By Richard Littlejohn
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White airline passengers are routinely stopped and searched unnecessarily at Britain’s airports just so staff can prove they’re not ‘racist’.
Even when customs officials have been tipped off about a black drugs mule arriving on a plane from the Caribbean, they deliberately intercept a number of innocent white passengers so they can’t be accused of discrimination.
John Vine, chief inspector of the UK Border Agency, says staff try to ensure the right racial ‘mix’ even though they have no legal right to detain people on such grounds.
Checks: White air passengers are routinely stopped and searched by customs officials simply to ensure the right racial 'mix' of travellers
This is because they are petrified about being hammered with allegations of racism every time they stop and search someone from an ethnic minority background.
Tell us something we don’t know. Airport security operates on the same senseless basis.
We’ve all watched elderly white passengers being put through the third degree, while young Asian men wearing backpacks waft past unchallenged.
I’ve seen distressed grey-haired pensioners being patted down intimately and forced to empty all their belongings out of their hand luggage.
Meanwhile, women in full burkas are waved through with a cheery: ‘Have a nice flight.’
Witless: Humiliating unsuspecting tourists heading off on holiday, just to meet some artificial racial quota, doesn't increase air safety
Now I’m not suggesting these young Asian men were planning to blow up the plane, or that the women in burkas were a security risk.
Like it or not, though, the fact is that potential suicide bombers do tend to come from that particular demographic. And Al Qaeda suspects have been known to shield their identities behind a burka.
Humiliating every Howard and Hilda heading off on a package holiday, just to meet some artificial racial quota, doesn’t serve to make air travel any safer. It is witless, inconvenient and inefficient.
The authorities know that it causes widespread resentment, which is why airports are plastered with notices giving dire warnings that anyone abusing staff will be arrested immediately and prosecuted.
There’s something horribly wrong with any organisation which has to threaten its customers with arrest before they get to the counter.
I have to bite my lip every time I travel by air to stop myself railing against the insanity of it all, otherwise I’d be in handcuffs before I got anywhere near the departure gate.
Don’t do it, Rich, it’s not worth it.
Passing through Britain’s airports is already an ordeal. And now that the CIA claims to have discovered a new Al Qaeda metal-free explosive device aimed at bringing down aircraft, it’s about to get a whole lot worse. Expect even more stringent security, especially on transatlantic flights.
As someone who travels to the U.S. fairly regularly, I’m acutely aware of the threat posed by terrorists. I was on a North West flight into Detroit just two weeks before the so-called underpants bomber tried to bring down another North West plane above the same airport in 2009. So I’m glad that the authorities are doing everything possible to prevent more aircraft being blown up or flown into skyscrapers.
I just wish a little more intelligence was applied to the process. When was the last time any plane was hijacked by a 78-year-old granny from Leamington Spa? Precisely.
The nature of the threat makes the case for racial profiling at airports compelling. The security services already do it covertly. Stopping and searching those who plainly pose no danger, simply for the sake of keeping up appearances, is obtuse.
Yet when Jeremy Clarkson suggested recently that a little light profiling of air passengers might not be a bad thing, the twittering lynch mob went knee-jerk berserk and there were bovine calls for him to be sacked from the BBC.
Look, I’m not denying there are still genuine problems with racial discrimination. But we’ve come a long way and it still isn’t possible to have a grown-up debate on the subject.
The news has been dominated this week by the conviction of a gang of Pakistani and Afghan men from Rochdale for grooming and sexually abusing vulnerable white girls.
Rochdale grooming gang: Because of the men's ethnic background, there was a seeming reluctance for a full investigation until it was too late
This criminal exploitation had been a problem in some sections of the Pakistani community in the North of England for years. Sue Reid has performed a sterling service exposing it in this newspaper.
But because of the men’s ethnic background, there was a reluctance on the part of the police, the Crown prosecutors and the social services to do anything about it. So these girls were abandoned to their horrible fate. The authorities were all terrified of being accused of racism, even though the judge this week acknowledged that these crimes were motivated by the gang’s religious and cultural prejudices.
As a direct result of their upbringing in rural Pakistan, these men repress their own wives and daughters and view white girls as trash â€" easy meat, to be raped at will. Many in the wider Muslim community acknowledge this undeniable truth and abhor their criminality.
Trevor Phillips, head of the equalities commission, hardly a paid-up m ember of the BNP, has spoken about the madness of transporting Third World village culture to the heart of our industrial cities.
Yet still the police and others, like the preposterous Keith Vaz MP, are insisting mulishly that there was no racial component to these crimes whatsoever.
If it had been the other way round, with white men targeting Pakistani girls, these same lame-brained fools would be howling ‘racism’ from the rooftops.
Guilt: The men, all but one originally from Pakistan, were convicted of luring girls into sex with drink, drugs, fast food and free taxi rides over a number of years
While we are all being urged to ‘celebrate diversity’, we shouldn’t try to kid ourselves that multiculturalism hasn’t brought with it some serious downsides â€" such as home-grown Islamist terrorists and gangs of Pakistani child rapists.
We’ve all got to rub along in this modern-day melting pot. And that noble ambition isn’t served by ignoring genuine prejudice where it exists, from whichever inconvenient quarter, and gormlessly screeching ‘racism’ where it doesn’t.
Disingenuously insisting that Pakistani child rapists aren’t motivated at least in part by their own wicked brand of racial and cultural bigotry doesn’t do anyone any favours.
And neither does stopping and searching blameless white passengers at Britain’s airports, when you are hoping to catch a black drugs mule.
That’s not a bold demonstration of anti-racism. It’s just plain stupid.
The Olympic Torch is finally on its way to Lond on. In Greece yesterday, at the ruins of the 2,600-year-old Temple of Hera, a special concave mirror was used to harvest the sun’s rays to light the flame.
That’s a novel way of lighting it. They must have run out of matches. But it might explain an email I’ve received from Sarah Brown (not that one).
Sarah tells me she recently bought a small compact mirror for her handbag from a shop in Wallington, Surrey.
Before she could use it she had to remove a sticker which read: ‘Warning. Place mirror out of direct sunlight as the reflected light may cause a fire or other heat damage.’
So if the Olympic torch goes out as it passes through Wallington on the way to the Olympic Park, they’ll know who to call.
It doesn't get any tougher than this: Gregg Wallace should see me try to crack an egg
Tears on my pilau
If I stumble across my wife watching Masterchef, I groan whenever Gregg Wallace announces:
‘Cooking doesn’t get any tougher than this.’
He should try watching me attempt to crack an egg without breaking the yolk.
Now it’s the turn of the Great British Menu to drive me mad. I only looked at it in the first place because my mate Richard Corrigan was a star judge.
But I’ve become drawn to it, like a rubber-necker to a motorway pile up.
Where do they come up with this ‘food’? I’ve never seen anything on it I’d be willing to eat.
This week, one chef prepared a fish course which looked like a tray of cat litter and had the unique distinction of not actually containing any fish.
He stomped off the programme, swearing, after getting just two out of ten. Another burst into tears after getting ten out of ten.
For heaven’s sake. It’s only cooking. Pull yourselves together.
At this rate, they should rename it the Makes You Proud To Be British Menu.
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Affluent residents in Ascot, Berkshire, have been accused of snobbery for wanting to close down a council playground at the end of their gardens.
Locals, including a former Concorde pilot and Sky Sports presenter Chris Skudder, say the £150,000 playground generates too much noise and makes their lives a misery.
But the council says the real reason they are objecting is because the park is ‘full of really fat women from Bracknell’ who can’t control their children.
Chocs away!
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Una collapso banco
I’m no economist, but 18 months ago I predicted that Spain’s banks would go the way of those in Iceland and Ireland.
The Spanish had been on a spending spree in Britain, buying up everything from the British Airports Authority to three of our leading building societies.
Anxiety: Bank of Spain Governor Miguel Angel Fernandez Ordonez is delaing with a mounting economic problem
But it’s always been a mystery to me where they got the money from. Apart from a couple of factories screwing together Volkswagens and a dodgy time-share industry, Spain is essentially a peasant economy dependent on EU largesse.
Now that the euro is in crisis, Spain could be the next Greece. This week, the Government had to bail out the country’s third biggest bank to the tune of 4.5 billion euros. Collectively, Spain’s banks are exposed to 180 billion euros in property-related loans at a time when the housing market has collapsed.
Back in December 2010, I wrote: ‘We’ve already seen the fall of the Banki Hankipanki and the Banki Fiddly Diddly. Stand by for the imminent implosion of El Banco Collapso.’
You didn’t have to be Robert Peston to work that one out.
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