Making an ash of themselves

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If you're one of the millions of people who've been stranded, inconvenienced, impoverished or just plain annoyed by the air travel ban imposed on Europe after the Icelandic volcanic eruption, you're probably aware of all the trouble and expense that ban has caused. What you may not be aware of is how pointless the ban turned out to be.

When Eyjafjallajokull blew its top, we were all assured that aircraft across the continent had to be grounded because a vast could of engine-destroying ash was bearing down on the continent like Godzilla dropping in for some sushi. For nearly a week one of civilisation's main transportation systems has been unavailable and travellers are falling back on everything from duck punts to pogo sticks to get home, yet that ash cloud has proven suspiciously invisible. Then the airlines, losing money like water stored in a brown paper bag, sent up test flights and couldn't find any sign of those destructive ash concentrations.

What happened? The EU, the real government of Europe whatever the provincial governors like Mr Brown may claim, decided that using actual science involved all sorts of messy things like sending up aircraft and taking air samples, so they fell back on Met Office (Met Office?!?) computer models that predicted that the air over Europe would soon have the consistency of a breeze block. That was bad enough, but then the Eurocrats decided to adopt the dreaded "zero-tolerance" policy on ash that basically meant that if a housewife in Strasbourg cleaned out the fireplace every jet liner between Edinburgh and Ankara would be left to rust on the tarmac.

Sound familiar? It's the same logic and methods (or lack thereof) used with swine flu and pretty much every other baseless scare that has provoked so much knee-jerk reaction and cynical power grabbing over the past couple of decades. Cost benefit analysis? Risk assessment? Common sense? The brains God gave a duck? Why bother when the Precautionary Principle reigns supreme and there are so many diktats to be imposed? Besides, there are more important things to attend to, like making holidays a "human right". The EU did slip up this time, though. I can't understand how they overlooked passing laws against secondhand ash and taxing the airlines to death for the privilege of being grounded. We did, however, have the amusing subplot of "scientists" who seem incapable of doing the maths, but didn't stop them from making a spurious connection between the Iceland volcano and global warming.

This is what life is like under the heel of the self-annointed Solons who claim to be more competent to rule the tiniest aspects of the serfs people's lives without all that messy democracy getting in the way. Or maybe, just maybe, this will act as a wake up call and the nations of Europe, or at least Britain, will take control of their own skies again.

Update: Fool me once...