Chaos

OK, so supposedly the UK police have foiled a terrorist ‘plot’ to blow up a bundle of planes. Aye, right.

Maybe I’m just an utter cynic, but isn’t it great how

1. this got released one day after Our Illustrious Leader flew off (long-haul) on his hols
2. this got released one week after the decision to make the UK ‘shit-scared level’ publically accessible
3. it supposedly makes people feel ‘more secure’ by making them wait longer at airport checkins

What it does go to show is just how shit the current security checks are when you get to an airport. In fact, let’s face it, they’re all there to make the public feel safer. “Oh, terrorists can’t get on our flight, because we’ve been checked once, and all our stuff’s been X-rayed.” We’ll just gloss over the entire farcical fact that once you’ve gone through that X-ray machine, you’re in the food area, where you can get served meals with metal cutlery (order a steak – see what you get to cut it with!), buy perfume bottles you can shatter into heavy glass knives, and buy gift sets with the dreaded nail file and/or scissors.

At the moment you’re not allowed to take on most of your hand luggage, instead it has to be checked in to the hold. Now OK, that’s fair enough. But hang on, um, if there are explosives in that hand luggage, they’re still going to be putting it on the sodding plane!

And on the subject of explosives, OK, you’ve uncovered this plot to blow planes out of the sky. Right. You’ve buggered up the plans and announced them to the world, but the current security scare is because “there might be people we haven’t detected yet”. Now, any prospective terrorist who’s got a brain cell won’t be heading to the airport. Oh no. They’ll be going to the train station, or the bus station, or the motorway service station, where there’s no security, and causing chaos that way instead. If they’ve got the explosive, they’ll use it – just not on a plane. That’s not cynicism, that’s common sense.

Personally I’m a total cynic, and don’t believe this “plot” at all. It does, however, provide a viable story (which could equally be made into a Hollywood action movie) for the resultant media hysteria, as well as the security forces being able to say “Look, we’re great, we broke this ‘plot’ – we need more money in the next budget so we can keep on breaking up these plots” and for the government to trolley out the same old shit about “we need ID cards, so this sort of thing won’t happen, and it’ll be easier to process people through airports etc. Oh yes it will. Honest” It works on the slightly warped logic that people will feel safer because we’re “stopping terrorism”, and we’re aware of these plots to kill people, so we’ll tell you all about it, scare the shit out of you, and you’ll fucking welcome the extra security measures and totalitarian surveillance that we bring in on the back of it. In fact, you’ll bloody well want to have your lives on camera, your calls listened to, your ID stamped in a barcode on your forehead, because it’s Special Home-office Intelligence on Terrorism.

Or SHIT for short.