things on board - they were just arranged slightly differently.

I don't buy the argument that this speeds up the scanning process, either. The progress of the bags through the machine is not the critical factor. Far more time is spent on the following routine: remove one or more outer garments at the whim of the security officer; remove shoes (depending on airport, security officer or whether the month has an 'R' in it); prominently display zip-lock bag with small tube of toothpaste; remove laptop from bag and place in separate tray; empty pockets of coins, keys, phones, wallets (?), passports (?), foil packets of peanuts (not kidding... Paris CDG, 2003), and so on.

Oh, and my favourite: wait while the person in front goes through, sets off metal detector, comes back, takes off belt, goes through, sets off metal detector, removes watch and piercing, goes through, sets of metal detector and then, with a look of blissful enlightenment, removes Large Metal Object from pocket and asks if 'this could be it?'. Why my queue... why always my queue?

Anyway, bottom line: the one-bag limit is a nonsense and has been since its inception; the queuing area created by the security screening process represents the highest density of un-screened, bag-carrying humanity in the entire airport, and thus the highest risk to the public and the staff.

The problem Ms Kelly faces is this: in order to make space for the pre-screening, the boarding-pass check, the hand-luggage and personal screening, the shoe-scanning machines and the outbound passport check, airports would have to sacrifice their most precious asset. No, not passsenger lives, silly... retail space.

Footnote. Other things I have taken through hand-luggage screening - mostly genuinely unintentionally. I'm not going to say which airports, but these were all within the last 2 years:

- Extremely sharp locking knife with a 1-inch blade - at least as dangerous as a box-cutter;

- 2 miniatures of brandy (pocketed from the outbound flight);

- scalpel blade, in the form of one of those plastic letter-openers you get as conference freebies;

- 5.56mm brass cartridge casing. Fired, and empty, but still... you'd think the distinctive shape might at least raise an eyebrow.

The first two of these were one-offs. The last two have made multiple trips to all kinds of destinations. 

So if you hear a sharp yelp of agony at Heathrow in a couple of weeks' time, that will be me getting the full treatment from the screening staff as a result of this blog post... 

Security Minister Lord West, appointed by Gordon Brown in July, is in the news today over his views on the 28-day limit on detention of terrorist suspects. Back in July, he expressed the view that the 28-day limit (already the longest in any Western democracy, and double the previous 14 days) should be increased, citing the complexity of the problem faced by the security forces.

This morning, apparently, he said that he wouldn't push for such an extension - unless he was totally convinced of the need for it. "I still need to be fully convinced that we absolutely need more than 28 days", he is reported to have said. Within an hour and a half of having set out his position, he had had a half-hour meeting with Gordon Brown and reverted to his July position: "I personally, absolutely believe that within the next two or three years we will require more than [28 days] for one of those complex plots".

The Daily Telegraph seems to have no difficulty reading between the lines on this one, to the effect that Lord West was on the carpet in front of Gordon's desk so fast he probably didn't even have time to stuff a protective exercise-book down the seat of his trousers before the caning began.

More serious than the PM's instinctive reversion to news management, though, is surely the plan for which he and the Security Minister are softening us up. Counter-terrorism measures will, in future, apparently govern road layouts, building design and specifications for materials such as glass. These are measures on which we 'can spend the national wealth' - implying that we are diverting it away from other things like local provision of health-care, closing the 'black hole' of state pension provision, and so on.

So the terrorists have won, then.