Liquid terrorists jailed

It’s not often that some event on the news has deeply affected us all years previously – but the guilty verdicts handed out to some home-grown extremist with a penchant for knocking airliners out of the sky with soft drink bombs has certainly caused angst to all of us many times.

Only a few weeks ago I watched my contact lens solutions and some sun tan lotion disappear in the hands of some irritating security staff at Stansted – because apparently a bottle of coke or some shampoo is now a weapon of mass destruction.

Now don’t get me wrong.  I am all for trying to stop deranged lunatics commit mass murder.  But this ban on liquids in hand luggage is demonstrably farcical.  To prove the point I asked the Mrs Cross-Person what she was going to do with my contact lens solution.  The answer was to pour it down the drain.

No wonder there are leaking sewers all over the place if hundreds of gallons of potent explosives are being poured down sinks at every airport.  When I pointed out the stupidity of this – I was awarded with a patronising lecture from a man in a suit.  I would have given him a patronising lecture of my own – but I had a plane to catch, and was holding my trousers up and my shoes at the time, whilst wondering where my bag was.  So he had me at a bit of a disadvantage.

The truly ludicrous part of this global mess is that you can actually put as much liquid explosives as you like in your baggage that goes into the hold.   The whole thing is truly ludicrous.  Right down to the fact that it took the authorities three years to get the case to court.  Methinks the evidence was a bit thin.

So why on the basis of this bizarre case is the entire world stopping us carrying sun tan lotion on holiday?