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You may have thought that the recent search orgy at British airports was triggered by a genuine fear that passengers might bring something explosive on board. Apparently not, because the same regulations apply to air crew too. It is of no consequence to the official mind that a pilot can destroy an airliner without any technical assistance. (9/11 didn’t change quite everything – even where it might be thought to be relevant by us untrained civilians.)
Here is an extract from the security briefing from the BALPA (pilots’ association) website:
The requirements for airline crew are:
Any crew, whether operational or positioning, using passenger search areas must be subjected to the same security measures as passengers.
Crew accessing the Restricted Zone through staff search areas must carry only the items they require to perform their duties (including personal hand baggage meeting that description). All such items must be x-rayed where possible and hand searched where not. All crew must be hand searched.
However, no liquids of any type are permitted other than those mentioned above as able to be taken into the Restricted Zone by passengers.
At airports where there is no specific staff search facility, airports should make special arrangements for crew to be screened away from passengers.
How thoughtful they insist crew are not searched in front of passengers. One would not want them humiliated any more than is strictly necessary. Creating artificial privileges is in any case good psychology to keep the recipients of privilege loyal to the heirarchy. It also helps to avoid anyone getting the idea that the whole rigmarole is ludicrous.
Can it be true that UK mobile phone company Orange has suspended an employee, Inigo Wilson, for a non-work related entry on a blog? What seems to have caused offence is him making jokes in his ‘Lefty Lexicon’ such as:
Islamophobic – anyone who objects to having their transport blown up on the way to work
Unless there are other factors at play here (I will be see what I can find out), I am about to become an ex-Orange customer and will start urging others to do likewise. If Orange is concerned about one of their employees ‘upsetting customers’, well I think they need to be told that pursuing this course of action against Inigo Wilson, they are doing precisely that. I do not dispute their right to hire and fire whomsoever they wish, but I intent to try and make them suffer some economic consequences as a result if this is as egregious as it appears.
Update: I received an e-mail from Stuart Jackson at Orange telling me:
To clarify, the suspension of an employee is not intended to imply that the employee in question has done wrong. It is a neutral act that allows us to conduct a full investigation and reach a conclusion based on facts. I will gladly update you regarding the outcome of the investigation.
But as the ‘facts’ are not in dispute, that does not really answer my question, which was:
I am enquiring about why Orange has suspended its employee Inigo Wilson. It is indeed the company’s position that remarks made on an employee’s own time and wholly unrelated to his work, is grounds for action by the company? I ask this as if there are other factors at play here, I may then refrain from cancelling my Orange account.
The ‘facts’ are not the issue. The issue is why Orange feels it has to do anything about them. Frankly even requiring Mr. Wilson to ‘apologise and not do it again’ would be wholly unacceptable given that his off-the-clock non work related remarks should be none of Orange’s business and if they think otherwise, they can do without my business.
I appears that the Blair government has created over three thousand new criminal offences during its nine bleak years in office, almost one for every day they have been our political masters.
Polish Potatoes (Notification) (England) Order 2004
No person shall, in the course of business, import into England potatoes which he knows to be or has reasonable cause to suspect to be Polish potatoes.
No doubt everyone will sleep a little safer knowing that England is protected from Polish potatoes.
So on the (very rash) assumption that David Cameron’s Tory Party actually noticed any of this happening in Parliament over the last nine years, are we going to see ‘Dave’ campaigning on the basis that a Tory victory will mean a massive roll-back of the intrusive powers of the state?
Okay, you can stop laughing now.
I have never been to the Edinburgh Festival, which has been, over the years, a launchpad for standup comedians and musicians such as Denis Leary. James Glassman, who went to the event this year, observes that Jew-bashing and “gags” about the Holocaust is going down a storm. Quite what that says about the organisers and the clientele, heaven only knows. Being an ardent defender of free speech, Glassman rightly points out that the way to deal with jerks like the “comedian” mentioned its contempt. I hope a fair amount of contempt is indeed delivered.
Earlier this week I flew into London Heathrow from Athens, having been subjected to a relatively modest amount of incovenience, expense and humiliation as a result of the latest anti-terrorist security measures. Had I been travelling in the opposite direction (i.e. London to Athens), the story would have been altogether different and my trifling miseries compounded by several magnitudes. I truly sympathised with the weary, frustrated wannabe-outbound travellers who were camped on the floor of the terminal going nowhere, thanks to numerous cancelled flights, huge delays and a blanket of zealous security measures aimed at stripping them down to their socks.
I wonder if any of those people have been sullied by the experience? I wonder if any of the magic and wonder of modern civilian airline travel has been marred for them? I hope not, but what is certain is that the hidden costs of this latest air-travel crisis, in terms of time, money and lost opportunities, must be huge. Air travel is no longer the preserve of the privileged few; it is a vast mass industry that bestows incalculable economic, social, cultural and even spiritual benefits on us all.
And yet, it is all too easily assailable because no amount of security or scrutiny can obviate the basic fact that a pressurised, inescapable metal tube flying some 30,000 feet up in the sky is, and always will be, critically vulnerable to attack from either without or within, the results of which are simply to horrible to be shrugged off. Tougher security measures can make life harder for the Islamists but the fact remains that the security screeners need to be lucky all the time while the jihadis only need to be lucky once. That is why, over a longer time frame, the odds favour the latter.
Perhaps that is why the tune has changed. Following the London Undergound bombings in July 2005, there was an instant and comprehensive demand for solidarity. ‘One London’ read the official blazen of the Mayor’s office. ‘We will not allow these terrorists to divide us’ proclaimed HMG. From one end of the country to the other, hands were held, memorials were wept through and communities appealed to for calmness and reason. Everyone who was anyone rushed headlong towards the Totem of Tolerance and hugged it hard enough to squeeze out the sap.
In contrast, the airline scares have been just that; scares. Not a single bomb has exploded and (mercifully) not a a soul was taken. Yet the response could not be more different. This time, the message emerging from some official quarters is that it is time for profiling, a measure the mere utterance of which would have been unthinkable a year ago in the wake of 52 dead commuters.
Why the difference now? Perhaps it is just the cumulative weariness of one bloody thing following the next and a government that is rapidly running out of other ideas. Or perhaps it is because there is a dawning collective realisation that it will not take too much more of this to bring the whole wonderful, liberating phenomenon of commercial air travel to a juddering and insensible end. It seems that taboos can be easily dispensed with the moment they are no longer affordable.
Of course, the threat of profiling has precipitated a chorus of disapproval but, significantly, only from the usual and expected circles. I would wager that those exhausted travellers, stranded in blankets on the unforgiving stone floor of Heathrow’s Terminal 2, would noisily and heartily approve.
Muslim ‘moderates’ in Britain are calling for changes to British foreign policy as the only way to prevent Muslim ‘extremists’ in Britain from attacking the rest of us.
This is of course the same approach used by Sinn Fein and other Republicans in Northern Ireland, who held that only by political engagement and accommodation with ‘moderate’ political figures (i.e. Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness) could the wicked IRA be stopped from blowing people up. Of course the fact Sinn Fein and the IRA were actually inseparable parts of the same movement was something only a reader of the Guardian could have failed to notice.
And so a ‘moderate’ Muslim, a member of the Tory Party no less, tell us that ‘Muslim anger’ must be recognised (our old chum root causes). Is that so? Well I think increasingly it is being recognised. It is being recognised as an excuse used for getting a non-democratic Muslim veto over British foreign policies just as a majority of Muslims also appear to want a Muslim veto over freedom of expression in Britain.
If the solution to Muslim extremism in Britain being offered by ‘moderate’ Muslims is to give the extremists what they want (i.e. changes in British foreign policy), then the so-called ‘moderates’ are nothing more than the mouthpieces of the extremists they claim to reject. No doubt if given the changes they want, we will be told that only if yet more legal restrictions are placed on what we kuffir can say about Islam will we be able to to placate Muslim ‘anger’ and thereby prevent those wicked extremists from blowing us up. And homosexuals must be legislated against in order to placate those wicked extremists. And alcohol must be banned in order to…
I think it is well past time for some British anger and a great deal of it needs to be directed at the British establishment for allowing this to happen via a policy of appeasment towards domestic Islamists.
The Telegraph reports how enemy saboteurs could have made a ‘liquid bomb’. According to Andy Oppenheimer, editor of Jane’s Nuclear, Biological and Chemical Defence Directory:
“We are talking about common, everyday chemicals that are used in perfumes, cosmetics, drain cleaner, batteries, or could for example be stolen from school labs.
“These materials are easy to obtain and hard to detect, and could be smuggled in small amounts in small containers because it doesn’t take much to blow an aircraft up.”
I will be keeping my eyes open for further information.
The thought struck me after reading Adriana’s post that this plot may be quite wide. Last year a fellow here in Belfast was arrested, tried and convicted for studying ways of blowing up airliners using capacitors from tape recorders and such.
I was working in the US at the time that particular story broke… and was quite surprised to see pictures of the very complex in which I lived.
Perhaps it was a good thing my drapes were pulled while I was away so he never noticed the American flag in the corner. I can almost imagine his thoughts had he seen it: “An American! Allah be praised! And me, the only Arab terrorist in Belfast!”
Only those who have lived in Belfast will fully understand the joke.
According to Scotland Yard a plot to blow up planes in flight from the UK to the US and commit “mass murder” on an unimaginable scale has been disrupted.
It is thought the plan was to detonate explosive devices smuggled in hand luggage on to as many as 10 aircraft. High security is causing delays at all UK airports. The threat level to the UK has been raised by MI5 to critical. Three US airlines are believed to have been targeted.
There are no more details about the plan available at the moment other than it revolved around liquids of some kind and that the explosives would have been sophisticated and extremely effective. Flights from Heathrow Airport and Gatwick are suspended until this afternoon at least. The security measures are pretty drastic:
Passengers are not allowed to take any hand luggage on to any flights in the UK, the department said. Only the barest essentials – including passports and wallets – will be allowed to be carried on board in transparent plastic bags.
Another article reports that intelligence is often fragmentary and partial, so the fear perhaps is that there is another, parallel group or other individuals who are also going to carry out similar attacks and that is why such security measures are being taken.
This is all very distrurbing, of course, both for the obvious threat to lives as well as the disruption it will bring to our everyday existence. Another disturbing fact is this kind of comments (a reader’s comment next to the BBC article I got the news from):
This disruption [security measures] is one of the short term limits on freedom that are needed. Tony Shield, Chorley
I remain puzzled by the Porter affair, and the venom with which it is still pursued by nearly all British papers.
The former leader of Westminster Council masterminded the “homes for votes” scandal in the 1980s when good council homes were sold to prospective Tory voters in key wards, in order to stop Labour getting into power.
Summarises The Times, not completely accurately. The policy was based on a reasonable assumption by the councillors involved that owner-occupiers would be more likely to vote Tory. They did not hand-pick the beneficiaries.
I have two questions for which no satisfactory answers have been provided. Indeed, I have not seen the questions asked in the mainstream media.
1. If Porter and her colleagues could be surcharged by an official for selling off some dozens of council flats for indirect political advantage, where are the surcharges for the Labour, Liberal, and Tory politicians who built and subsidised the occupation of London’s three to four million council flats?
2. Why the hatred directed at Shirley Porter in particular? She is not a particularly endearing character, but then neither were most of the other Tory politicians caught up in the sleaze craze of the ’90s, and most of them have been rehabilitated in the public eye and are writing books or presenting TV shows. Is it because she is so rich? Or is it because she is Jewish?
Apparently the terrorism threat level in the UK has just been raised to ‘critical’. Which we are told means, “an attack is expected imminently”.
Pardon me for being critical, but that is entirely meaningless. It has been raised from ‘severe – an attack is highly likely’ which is also meaningless. When I write “meaningless,” I suppose that is because I want to know what is meant by ‘an attack’, and what probabilities are adduced to distinguish between ‘unlikley’, ‘possible but not likely’ [are not those the same? – no, apparently], ‘a strong possibility’, ‘highly likely’, and ‘imminent’? The announcement is full of meaning, but it is a purely political meaning.
This morning the police announce they have “disrupted a major plot” and arrested 18 people overnight, “as part of a long-running operation”. Unless there is actually someone known to the police to be loose with a bomb as a result of the raids, then disrupting a plot would reduce the actual level of danger, wouldn’t it? Maybe the danger was ‘critical’ (whatever that means) before last night, and they did not know it, so now a misleadingly low level of threat is being corrected.
What is entirely evident is that in the threat levels do nothing to inform the public. They contain no information. Actual threats (those that might succeed) are by definition unknown unknowns, because the security services can (we hope) cope with what they know.
What threat levels do do is provide justification for actions the authorities might otherwise have to explain in detail. One cannot help notice the timing, immediately after a vague but minatory speech by John Reid:
[W]e may have to modify some of our freedoms in the short-term in order to prevent their misuse and abuse by those who oppose our fundamental values and would destroy our freedoms and values in the long-term.
It is up to each and all of us to ask the questions: what price our security? What price our freedoms? At what cost can we preserve our freedoms?
I do not think the plot is invented to support the Home Office’s war on liberty but I do think it is so interpreted. I do think that Reid, with knowledge of what would happen in the next few hours, was well situated to take advantage. And the timing could not be better to monopolise the news.
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An acquaintance of the left-liberal establishment, whom I will not embarrass by mentioning his name on this blog, remarked on Reid’s speech that it marked another step in the perversion of language: “None of us should be anything other than vigilant and that vigilance is the price of securing our freedom,” the Home Secretary said, inverting the meaning of a well-known phrase.
“The price of liberty is eternal vigilence” once meant we should take care of our liberty at all times lest we lose it to surreptitious encroachment. Now the official meaning is to be that we may only repurchase our freedom (at some indefinite time in the future) by indentured labour for state security, exchanging it just for now (and future nows to be determined) with vigilence – that we should subordinate our lives to watching for the Bad Wolf. And Big Brother is a TV programme.
The Channel 4 programme the other day called What Muslims Want raised a number of important issues. The presenter Jon Snow showed evidence that Muslims are not, as I had hoped, assimilating and in fact the process may be going backwards. If so, that means Muslims are unlike any other major immigrant group in Britain: Blacks, Eastern Europeans, Jews, Huguenots, Sikhs, Hindus, etc. have all become intermingled and inter-marriage is increasingly common. Not so for the Muslims. Snow also made the rather interesting distinction that most alienated Muslims in Britain are not ‘extremists’ so much as ‘separatists’: they simply want to live a separate Islamic life that draws little from British society. His argument on this was quite well made but it is also quite incorrect as I will soon explain.
Snow pointed out that there is considerable diversity of opinion amongst Muslims in Britain but there are a small number of key issues in which there is a very considerable Muslim consensus indeed, namely that of opposition to any British foreign policy that involved force being used against Muslims anywhere, opposition to free speech and opposition to common social liberalism (particularly issues relating to sexuality).
The first is an issue which should properly lie within the purview of democratic politics: at some point in the future Muslims may be able to find enough non-Muslims to support their apparently widely held views on foreign policy matters, though in truth I have my doubts. Nevertheless it is by no means impossible that British policies could one day be more to their liking. The second and third however are quite different matters. It is intolerable that any attempt even be attempted to find ‘middle ground’ on free speech and social liberalism because there can be no middle ground. Muslims say that people should ‘respect’ each other, which is clearly both a lie as that suggest they too are willing to ‘respect’ values they clearly oppose, and in any case the whole notion of respecting things you oppose is arrant nonsense. Tolerate, perhaps, but respect? No. One of the issues that seems to have a very broad basis of support, according to Jon Snow at least, is a spectacular lack of respect for people exercising social liberal values.
Now I have no problem with Muslims refusing to respect homosexuals, adulterers, women in short skirts or whatever else, because speaking personally I neither want not expect Muslim respect. I insist on their tolerance but their respect, or lack thereof, means less than nothing to me. As long as they do not try to stop women with short skirts walking down the street, or throw rocks at homosexuals and adulterers, I really do not care what they think.
But this is also where Jon Snow is incorrect to describe them as ‘separatists’. If all Muslims in Britain wanted was to live in ghettos where Muslim social norms are accepted, well I really think that is a ‘manageable’ problem. However it seems that what they also want is to prevent me, by law, from poking fun at their religion and demonstrating just how much I do not respect the things they hold dear. They insist I tolerate their beliefs, which I regard as deeply offensive barbarism based on superstitious nonsense, yet will not tolerate my belief in the unlimited nature of civil free expression, because they find what I will say offensive. They are not ‘separatists’ because they want their prohibitions on poking fun at Mohammad to also apply to me. There ain’t nothing ‘separate’ about that.
And so when Jon Snow suggests this issue is what may lead to violence and inter-communal strife, he is no doubt correct. And that may well be a process we need to go through. If the majority of the Islamic community in Britain truly does think that, they must not be accommodated, they must be utterly denied without apology and their repressive aspirations condemned.
Tolerance they get (for now), but it needs to be made clear that Muslim sensibilities do not trump secular values and they do not get a veto on what gets said about them or the things they value. They are free to respond in kind. However if that leads to violence by some extremists, well, so be it. They can say what they like about my values, I do not care and I suggest they take a similar attitude because I intend to say what I like about their values and any politician who tried to pander to them to prevent that from happening is someone to be implacably opposed.
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We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
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