Sky in Cloud Cuckoo Land?

Today Sky News are leading with  this piece of nonsense .
They demonstrate how easy it is to take "prohibited" items from Brussels to the UK. At the same time they are comparing the hopeless E.U. airport security with the wonderful  measures taken by the UK and USA!

Yet in the last couple of days, a muslim from Manchester travelling with his family to Florida for a holiday has been returned home; a 60 year old woman with claustrophobia has managed to have a flight to Washington diverted and a local US airport has been closed because of invisible explosives.

Sky do not point out that the latest terrorist threat that for a week has brought most U.K. airports almost to a standstill involved threats to UK/USA flights out of Heathrow/Gatwick to the States. Not flights from Brussels to Barcelona, Paris to Pisa. It's inconceivable that had Italian, French, German or Spanish intelligence got wind of an attack on one of their flights they would have done nothing.  All these countries have had serious terrorism threats to deal with in the recent past. They know what to do, and it does not involve panic.
What they are, rightly in my view, not prepared to go along with is "Dr". John Reid's silly attempt to make the UK air traveller feel better by asking the rest of Europe to join our misery. Why should they suffer with us? They are not subject to the same terrorist threat from British born Muslims. They kept out of the illegal invasion of Iraq. Most have a foreign policy that is not dependant on that of America.

Those states within the E.U., signed up to the Schengen agreement, are unlikely to want to see the same chaos at their airports.

My old chum Lavengo makes the same point here:

" In 2004 there was much smug Anglo-Saxon ho-ho-hoing when French Muslims burnt thousands of cars.
It just shows how much better our system of multiculturalism is, doesn't it?' asked many commentators. Then we had 7/7, and now we have a couple of dozen British al Qaeda members arrested and chaos in the air transport industry, all because the UK can't manage its community relations and internal security policy properly, and the idea that they manage things better in France no longer seems so silly. After all, it isn't the closure of Charles de Gaulle, or Schiphol, or Tegel, or Barajas, or any other major international airport, that is causing worldwide chaos."

The delicious irony for Sky is that its owner, the Dirty Digger, never has a good word to say about the European Union. But what Sky, and its security experts, suggest as a solution can only be effective by an agreement between the member states.  Justice Commissioner Frattini is already inviting member states give up their right of veto in criminal justice matters!
Fat chance, "Dr" Reid?

Comments

[peterharvey]

Tony,

Absolutely. I saw a pundit on Sky the other day saying how the other EU members would have to bring their air security standards up to British levels. Great. You cause a problem and then criticise others for not panicking properly.

Peter (Lavengro in Wales)