international news _ 18th August, 2006
Hand Baggage Ban On UK Flights
Text by Jonty Skrufff (Skrufff.com)
British DJs carrying laptops and CDs overseas will have to risk checking
their music and equipment into aircrafts’ holds from now on, following this
week’s UK terror alert and subsequent ban on almost all items of hand
luggage.
The development was greeted with dismay by techno star Dave Clarke, who
fired an angry broadside against Tony Blair.
“It's great that the security services stopped a plot, but this hand luggage
ban is totally impractical and I have to say we are reaping the rewards of
Tony Blair's Foreign Policy,” Dave told Skrufff (speaking from Amsterdam’s
Schipol Airport).
“We are now in a situation where we cannot extricate ourselves
diplomatically, we should have never stood shoulder to shoulder in our
allies’ imperialistic dreams. It was terrible what happened with 9/11 and we
mourn shoulder to shoulder with America but Afghanistan is worse off, Iraq
is descending into civil war, and the situation in Israel and Lebanon is
getting worse all the time.”
“We have a good chancellor (Gordon Brown) but an incredibly naive leader who
seems to be led by his interpretation of God's will; he wanted history to
judge him, well he is history now,” he stormed.
“I won't travel through airlines under such draconian measures,” Dave
continued, “If the ban continues I will consider buying my own plane and
operating it privately and presenting HM government with a tax reduction
bill due to their ineptitude of cohesive foreign policy making,” he
promised.
Dave estimated he saves seven to ten days a year by carrying his music as
hand luggage as he travels the world and said he’d switched only after
frequently having his hold baggage delayed. A much bigger risk DJs will now
have to face again is theft, which plagued the dance music industry
throughout the 90s as baggage handlers targeted record bags.
“I've not checked in tunes- either records or CDs- for over 10 years, so the
thought of my tunes not turning up the other end is quite a worrying
prospect, to put it mildly,” Judge Jules told Skrufff.
“There are certain airports which are known amongst DJs as being black holes
for lost luggage. Madrid is a particularly bad example,” he added.
One such DJ is UK techno pioneer Jim Masters who three years ago lost his
records when flying out to Brazil.
“Some motherf**ker at Madrid airport stole ALL of my records - not just took
the box style, but the little sh*t carefully removed every record from the
bags, zipped them back up and put the bags back onto the plane,” Jim said,
in a letter mailed to the media in 2003,
“As you can guess, I had quite a shock when I lifted my feather-light bags
up at Sao Paulo and found them empty.”
With many DJs now also routinely carrying laptops, the theft risk everywhere
is likely to be dramatically higher, everywhere.
Related Link
