Heathrow Slow Hand-Clappers Beware, Big Brother Is Watching You!

Today’s reports on the ‘fears of public disorder’ at Heathrow Airport due to slow hand-clapping by passengers showing their derision towards passport staff caused me to shiver with a feeling of deja vu.

Anyone harbouring any disbelief at police being alerted to the behaviour of passengers should beware. Unlike the railway infrastructure, which is policed by the British Transport Police, Heathrow is under the control of a Metropolitan Police Service Operational Command Unit (OCU) known as Aviation Security. ‘The Met’, as everyone knows (recall the case of Ian Tomlinson) has a somewhat ‘iffy’ history in dealing with the public, and the Heathrow OCU is prone to over-reacting when faced with passengers exhibiting frustration. I know this from personal experience.

I made the mistake of showing my frustration at the airport a few years ago when, after a nightmare twenty-two hour journey home from a business trip to Bangladesh, I was left standing forlornly at an empty, rotating luggage carousel. The only one on my flight to receive no baggage.

Unfortunately, my airline (the so-called premier Middle-East based carrier) did not consider it necessary to provide a help-desk in the baggage hall. In desperation, I walked to the front of a long queue at an adjacent american airline’s desk to ask where I might seek some help.

I was met by the archetypal red-faced ‘jobs-worth’ behind the desk, who stopped me in mid-sentence and told me to get to the back of the queue. I tried repeating my question, but he just picked up the phone and began to ask for assistance. A nice american lady in the queue beside me said that she thought I ought to be careful. How right she was!

Minutes later, I was in the back of a police van on my way to Heathrow Police Station. I was thrown into a cell, where, incarcerated for hours alone, I began to feel much like Orwell’s Winston Smith might have when held in the Ministry of Love. Eventually, at three o’clock in the morning I was told I could go. Upon requesting from the duty sergeant the reason why I had been held, I was forcibly ejected from the building by the two officers who had ‘arrested’ me.

I was subsequently fined two hundred pounds for contravening a Heathrow by-law that prohibits ‘singing, dancing, playing a musical instrument, and causing a general disturbance to others’. This was subsequently overturned at appeal, and I retain my good name, but I learned a salutary lesson from the experience. Be careful at Heathrow, be very, very careful. We might be beyond 1984, but as I write, ‘Big Brother’ is seated at his CCTV console in the ‘Ministry of Love’, and he is definitely watching us!