Pity the poor immigrant

Well, that wasn't so bad after all! Flights both to and from Warsaw right on time, and when we got back to Heathrow last evening, only a minimal queue at the immigration desk for UK and other EU citizens.  We spent more time waiting for the steps to be attached to the aircraft than we did in the immigration line.  There was a much longer queue for non-EU passengers, but every desk was staffed and the line seemed to be moving quite quickly.

There are suggestions that the Home Secretary, Theresa May, is about to risk embarrassment by scrapping the more stringent passport checks that she insisted on last year, and which seem to be the direct cause of the queues.  This possibility has already fired up a few knuckle-draggers to cry foul.  One genius warned darkly on the Daily Telegraph website that when we hear the "big bangs",  which are apparently coming "very soon", we'll all regret that we relaxed the rules, just to save travellers a few minutes.  Ah yes, I thought: how tragic it was that lax passport controls at Luton railway station allowed the 7/7 bombers to pass through unimpeded on that fateful morning back in 2005.

There is, of course, one very important reason why the immigration lines at UK airports are a lot longer than they are in the rest of Europe.  The UK has steadfastly refused to join the "Schengen agreement" that allows EU citizens to pass between most countries without any passport or identity checks.  If you fly from, say, Paris to Frankfurt, you can get straight off your plane and into a taxi, while passengers arriving from London have to queue up with those from all corners of the globe, usually in a less salubrious corner of the airport,   to present their passports.  Unless the UK signs up for Schengen, it will always need a lot more passport checkers at its airports than most of its neighbours do, and if it also insists on more rigorous document checks, there will always be a risk of big queues at busy times.

There doesn't seem to be any evidence that the UK's refusal to adopt the Schengen agreement has made the country any more secure than its European neighbours.  However,  the Telegraph's "big bangs" correspondent would doubtless be vehemently opposed to adopting it now, and would no doubt be supported in that by a good proportion of the population.  Remarkably, the subject hasn't even been raised in all the recent carping about queues at Heathrow.  It would solve the problems overnight, but it would be a brave politician that would dare to suggest it.