Dominic Lawson

Not a favourite columnist (and a loathsome Chancellor) but his thoughts in the Independent this week about the latest security incident are well worth reading.

"A novelist would regard it as too crudely ironic, yet these are the facts: the very day after the chairman of BA broke cover to denounce the "completely redundant" security checks to which his passengers are subjected, the security services discover ink cartridges rigged with explosives on board a cargo plane at East Midlands airport, en route to the US from Yemen."

"Despite the fact that the booby-trapped cartridges were addressed to two synagogues in Chicago, David Cameron declared that the intention was for the explosive devices to be set off while in mid-air, allowing the more excitable newspapers to declare that this would have been "another Lockerbie". In such an atmosphere of fear, the BA chairman's demand that we stop "kowtowing to America" in imposing "redundant" security checks (such as those involving the scrutiny of passengers' footwear) seems doomed to be dismissed, even though it is objectively as reasonable a remark now as when he uttered it. I wouldn't dream of suggesting that the people denounced yesterday by Ryanair's Michael O'Leary as "the securocracy" are actually pleased by this development; no, the happier crew will be the bomb-makers themselves, because the disruption of Western lives and businesses through the implementation of ferocious security measures is a principal objective, which means that the mere discovery of a device with potential to kill is a strike in their favour: even their failures can be judged a success, as long as we in the West react disproportionately or, better still, hysterically."

"The Prime Minister told the News of The World at the weekend that we "must not compromise with security". But we do, of course, and must. The only mass-murder successfully achieved by Islamist terrorists in the UK occurred not on an aeroplane but on the London Underground. Are we checked by scanners as we enter the Tube? Are even those wearing rucksacks required to show anyone their contents? No, and no. Why is this not done? Principally because if it became intolerably oppressive and time-consuming to negotiate the Underground network, London would be gridlocked and the economy of the region would experience something akin to a stroke. So, of course, a compromise is made with security."

"There is a second reason why the security services are relatively relaxed about the fact that checks are not made on the Underground: they know that in reality such procedures are not the way in which devices – let alone plots – are detected. The discovery of the allegedly explosive ink cartridges was typical in that it was the result of prior work by an intelligence service, in this case the Saudi Arabian one, which tipped off the British and American authorities. So far as I am aware, there have been no al-Qa'ida explosive devices unearthed as a result of airport scanning checks: the "airline bomb" plot of August 2006 was absolutely characteristic in being uncovered at an earlier stage by the intelligence services."

"The chances of detecting devices by random checks on the day of delivery are far lower than the long-suffering public may think. The US Transportation Security Administration each year runs dummy tests in the nation's biggest airports to measure the success of its scanners and security staff in detecting deliberately planted "devices". In its most recent report, it revealed that roughly 75 per cent of the fake bombs or component parts were not detected by any of the screening processes."

So the vast panoply of people, scanners, sniffer dogs and surveillance only works a quarter of the time. A fact the securocracy would prefer to keep hidden.