There was much hilarity, and not a little irritation, at last month’s story of a traveller stopped when passing through security at Stansted airport and asked to surrender a necklace which featured an inch-long model of a shotgun. The offending item was confiscated by officers on the grounds that it might be mistaken for the real thing. National media rightly derided the decision as did the traveller, former Special Branch officer Claire Sharp, who had worn the necklace previously whilst travelling through a number of airports, including Stansted, without problem. Whilst it is easy to put this down to petty bureaucracy, the explanation for this sort of incident probably lies elsewhere.
Here’s why. At the height of the IRA bombing campaign in London, it was not uncommon to find posters pinned up in offices and workplaces telling staff to remain watchful for suspicious packages or objects, and advising them what to look out for. On one such notice, under a note reassuring readers to not be worried about causing a false alarm someone had written, “Yeah, because false alarms are a good laugh”.
A poor joke perhaps, but not without some truth to it, insofar as such alarms, which were fairly commonplace in the capital during the eighties, would see staff troop out of offices to then spend an hour standing on the pavement whilst a suspicious package was examined, thereby providing them with, if not a good laugh, a welcome break in their day-to-day routine. And isn’t this likely to be what happened with Ms Sharp? The monotony of standing around in the humour free environment of airport security must be numbing. Day in day out watching a conveyor belt of luggage and fragrant footwear make its way through an X Ray machine with not so much as a sliver of Semtex to set the pulses racing. Whole days having to deal with stag party travellers gurning their way through a frisk, which at best yields some forgotten items of change, but never a Stanley knife. You however, are unnoticed by this endless treadmill of people who are all headed somewhere, whilst you are chained to the spot. Under these circumstances isn’t any opportunity to ratchet up a mild technicality into a serious threat and with it create a rupture in this stupefying boredom going to be seized upon?
Thus, whilst it was petty bureaucracy that allowed the Stansted official to confiscate the necklace, it was likely something much more human and personal that started the process.