The health-and-safety Armageddon I long expected has arrived, writes Simon Jenkins. It is another "swine flu", he says.
It was bad enough to have an idiot with a shoe bomb stirring equally idiot regulators to enforce billions of pounds of cost and inconvenience on air travellers in the cause of "it might happen again". Now we have a volcano and a bit of dust. It is another swine flu.
The truth is that putting large, heavy bits of metal into the air is just too much for the psyche of modern regulators. They panic. The slightest risk cannot be taken or someone might blame the regulators, whose job is not to assess risk but avert it.
Even an airline company, with everything to lose, is not allowed to assess its own risk. Many more will die on roads and elsewhere because of the anarchy the air controllers have unleashed on Europe, but that is not their business. They don't care.
Sterling stuff ... the nannies are taking a beating!
ICELAND'S REVENGE THREAD
