Selfish, pathetic creative protectionists

Read here an excellent piece by Marina Hyde on why extending artists copyrights to 95 years is a bad idea.

In Defence of Air Travel

One of the best defences I've read
http://www.smh.com.au/news/opinion/too-much-hot-air-over-plane-travel/2006/11/23/1163871545258.html

I don't feel guiltless now - short haul trips are hard to justify. But if you carbon offset there doesn't seem to be a need to lose sleep of frequent air travel.

But the author runs the International Aviation peak body .... so he would say that.

The Heat Is On
(first published on www.newmatilda.com.au 8 Nov)

Until this month, the only things connecting Her Majesty’s Treasury and Buckingham Palace were a park and her name. Now, St James’s Park and its strangely green November leaves connect the country’s most famous environmentalists. On green issues, the Windsors, for once, were way ahead of the game. Now Her Majesty’s neighbours are catching up. Given the palpable lack of Autumn as you stroll through the park shared by the Treasury and Palace, the Stern Report is timely indeed.

As the Treasury knows, everything has its price. Even, and most particularly, cleaning up the planet — more than $9 trillion dollars in total, measured at $200 per tonne of carbon emitted, according to Sir Nicholas Stern who, regardless of whatever he did before or will do again, is now forever the man who married economic growth and global cooling. Climate change, along with free trade, debt relief and an ‘aspiration culture’ are the four pillars upon which the crusading Chancellor of the Exchequer, Gordon Brown, is building his Prime Ministerial vision. At his shoulder is Labour’s brightest star, the Environment Secretary David Miliband, and in their sights once again is a 2009 election victory that had been slipping out of view for most of the year. This dance of the political, scientific, moral, and now economic, will make a fascinating spectacle. Until this year, I have never had access to household recycling collection in England. Topping a long list of plastic bag outrages, I was once offered a large one for a 45 gram chocolate bar. Water usage in England is not metered, nuclear power is accepted, and the British are the world’s first and best at mini-break, short-haul, environmental travel hell. Yet Britain sustains a paradoxical culture where stopping climate change is now an entrenched consensus position. The Right-wing free sheets place global warming warnings as front-page splashes as often as Public transport is revered, congestion charging is here to stay and road pricing is set to launch in 2008. You cannot shop without stumbling on yet another chain of organic grocers or the latest extra organic aisle at Tesco, the nation’s retail behemoth. Had Conservative Party leader David Cameron responded like John Howard did to the Stern Report he would, literally, have been laughed off the pages and panels where it was dissected. Cameron is actually trying to out-green Brown. In fact, given the strength of the environmental NGOs, Britain has no need for a Green Party. The market is oversupplied already.

Australians feature at the start and end of this roadshow. Nick Rowley, Tony Blair’s previous environmental adviser, is an Australian who pushed the barrow for climate change action stronger than most — a man whose regular walks around St James’s Park would have led his eyes to acknowledge what his heart already felt. Meanwhile, Wayne Swan popped into the Treasury for a pre-briefing from Stern last month. What the two might have discussed over the Treasury’s Fairtrade latté and Byron Bay cookies is anyone’s guess. But for a man capable of talking for 30 minutes while saying nothing, Swan has been unusually forceful since getting his briefing — calling it ‘the most important political discussion of my life.’ The Stern Report is not so surprising when you consider its setting. HM Treasury operates a carbon neutral building — its fourth floor being something of a hot house because the building deliberately has no air conditioning. Down on the second floor, just where it starts to get warm, sit the Stern Review team — barely noticeable, save for a hastily arranged A4 sheet of (recycled) paper pointing you inside. In this office, over the past year, fewer than a dozen young researchers set about changing the course of history. The Treasury excels at these think pieces and a visceral delight pervaded its canteen last week as the wall-to-wall coverage of the Stern Report rolled in. While more famed for failed IT systems and accusations of spin in recent years, Whitehall is still a centre of immense intellect. And there are times — such as this — when it mobilises such force and clarity as to leave the rest of the West’s public services in the dust. The economic is now able to combine with the previously stronger scientific and moral arguments about stopping climate change. And together the three have the power to generate political change. This is what the textbook means by an independent public service serving the government of the day. With Al Gore now signed up as Gordon Brown’s environmental adviser, you can bet that as the case for a new global carbon trading system gathers pace the next step is an agreement between the EU and the big US Democratic States — with China, India and Brazil on the shopping list thereafter.

Sounds great. But in its own way the Stern Report also symbolises the decline in the power of Western politicians. Aside from its price tags, it does little more than use graphs to say what Tony Blair and (former Environment Secretary) Margaret Beckett have been saying for years. But in the end, the Government had to get a non-politician to make the case. Just as it did with National Health Service and just as Brown did when he handed control of monetary policy to the Bank of England on his first day in office.

Stern said: ‘Strong, deliberate policy choices by governments are essential to motivate change.’ It may well take this non-politician Stern to prove to politicians and the rest of us that there is, after all, a role that only governments can play in making the world a better place. And Gordon Brown immediately followed through with an email to more than a million Labour Party supporters. ‘Tackling climate change is the pro-growth strategy,’ he wrote. Climate change is the greatest market failure the world has seen … an injustice between generations and nations, with the poorest people in the world suffering first. Today I set a new ambition for Britain in future years: a Britain that is both pro-growth and pro-green. Britain is the only G7 country to have already met our Kyoto target and by 2010 we will have met it almost twice over … [but] we must tackle climate change internationally, or we will not tackle it at all.

Politics and politicians of all stripes have a chance to get back into the game now. They would do well to remember that Her Majesty’s Treasury was once home to a hospital for lepers. If they can’t get this right it may end where it started.

Matthew Parris on brilliant form as always - lambasting the structural idiocy of the Iraq War in The Times

It’s time for a Muslim Reformation
930 words

It’s official – nearly everyone in the UK agrees that the niqab (full Islamic veil) sucks - from Salman Rushdie to Cabinet Members to [insert link: http://books.guardian.co.uk/news/articles/0,,1892557,00.html] 93 per cent of the BBC’s audience.

Yet it feels odd to be part of this overwhelming majority. Why? Because this debate is all we’ve heard about for two weeks. It’s so one-sided it feels more like an assault. Take the feminist writer Julie Burchill: “When I see a dumb, white bitch convert wearing Islamic dress, I feel massive revulsion and contempt, as they have actually chosen enslavement.”

I can’t fault the logic, but if people wrote that about you or me for two weeks, we’d feel persecuted too. Such a tone misses the point – which is that arguments in favour of the full veil are weak, and debate within Islam ought to be encouraged.

Progessive outsiders also find themselves in a quandary. Until Jack Straw sparked this debate by asking one of his constituents to remove her veil when talking to him in his office, most would have thought such attitudes ‘Islamophobic.’ Not any more.

Exposed to the light of stinging public argument there is now a palpable sense that questioning the veil is perfectly proper thing to do. It’s a view typified by the young columnist Saira Khan [insert link: http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,1072-2394934.html] and Zaiba Malik [insert link: http://www.guardian.co.uk/g2/story/0,,1923964,00.html]
- who tested the veil for a day and decided it was a disabling, mummifying experience.

From Darwin’s The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals in 1872 to the bestselling self-help books of Allan Pease, we have spent more than a century learning just how complex and rich human communications really are.

Reminded of this, the public is deciding the veil just doesn’t fit into this complexity. Sure,c we have learnt about all-girl Muslim rock bands that compete in London school competitions, unimpeded by their full veils. [insert link: http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2087-2393667.html] but we hear more of Aishah Azmi, the teaching assistant in Yorkshire now suing her employers. Azmi was suspended from work when she refused remove her veil in the classroom, and wear only a headscarf. [insert link: http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2-2403072.html]. Her young, mostly foreign born, students were meant to learn English from her - and couldn’t because they had no sight of her lips and expression. Backed by local MPs and the Muslim Council of Britain [insert link: http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2-2403072.html], the school stood it’s ground and so did she. She lost.

Then there is question of where the veil sits in relation to conventions about safety (motorcyclists can’t wear their helmets indoors in public spaces; a terror suspect recently went about in Islamic drag to avoid arrest) and justice (we don’t allow witnesses in court to wear bags on their head even when discussing the most brutal crimes).

Opportunity and achievement are also issues. Notice the lack of high-achieving pious Muslim women in British society? It’s not easy to getting ahead as a machine operator, PR, hairdresser or someone who has to wear a corporate uniform if you’re wrapped up and no one can see you smile.

Non-Muslims are far from pure and blameless – our communications are generally poor, [insert link: http://www.guardian.co.uk/guardianweekly/story/0,,1896807,00.html], we live in a hyper-sexualized society with some nasty consequences, and prejudices infiltrate both thoughtful minds and the fools who think its funny to rip headscarves off the heads of shoppers.

But body language, facial expression and eye contact are so fundamental to our ability to relate to each other and to gel as a community that we cannot afford to do without them. And that’s where pro-veil arguments about tolerance and cultural understanding fall down. When it’s worn voluntarily it’s impractical and a deliberate statement of separation from society; when it is worn involuntary it is all that and inherently problematic.

Moving from realpolitik to faith: the Qu’ran simply does not ask women to cloak themselves from head to toe. In fact, women must not cover their faces or hands at all in Mecca’s grand mosque.

Indeed, when there is an element of choice the veil is often the tool of snobs. For large numbers of Muslim women (especially those with African roots) the elaborate and expensive fabrics are a sign of social status – the equivalent of a solid gold crucifix or fancy rosary beads. Yet other groups with who use fashion to mark out beliefs and status - Chavs, Goths, Punks, Preppies, the Amish – do not escape scrutiny. So why should Islamic women?

Consider also the irony that only in democratic Britain in this debate happening. In most nations where Islamic women live there is no debate at all. Millions are fainting in fifty-degree heat and living stunted lives off the back of fairytale interpretations of Islamic teachings – not a great progressive cause by any measure.

Broadly speaking, the reactions in the current UK debate are a model for future of Islam. Many people have questioned and attacked the veil. But they didn’t burn the houses of the women who wear them, kill Imams or organise protests. Instead they wrote letters to the editor and mumbled about it at the pub.

If the veil is really such a friend of freedom then it and its supporters will win through in rational debate. Whatever the merits of that case, the great thing about this debate is that we are having one. Hopefully it can come back from the brink of paranoia and help sow the seeds for a Muslim reformation. One where feminism gets a look in, where it ceases to be OK for Muslims to murder each other in their thousands in Sudan and Iraq, and where Islam’s appalling attitudes to homosexuality are revised.

Calling for an Australian Centre for Public Opinon, 2 October
** this is an unpublished article, submitted as my entry into a political opinion writing competition.

For all the recent obsessions with constructing new ‘narratives’ of Australia’s history, a distinct lack of thought has gone into the independent construction of a narrative of Australia’s present.

But having a ‘present narrative’ is what public life and democracy are about. It requires more than newspapers and politicians and BBQ chatter with our friends and families. It requires a deep understanding of public opinion, and implies our public institutions being responsive to it.

Democracy does not exist without responsiveness. Worldwide, political archives and monuments are strewn with clichés about ‘the people’ – ‘power to them’, ‘lest we forget them’, ‘for the people, by the people, of the people’.

But in recent times we have seen the re-emergence of ancient splits between governing elites and the public at large. Politics is now more professional, less ideological, and alternative sources of information and entertainment have grown exponentially.

If Labor is ever again to be the party of the many, not the few, of government, not fratricide, it must re-discover the people and through them it’s soul. This discovery could happen in unlikely places.

Any opposition, but particularly the federal ALP opposition, would do well to spend more of its extensive publicly and privately funded advisory resources on communications and researching and analysing public opinion.

We cannot expect a few dozen advisers and MPs to stitch together elaborate policy programmes from the Opposition benches and back rooms. Facing the might of the Australian Public Service, the Charter of Budget Honesty, the inertia of its own policy committees and dwindling attention spans, this is a David and Goliath challenge.

Policy frameworks are necessary, political vision is necessary – these basics matter more than biblical, technical tomes. This is not to suggest polling about slogans and personalities will deliver an ALP government or better public policy. It is to be realistic and to accept the party’s narrow membership and union base is no longer a sufficient sounding board. Long term, deliberative engagement with samples of the Australian population will give ‘the people’ a better stake in ALP policy development than rhetoric created in a Parliament Hill vacuum.

Better still, a robustly independent Australian Public Service could be supplying such information on public opinion – for everyone’s benefit.

Why not an Australian Bureau of Public Opinion? Either as a branch of the Australian Bureau of Statistics or a separate body, it would be a rational extension of Australia’s pioneering efforts in freedom of information and accountability in public administration promulgated since the 1974 Coombs Royal Commission into Australian Government Administration

While we now have a Public Service Act covering inefficiency, politicisation, fraud, corruption and inequalities, there is no requirement for the public service to serve the people who fund it as well as the Ministers they elect.

Why do we lack this crucial element of responsiveness in our democracy? Why do without or keep this information private in consumer research companies and political backrooms?

The role of an Australian Bureau of Public Opinion would be to provide this broad catalogue of information - not on public facts, like the ABS, but public attitudes.

Such an organisation would reduce the money needed by political parties for their own selfish research, allow small and medium businesses a better cost-effective understanding of their potential customers, and widen the source base for historians next time we have this debate. It would present the nation to its servants in a truer and fresher light.

Of course, public value is not always related to public opinion – there cannot be iron laws about what to do with the information discovered. There would be questions about whether the information was trustworthy – remember the debate about ABS’ Measuring Australian’s Progress series? And do we have enough skilled people to run it? Shouldn’t we just leave it to Newspoll and Roy Morgan and Access Economics?

The answer is no – our democracy demands it.

Nowhere in Australia is the use of representative online polling exploited effectively – here would be a case in point of the Australian Public Service being the world leader it claims to be – efficient, cutting edge, useful to Ministers and the public.

More importantly an Australian Bureau of Public Opinion would keep the public service on its toes. It, like Britain and Canada and the United States thinks it is the best in the world. But they can’t all be right. The senior public servants of each of these leading services would be surprised to realise that the Singapore government actually engages in more polling than they do.

Lynelle Briggs, the Australian Public Service Commissioner, is fond of talking about the good standing the service has in the community. It would be better if she could pinpoint this reputation, and share the comments and figures with us.

Through better use of public opinion we might also enfranchise those who don’t wish to pursue an active involvement in politics. Right now their opinions don’t count if they’re in the wrong electorate - they offer little and receive the same from our democracy.

Where will the next Centrelink – admired the world over – come from without knowing exactly where the increasing expectations of citizens of their public services is heading?

Directgov (www.direct.gov.uk) is the UK government’s internal bulldozer. It’s task is to demolish the thousands of internal barriers that exist to information sharing and presentation across the UK public sector. Which department decides what policy and delivers what service is largely irrelevant to Directgov. ‘How do citizens think and how do citizens want to consume information and services’ are the only questions that matter to them.

This is the use of public opinion to add value, rather than simply to exploit fear or win votes. It is fundamentally different to using public opinion to send vote changing, computer-generated personal letters – it is about helping people to help themselves.

John Howard understands public opinion, and uses it effectively for private political benefit. The ALP’s challenge is to do the same and deploy their understanding for a wider national good.

Poles Dancing

** First published on www.newmatilda.com.au on 4 October 2006

There is a debate about immigration taking place in the UK right now. It is not about ‘illegals’ as with America’s 12 million ‘illegal’ immigrants, nor is it nonsensical like recent Australian headlines about eight boat people arriving on a remote island or 139 Chinese workers receiving TAFE training that may eventually assist them to meet Australian migration requirements

Rather, this debate comes close to being constructive. Given the British Home Office’s wild underestimates of the scale of the current eastern European influx and the incompetence of the country’s Immigration and Nationality Directorate in employing illegal Nigerian workers as cleaners, there is potential it will not remain enlightened.

But the Mayor of London and his thousands of posters reminding us that we are ‘LondONErs’ and should barrack for ‘London United,’ are more obvious and more convincing than the alternative. Even the crudest government pragmatists back immigration. The Financial Times recently quoted a government adviser: "The Poles are great. They all work, they don't want to kill us and their women don't wear bags over their heads."

Fears of pressure on local services, and of working class neighbourhoods changing too quickly for their stalwarts to keep up are expressed through tabloid voices, but these are the minority. Mostly the question is ‘what did we ever do without them?’

‘Them’ conduct the majority of London’s outsourced cleaning, and much of its food service and plumbing. And the recent summer holidays have seen them off on their foreign summer holidays – leaving the Chloe’s, Felicity’s, Henry’s and, well, Ryan’s of London to scrub their own bath-tubs and wait five minutes longer for their ‘asian fusion’ lunches.

Confused? As well you might be. Ten years ago people in my situation (renting with friends, comfortably off professionals still snapping up specials at the supermarket) would barely have been taking regular overseas holidays. Now we have cleaners and they earn enough to take their own overseas holidays! We pay Sveta, our cleaner, a little more than A$20 an hour (some colleagues pay their cleaners A$25 – double the minimum wage.)

Millions of such arrangements now permeate the south of England – forging a cross-party, and somewhat cross-class consensus about immigration in the process. These arrangements bring home a very personal understanding of what immigration means to the British economy.

Lynton Crosby thought he was on a winner in the 2005 election campaign with his ‘Are you thinking what I’m thinking?’ billboards. Instead, the Conservative base now relies on the Poles for their catered dinners, and Phillipe Starck refits and last minute babysitting.

The free movement of labour is becoming real. People as well as capital and goods, are beginning to circulate at rapid rates.

Cheap flights, surging economies, the internet and political projects like the European Union are facilitating a massive voluntary whirlwind of humans, like the world has never seen. No potato famines or night-time desert crossings here – this time the diasporas are complex, two-way and, besides their huge scale, difficult to get to grips with.

I’m recalling this at 5.45am, perched on the platform of a rare above ground Underground station on the City’s edge. Here London’s tracksuited, determined Polish future waits with me for the morning’s first train. This is not the A$25 an hour wedge of new immigration. Much of it is invisible, works before the sun is up and receives less per hour than what I am about to fork out for the privilege of my morning swim (A$15).

My next encounter with the Polish army is more hopeful. Swathed in purple smocks, they are the staff of the achingly New Labour ‘public-private partnership’ contractors who manage our building, dishing out breakfast rolls as I stroll through the foyer. They keep the British Treasury building running like a Swiss Railways version of Yes, Minister. And, as they emerge in pairs from free workouts at our gym, into the awesome light-wells and high-ceilinged grandeur of the place, their choice to move to London seems to make sense.

Heading out for lunch the Polska Gazette seems to emphasise just how second-rung I’ve become as an antipodean immigrant. It’s flying off the newsstands, making TNT and Australian Times look like wallflowers at St. James’ Park tube. Twelve months ago, Polska Gazette didn’t even exist. Now it is responsible (or perhaps just a reflection) of its own niche advertising industry.

My day ends on the Number 25 bus. It’s an improbably long, bendy, single story operation. It’s also known as the ‘free bus’ – because you can get on for nothing via the back door and because it carries mainly new immigrants. Here you cannot fail to remember the initial shock that London’s in-your-face diversity produces in any antipodean newcomer. You actually see people with dark skin everywhere. Tonight I counted six languages being spoken on my section of the bus.

The breadth of the new multiculturalism is further hinted at in last week’s Worksop Guardian (insert link: http://www.worksoptoday.co.uk/), a minor regional paper, which ran a seven page insight into the “Polish Issue.” Local journalists mused about the effect of a 72% increase in Polish migrants in the past year on their small community. This was not ‘put up the shutters’ rhetoric – it explained why the paper now has classified ads printed in Polish and visited new church socials aimed at Poles. Less happily Westminster Council is now paying airfares home for homeless Poles who have struggled in the UK (Insert link: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/london/5336136.stm).

But parties, businesses and unions of all stripes agree immigration of this kind is here to stay. The Trades Unions Congress (insert link: http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,,1870194,00.html) even took the step of hanging up a ‘You’re welcome here’ sign at its televised September annual conference. The unions know that it is exploitation that is the problem - not whether the exploited were born in Britain or Poland.

They are right on both counts. I love our cleaner, and Sveta deserves the decent pay she gets. We just wish she’d get back from the beach soon because our bathroom is looking atrocious.

Islamists Killed Enid Blyton

By: Ryan Heath Wednesday 16 August 2006 First published on New Matilda _______________________________ It’s 7:00am on Wednesday, 9 August in Walton Drive, High Wycombe. All is quiet, mock-Tudor bliss. Empty-nesters are taking their morning walk in nearby Forest Way, as they always do. City accountants reach for ties, scrambling to catch the 7:09 on its glide towards boutique Marylebone Station, as they always do. And mothers, if they’re not dropping by Marks and Spencer for fresh bread, are hitting ‘snooze’ — as they often don’t. It’s still the early stages of the summer holidays — a time for sleeping-in, not school. Cleaning the wooden kitchens and bay windows can wait. Indeed, the streets of High Wycombe look like a postcard from Enid Blyton’s England. Playing fields to the left, golf courses to the right. Population 72,000. Nestled in the Chiltern Hills on the fringes of the Home Counties, this part of Buckinghamshire nurses the Thames southwards to London. It’s the sort of place where regular train commuters have unmarked but reserved seats, and greet each other by name. The greatest moral dilemma is whether to report the neighbour who’s breaking the drought-inflicted ban on hosing the garden. But that was Wednesday, 9 August. As Thursday’s 7:09 train pulled out of High Wycombe’s station, nearby Walton Drive and Micklefield Road were police investigation scenes. And the Islamic child of local White, Christian, Conservative Party activists was in handcuffs, under suspicion of terrorist activity. Enid Blyton didn’t write about this sort of thing. Abdul Waheed — formerly Don Stewart-Whyte — 20 year-old, Muslim convert and terror suspect, is the new face of the new strand of the now old threat posed by Islamists to the world’s liberal democracies. It was bad enough that independent polling shows one third of Britain’s Muslims want Sharia (or Islamic) Law introduced, and that one in four believe the 2005 London bombings were justified. But the realisation that this net of hate has spread so widely that it’s caught a well-educated offspring of Tory activists is one chill too many for the burghers of High Wycombe. The town’s many housewives — previously content and not desperate at all — suddenly have something grave to ponder. And whether you live in London, Bowral, Mansfield or Applecross, so do the rest of us. If terrorists can live undetected in High Wycombe, then it can happen anywhere. Once upon a time, this would have been a drama only for the well-off — for those who could afford to fly — and the villains would have been merely swarthy, male, Middle Eastern and State-sponsored. Not anymore. Flying is everyone’s business in the Easyjet, $5 flight era. And, while no one can successfully pin a terrorist stereotype after Timothy McVeigh (Oklahoma City bomber), and Germaine Lindsay (London 7/7), everyone is still sure 70-year-old women don’t fit the profile. And, as the wet t-shirt competition that is queuing at London airports has grown into a farce, so the calls for greater ‘passenger profiling’ have grown louder. Passenger profiling has been in existence since 1994, and is both rampant and covert. Personally, I try not to stand behind Black people in passport queues — especially Nigerians. You get stuck forever — guess why. Profiling can be racist or common sense, and Britain now has to figure out which is the most right answer. Legitimate profiling is based on actual intelligence (type of ticket, travel history, etc). Other sorts will only increase tension. The real question, given we do not have unlimited resources and patience, is how we make the best generalisations possible. Considering this, my iPod and my bootleg sleeping tablets are no more relevant to the frontline of the ‘war against terror’ than is this website or a packet of cornflakes. Zoom south from High Wycombe to London’s Whitechapel. Home of Jack the Ripper and the Kray brothers, this groping, aspirational mess of street markets, urban poor and professional elites is where thousands of budget jaunts to the Continent are booked 24/7. Here, in the shadow of the City, the greatest and quickest voluntary migration of people the world has known assembles itself in a new combination every day. People come here to make and break dreams by the thousand, coming and going via the Underground — just one stop from one of last year’s bombs. I am among them. I am part of this living, breathing, multicultural proof that there is little support — outside of the insidious Islamist circles themselves — for a world without female flesh, debate, TV and Mardi Gras. And what are we supposed to do? Give up those dreams and Spanish holidays to terrorists? Shall I walk four hours to work instead of taking the train? No, we are, collectively, too clever for that. And in this world of hyper-commerce, we are also too dumb, and hedonistic, to give up our duty free shopping. Will we really forfeit gin at $15 a litre. Sign away those tempting Freakonomics plus The Da Vinci Code bundle deals? I doubt it. Common sense (and English stoicism) says we must continue our regular lives as if last week’s arrests never happened. Clean those bay windows, take the Underground, vote in elections — and enjoy our iPods on our hard-earned flights. The British Airports Association Chief Executive, Tony Douglas, calls the new airport security measures ‘unsustainable.’ 20,000 bags are already missing. The country’s two biggest airlines, Ryanair and British Airways are fuming. And they didn’t even have to drink their own breast milk, as travelling new mothers now do, to get through their day. But the best proof that life (and hand luggage) can go on is the absence of the UK’s leaders this week. Tony Blair is yachting (‘Crisis? Yacht Crisis?’ bellowed the Right-wing Daily Mail). The humble Foreign Secretary, Margaret Beckett, is caravanning. And the Acting Prime Minister, John Prescott, is nowhere to be seen. The next generation of not-so-new-Labour leaders are assuming the spotlight. Last week’s averted disaster should be of grave concern to us all. But these Islamist fascists have no hope of winning. Sydney Airport’s Max Moore-Wilton wouldn’t put up with the hand luggage nonsense crippling London airports. Neither should we.