Reading books cover to cover is something I’m not getting done at the moment. I may however persist with Ulrich Beck’s ‘World at Risk’. Handily enough Ulrich gets straight to the point on page one. Handy because I’ve not progressed much further yet.

A suicide bomber attack in which terrorists with British passports planned to blow up several passenger aircraft en route from Heathrow to the United States with liquid explosives did not occur during the summer of 2006… because British police, in cooperation with international colleagues, managed to intervene on time and arrest the suspected perpetrators. On 6 November, barely three months after the thwarted attack, a new EU-wide regulation came into force that imposes severe restrictions on the transport of liquids…

Beck’s points:

• New security clamp downs have restricted the freedoms of millions of passengers.
• The restrictions are to anticipated attacks, the likes of which have never happened.
• Like total dopes, these millions of passengers have accepted in their minds these terrorist threats and haven’t uttered a word. Clowns.

It seems our politicians, their policy advisers and the special interests who keep the whole show on the road can at a turn twist a threat, a risk, into a full risk discourse. With little debate and even less implementation friction. For the love of god. I’ll spell this out. A blown up plane takes down maybe 500 people. Do 10 simultaneously and maybe you nail 5k. That’s hardly a Book of Revelations style threat to the species. Like climate change.

Okay, here’s my point; Stern, Hansen, Gore, the IPCC, the clowns at the UEA and everyone else on the anthropocentric side of climate change are going to have to get real. We’ve got more science that we know what to do with. We’ve got millions of people around the world ‘campaigning’ on the issue. And we’ve got a big conference called COP-15 next week that is bringing just about everybody in the world with a say on climate change to the table. Yet never has there been the sudden and unilateral action on climate change mitigation equal in scale to that the small cell of potential bombmakers have had on the personal freedoms of airline travelers*. WTF!

Scientists can continue churning out data. It can be great data. It can be peer-reviewed by the finest peers in the land. Hell, we’ll even get Piers Morgan in to give it some showbiz sexing up. But unless someone (metaphorically) distills it into explosive matter capable of being hidden in shoe heels, it’s going to come to not a lot. At least not anytime soon.

It’s time to push this thing up a notch. How exactly may come to me when I get to page two of ‘World at Risk’. I’ll let you know.

–

A quick BTW, here’s the other Beck (and Hansen) in my life. I’ll take the sociology over the scientology every time but great tune nevertheless.

* I appreciate we should be making flying more expensive and uncomfortable an experience, but let’s just ignore that for the sake of this small blog.

Copey and company bow down to the Greatest Briton (image cc Lloyd Davis)

I’ve just come across this personal account of the April 1st G20 protests from none other than Julian Cope, Liverpool post punk leftover, Krautrock boffin and the original Megalithic European.

Sorry I’m a day late with this Drudion, but I was in London yesterday at the G20 anti-Kapitalist protests that focused on the Bank of England. Unfortunately, I totally fucked up my plans through sheer yokel paranoia and came away empty handed. Intending to meet up with my dear friends, the writer Gyrus and U-Know editor Merrick, at Liverpool Street Station, at 10.30am, I left our W. Country home at 6am and was in central London just before nine. Nervous that there would be thousands of people milling about, I arrived on foot at Liverpool Street a full hour early, to be confronted by hundreds of police already in place. Of course, I was dressed extremely dodgily, with my hair up in a black wig and dressed in the kind of all-purpose rural chic that couldn’t have been further from my regular Rock God image (!). The police, however, were so fucking paranoid that they conducted a Stop & Search on me at the top of the escalators at 10.20; a full 40 minutes before the march had even started. Of course, I declined to give my name and address and, having no ID or cards on me, they detained me and wrote down a description. Unfortunately, when the main cop read on the report that I was wearing a stab vest, he came over personally and demanded to look at it. I just about managed to take the thing off without disturbing my wig, but the cop told me he believed the vest was part of a stolen consignment of police uniforms and gear, and that I’d taken off the labels to hide this fact. Kiddies, I’ve had this stab vest at least two years and wear it any time I’m in the city, but the cops just used this as an excuse to do a full body search and they soon confiscated my burka, a pair of women’s tights and all of my (expensive) police body armour. All of this occurred in full view of the general public and was clearly done just to make a show of me. When I still didn’t give my name, they sat me in a van to think about it for hours and the fucking protest went off with me detained. In the meantime, dammit, an exultant Merrick was texting me from Bishopsgate telling me the Climate Camp have taken over, while Gyrus had been penned in at the Bank of England. With hindsight, I’ll admit I looked extremely dodgy. But what got me most was how the police discovered all of my gear but still didn’t realize I was wearing a 99p black eBay wig! On the Stop & Search report I’m even described as having ‘Hair: black, short.’ I can’t show you my face on the self-portrait I took as I plan to use this disguise again in the future, but Holy McGrail referred to it as Scargill Chic and pointed out that there are clearly blonde tufts visible from underneath the rug. If McGrail could suss it from the crappy mobile phone photo (shown above), then so much for the West’s so-called War on Terror. What the fuck!

That one of England’s true rock (and I mean ‘rock’ in all senses of the word) heroes was detained at the Met’s pleasure for hours on end is galling enough but that he was recognized by none of his captors is truly an indictment on the state of policing in Britain today.