The Horsell's Mouth Politics, pedantry and personal interests

It seems that there were a few hacks back at the BBC yesterday and today as someone has had time to stitch together a toadying news story about Gordon Brown, giving him carte blanche to attack everyone else based on a tepid interview he gave to Andrew Marr. He’s also led the bulletins throughout Sunday by announcing the new full body scanners at airports – steering us gently back onto a massive over-reaction to a very specific and concentrated terrorist danger.

I had to laugh at the headline – not “Full body scanners on the way” or “Airports to get full body scanners” but “Gordon Brown promises full body scanners” as if the PM and the PM alone has the power to do this as opposed to the companies that operate our UK airports. It goes to show the subtle yet insidious bias that remains within the corporation’s coverage of UK politics.

The fact is that people have been getting on board aircraft and hijacking them for years. They have been planting bombs on them and evading airport security for even longer. If the UK government had been serious about this issue it would have acted far more strongly after Lockerbie to ensure that aircraft departing from this country are subject to far stricter and no less time-consuming security specifications. The Lockerbie bomb – if you accept it was such – could have been contained within bomb-strengthened luggage containers that are readily available but not commercially preferable to airlines.

The PM has had 12 years to bring forward these full-body scanning measures and although the technology in this field is advancing all the time, why has he waited to an election year rather than 2001 and 9/11 or 2005 and 7/7 to announced this? We’ve already had the case of Richard Reid when nothing was done. The sudden focus on tightened security is just a get-tough measure that Brown hopes to use to propel himself back into No 10.

What you won’t find on the BBC website is two things. Firstly that among the 

“Experts [who] have questioned the scanners’ effectiveness at detecting the type of bomb allegedly used on Christmas Day in an attempted plane attack over Detroit.”

is a Conservative MP who has advised companies on the design of such things and who no doubt knows a great deal more about the subject than Gordon Brown.

You also won’t find reference to the fact that the PM claimed he had spoken to President Obama about the “new” Yemeni dimension to the terrorist threat, something that turned out to be totally untrue. Funnily enough, there’s no story on this – apparently body scanners are more important than a PM who’s a liar – but you can unpick the angle from the interview transcript.

So we’ve got Yemen, the closed embassies, the airport scanners and top-level US co-operation. It sounds to me very much as though the Labour Party is spinning madly on the security line for a political hit to get the year off to a decent start. We can expect more bogeymen and women hiding in the shagpile – from Yemeni extremists to Conservative MPs – as this government enters into its final throw of the dice; a general election of fear.