The Minister has spoken - Lord Adonis has decreed by written statement that if a passenger declines to be scanned, they will not be allowed to fly. Women, children, people with religious objections, people who just care about their privacy - it doesn't matter - if you won't be scanned, you can't fly. It's a shame that our Lord couldn't make it to the BBC breakfast show this morning, where he was supposed to debate the issue (but then, why turn up to that, when you don't debate the policy in Parliament, either?)
People are understandably afraid of terrorism. But we didn’t allow the IRA to impede our freedoms or change our way of life, and we shouldn’t change now either. The difference, as far as I can tell, is that governments of both stripes during the Troubles had a sense of the importance of British liberty, and a sense of proportion. Jettisoning liberty in the face of what is objectively a much smaller risk than that posed by the IRA is both wrong and totally disproportionate - it's an understandable but foolish overreaction from a government desperate to be seen to be doing something. President Obama has said that systemic failures in sharing information already held by the security services allowed the "Christmas Bomber" got on the flight to Detroit - so it's not that some new, magic solution is needed; just competent use of the current ones.
Those upset by the prospect of undergoing these scans shouldn’t be forced to choose between their dignity and their flight.
It's peculiar, all the hoops we've been asked to jump through since 9/11. Belts off, jackets off, shoes off, no liquids, no gels, stand on your hands, hop on one leg, bear the petty officiousness of the often aggressive, frequently power-happy bureaucrat with good humour. Gratingly, people sometimes say - "well, if it makes us a little safer, it's worth it" - "if it saves one life, stops one crime..." - on behalf of Big Brother Watch, I spend a lot of time pointing out just what a specious argument that is. Plainly, it would "save one child" to ban the motor car, but we don't, because it would be disproportionate and we have to get on with normal life, even if we incur a slightly higher element of risk in doing so. We don't encourage people to take wild risks with cars, but we don't make liberty-reducing and disproportionate laws, either. We should react to the threat of terrorism in just the same way.
After all, what kind of a free society does the Government think it is “protecting”, when it invades our privacy like this? When we are forced to expose ourselves at the airport in order to go on holiday, the terrorists have won.
(And by the way, not that it affects the debate about the principle one bit, but for those who are interested in such things it seems that the scanners don't work, with material under skin not being detected, and their cost - at £100,000 a pop - will either be passed on to the consumer or come at the expense of things like sniffer dogs and trace detection kits, which are cheap, available now, don't violate privacy and work - as opposed to the scanners, which are expensive, won't be available in mass numbers for some time, violate privacy and don't work. That's why the head of Interpol has poured scorn on them. And Adonis has ignored questions about their legality, too).
