2006-08-15
The radio came on at a little before seven the other morning, as it does every working day. The first words my sleepy brain heard were ‘…and Carry On Luggage has been banned for the foreseeable future’. Or some such phrase. Dozing for the seven minutes I allow myself, my troubled mind went off into a reverie trying to imagine why some obscure innuendo filled British ‘comedy’ film of the 1970’s starring Sid James, Kenneth Williams and Hattie Jacques, might suddenly have become so offensive.But then, of course I woke properly to find the UK was back in another round of ‘the war on terror’. Allegedly. To date -like the raid and shooting of “a suspect” at Forest Gate (the Police tried to claim his brother did it…) where all we have to show is a suspiciously concocted kiddie-porn charge, we don’t actually have anything concrete to show for the mass disruption and multiple arrests.
Don’t get me wrong – I’m fully in support of acting on ‘intelligence’. Check things out. Make sure. I’d prefer we stopped short of killing innocent people without good cause but these things are too serious too take any risk. But allow me to sceptical, ambivalent even, about the huge public show. Airport security surely is nothing more than a public relations exercise designed to scare the public shitless. It can do no good – if you’re a terrorist, aren’t you going to know you can’t get onto a plane with anything explosive? And if you’re a terrorist wouldn’t the ideal place to set of a suicide bomb for maximum effect be a grid-locked airport that has been ground to a halt by ridiculously over-the-top security measures? So we risk ten thousand trapped people – but hey the planes will be safe.
Where is the sense in removing razor blades and scissors at security when you can buy them in Boots airside? Explain to me the logic behind claiming that the current threat is liquids that are potentially explosive when mixed, and then removing make-up creams and cough medicines and tossing them together into the same bucket. Er.. might they not explode there?
And the truth is that ever since the 70’s the UK has had adequate airport security to deter terrorists; - we had terrorists of our own; we knew about this stuff. It wasn’t the UK that trained pilots and allowed them to walk onto planes through lax security, but now we have to lift our ‘prevention’ to the same paranoid level. And how did that phrase ‘carry-on luggage’ get into our vocabulary? In the UK it’s always been ‘hand-luggage’ – is there a clue about where our security policy is being written?
We can’t stop terrorism. If someone is determined and organised they’re going to do these things. Sure we have to do what we can to stop them before they get to the brink, but the airport gate is way too late. Hindsight is a terrible thing – that ought to be the lesson of 9/11 and last July’s London bombs.
A ‘war on terrorism’ misses the point. Everyone who ‘fights a war’ believes themselves to be in the right and you can’t solve anything by punishment, retribution or explosives. Hard as it is to turn the other cheek (and I reel back at the level of understatement I’m using there) we will only get somewhere with robust defence and creeping dialogue. Eventually Hitler’s Germany started to turn against him, the Soviet empire fell, China started to embrace capitalism, the IRA started to decommission weaponry. Of course (understatements again) it’s impossible to live with a culture hell-bent on destroying neighbouring countries. But that works both ways if the surrounding countries seem hell-bent on destroying a culture they don’t understand. And super-powers keep intervening and supplying more and more fire power.
A ‘war on intolerance’ is what we need.