THE DAY THE MUSIC DIDN'T DIE

With an astonishing only 20% of voters believing the Blair government is telling the truth about the threats of terrorism, musicians are joining the growing crowd of opponents to the bemusingly drawn handbaggage regulations.

Faced with a choice of condemning precious instruments to the hold or not flying, many musicians are taking option (c) of asking what the point of the rules are.

One of the "don't you realise there's a terrorist alert" responses on the BBC's Have Your Say page unwittingly nails the reason why these rules are little more than a nonesense:

There is a very easy and obvious way around this - get on a train or ferry to mainland Europe and then catch a flight from there! If travelling is that important, a slight inconvenience or increase in journey time can be accepted.
Karl Johnson, Thetford, Norfolk

Karl is right - that's a really simple way round the rules. But the question, surely, is if it's not expecting too much for a violinist to hop on a ferry to Brussels and catch a plane from there, wouldn't a suicide bomber (who, after all, isn't in a hurry to get anywhere) be able to do the same thing? We can only conclude that, if there is a real risk, the security on the continent is much, much stronger and more efficient than ours - so why don't we ask the Belgians and French for ideas? Or, if the application of security is just as good as ours, and there is no real reason to tell musicians they can't take their instrument into the cabin.

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