Britain’s so soppy we can’t even fight off a toy helicopter

ONE of the things I most enjoyed about living in Russia was the absence of prissy health and safety. The doors on the Moscow metro slammed shut with a vicious crash, after a single warning, and if you were caught in them, too bad. No pathetic reopening of the doors. So nobody ever was caught in them, and trains ran fast and frequently.

On ferociously freezing days when any Western airline would have given up, Russian internal flights took off without hesitation, and arrived on time.

This is nothing to do with communism or tyranny. Israel is much the same. Russia (how can I put this?) is still a rather masculine society, in which the influence of lawyers and social workers is minimal. And I rather think that if anyone was fool enough to fly a drone over one of Moscow’s major airports today, two things would happen within about half an hour. The drone would be shot out of the sky, and the person involved would be in the slammer, contemplating a lengthy spell in Siberia. If the airport ever had closed (which I doubt), it would soon be opened again.

When I lived there, in the 1990s, this aspect of it reminded me of the equally masculine post-war society in which I grew up.

‘Just get on with it,’ was a good rule, in my view, and it served us so much better than our current attitude. No doubt, the health and safety frenzy created by Margaret Thatcher and John Major ( who licensed ambulance chasers here) saves some lives. But it also makes us so gutless that our very survival as a country is in question.

THERE’S another worrying thing about the wet response to t he Gatwick drone. Here we are, with our own burgeoning KGB-type organisations. There’ s the ludicrous MI5, lavished with public money and constantly claiming to be saving us from the supposed menace of terror.

Then there’s the so-called ‘British FBI’, the National Crime Agency. And MI6, which also claims to know everything. We also have the gigantic secret doughnut of GCHQ, supposedly plucking the plots of the wicked from the airwaves with fantastically sophisticated devices. Not to mention the police who, having forgotten how to walk, maintain their own air force instead.

And then there is the huge industry of ‘ airport security’, which forces innocent people to shuffle t hrough humiliating searches, in which they must remove their clothes and have their private parts photographed by scanners, before they can get near a plane.

But all these organisations and ‘security’ personnel can’t find a way to deal with what is, in effect, a large remote-controlled toy helicopter buzzing about near the runway. It is nothing to do with the resources available to them. It is just that they have all gone soft, like supermarket apples.

It is rather lucky that we don’t actually have any serious enemies at the moment, isn’t it?

THIS Christmas Eve it is 50 years since the Apollo 8 Moon Mission, which transformed our view of our planet by providing the two most astonishing photos of our home: one of the whole planet, the only tiny trace of warmth and colour in a frozen, monochrome universe; the other of Earth rising over the surface of the Moon. The astronauts – practical, military men versed in science, maths and engineering but overcome by the mysterious glory of the universe seen from space – took it in turns to read the soaring poetry of the opening words of the King James Bible. How the atheists fumed. Let them. They can never defeat Christmas.