What on earth is going on? Here we have John Reid making one of his regular “freedom can get tae f***” speeches while obviously knowing what’s going on in the background, a “terrorist plot” allegedly foiled by the security services, and thus the introduction of yet another kneejerk “security” feature that seems to be designed to make people’s lives hell whilst doing absolutely nothing to stop anything bad getting on the plane.

(I mean, explosives getting set off by an iPod? The amount of effort needed to get the battery out of one of those things would make any terrorist attack using one about as effective as Richard Reid’s shoebomb. Maybe a mobile, but that would take time to set up too – and would be just as effective in the hold.)

What’s amazing is that these ‘security’ additions haven’t been thought about at all: instead they’ve just gone for a blanket ban. If you’re facing a threat from “liquid explosives”, (although the current Net rumour is that it was a production-of-HCN chemical reaction designed to incapacitate the entire aircraft) you don’t need to ban laptops, MP3 players, cosmetics or, of course, any and all reading material. Instead, you just have to force people to hand over their bottles of “water”.

Which idiot civil servant thought that banning (or rather, not allowing) reading material was a brilliant idea, and how much of an idiot does John Reid have to be for forcing it through? It’s a tell-tale sign that all that’s going on is a serious kneejerk reaction of the type that does nothing to improve the safety of British citizens. Spending (say) 24 hours on a flight to Australia with young kids, no reading material, no games consoles, nothing other than ludicrously priced airline mineral water is not going to be fun for those families who have to go through with it, or anyone else on the aircraft.

I was close to the weight limit for check-in baggage when I left Britain for Germany at the beginning of July. I return at the beginning of September. If I have to put all my books and my laptop in check-in (along with my laptop’s backup drive, AC adaptor and restore discs, wonderful, no chance of anything going wrong there oh no), it’ll probably take it over Easyjet’s 20kg limit and I’ll get charged oversize baggage – no-one is waiving the fee, because they don’t have to. Worse than that, I’m going to be stuck in Berlin SXF for a long time with absolutely nothing to do, followed by being stuck on a two hour flight to Glasgow with absolutely nothing to do other than read Easyjet’s pathetic in-flight magazine, followed by hoping beyond hope that my bag comes through unharmed with my laptop intact. Don’t know about you, but I’m dreading it.

BBC Have Your Say seems to think that we should blame the terrorists for all the disruption and be thankful that we weren’t blown up, since obviously if we were allowed books some terrorist might find a way to break a window with a bound Qu’ran or whatever. If the plot was real, then I’m fine with the cancellations and the removal of water bottles et al; however, I won’t blame currently hypothetical “terrorists” for what British airline passengers are suffering right now. I will blame John Reid and BAA for being unmeasurably stupid, for instead of thinking about what was necessary to protect us they simply chose to follow the TSA-style kneejerk “Oh my god, let’s ban everything!” overreaction.

And this is his claim to be deputy leader? Pathetic.

If you liked this rant, take a look at Europhobia, where as always Nosemonkey lays it out in the best written of terms.