An article in the Grauniad about missing baggage has some interesting bits aside from the reason for the article:

British Airways passengers today faced more flight cancellations as the airline revealed that up to 20,000 bags had gone missing at Heathrow over recent days.

[…]

The home secretary, John Reid, today urged his European counterparts for consistency in anti-terror measures across the continent.

“It’s very important that the measures that are taken in one country are reflected in other countries, because we want equal security for all our countries,” Mr Reid said.

Why would other European countries need to burden themselves with the farce that is being enacted in the UK? It is costly to airlines, is not targeted at actual trrrrrrrrrrrrrsts and finally they don’t seem to have the groundswell of dissaffected persons willing to engage in trrrrrrrrrrrrsm. Obviously it should be the government that should be reflecting the world view of other European countries rather than that of the US, the only EU country to have previously suffered ‘islamic trrrrrrrrrrrrrsm’ is Spain, the government was ousted and we hear of no more problems. With Reid touting himself as an Occam’s razor wielding hardball he should appreciate the simplicity of the argument and pass it onto the other Cabinet lunatics.

And below we see that companies are revolting at the costly smoke and mirrors that the government is toying passengers with:

The budget airline Ryanair, which was today hoping to run a cancellation-free programme for the first time since last Thursday, has been highly critical of the new security arrangements, describing the new hand luggage regulations as “nonsensical”.

The airline’s chief executive, Michael O’Leary, said it had seen a 10% drop in group bookings over the last couple of days as a result of the travel disruption.

“We’re seriously considering taking legal action against the government to force them to get the airports back to normal,” Mr O’Leary added.

[…]

And even the police are unimpressed by calls for passenger profiling:

However, the Metropolitan police chief superintendent Ali Dizaei has warned that singling out some passengers considered to be more of a security threat would create a new offence of “travelling whilst Asian”.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 16th, 2006 at 2:32 pm and is filed under Politricks.