[Silhouette]

I don't fly from Heathrow airport for this reason. As far as I'm concerned, I do have something to hide: the intimate details of my body are not for the amusement or abuse of random "security" staff. If you don't like that point of view, f@#% off: we voted out the government who tried to turn us into a fear-driven police state, and now we are laughing at all the former ministers when they bleat about how much the world will end when the new government starts undoing all the abusive laws and regulations that the old one imposed.

[pmjordan]

Is there a list of airports (terminals?) where these scanners are being used? I visit family in the UK a couple of times a year, usually by plane, but this is one of the reasons we're taking the car & ferry on the upcoming trip. And yeah, I strongly hope the Tory & LibDem government make good on their civil liberty promises and then some.

[SoftwareMaven]

We did the same thing here in America. Guess what? Nothing changed.

Once a power is taken by the government, it is not likely to let it go. I hope you have better luck than we did.

[Silhouette]

I sympathise with your predicament. However, from my outsider's point of view, the US political system is something of a different beast to those here in Europe: it now appears to be systemically corrupt, representing special interests rather than those of the common citizen and with well-established feedback loops that make the unfortunate bias stronger with every election.

Consequently, I'm not sure elections in the US really mean very much at the moment. In the grand scheme of things, the two big political parties are closely aligned on most issues. Those distinctions that do exist between them are minor disagreements, which get dramatically exaggerated in election propaganda, rather than differences of any real substance.

I hope that here in the UK, where we have never quite fallen into the trap of having only two big political parties, we have more chance of seeing real improvement. It helps that we didn't give government to any single party at the last general election, for the first time in many years. That must have been a nasty wake-up call for those old-school Conservatives who had arrogantly assumed that they were somehow entitled to form the next government just because Labour were not going to. (Labour, does anybody remember them? No? Good. :-))

Fortunately, the principles of restoring civil liberties and rolling back the nanny/surveillance state are among the major issues on which the two coalition partners now in government strongly agreed anyway, and where there are politicians from both parties in the coalition with a long track record of criticising the sorts of measures we are talking about in this discussion. They need this sort of issue of common interest in order to build a successful and lasting coalition, and it's also a politically popular stance: FUD about terrorism threats doesn't really cut it with the average voter here any more, partly because people's minds are more focussed on basics like getting/keeping a job and paying the rent/mortgage, and partly just because you can only keep a population accepting of draconian laws for so long when there is no serious bad stuff happening to convince them to Be Afraid.

In short, I like to think that we are in with a chance, because while the political system in the US seems to have other systemic concerns and little incentive to put right the abuses of the past, here in the UK it is politically expedient to do so both for the popularity of the changes themselves and as a means of strengthening the governing coalition. Time will tell...