Thursday, July 26, 2007

Media Scaremongering & MPs Naivety

According to the Daily Mail this morning. "Pressure grew today for urgent changes to protect airport check in queues from terrorist bombers. The all-party Commons transport select committee has called for queuing passengers to be moved through to airside more quickly - two weeks after the Evening Standard revealed fears that people waiting at airports are a prime target for extremists - and raised alarms about the number of passengers breaching carry-on luggage restrictions."

Have we gone completely daft? The logistics of all this are just incredibly complicated and will do nothing but make the 'passenger experience' even worse. Trying to move vast numbers of people through airports at the best of times is a logistical tightrope. Added to which are we really going to have our lives blighted by bowing down to terrorism in such a way? Our media is getting to the point of absurdity with their pronouncements. The doom and gloom approach is depressing people, already depressed by the 'summer weather', and this type of thing is not helpful.

Life will become intolerable unless we stop this scare mongering. There is no such thing as 100% security and there has to be a balance between the risk and life continuing in a way that allows our economy to flourish and our state of mind to be maintained. This committee of MPs is doing us a disservice with their naive approach and at the same time it's acting exactly as the terrorists want.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

You are absolutely correct - as I wrote recently re Dante's Heathrow, we need to stop thinking in terms of security as restricting people and stopping things happening. With fewer constraints airports could actually be more efficient and enable any rare incidents to be monitored and resolved. The present chaos in fact just helps the cause of terrorists by making our lives unbearable. Where's our can do spirit?