In a 'big society'-style drive to eliminate unnecessary public spending on the security services, passengers flying out of UK airports are to be encouraged to perform security checks on themselves, instead of requiring the assistance of expensive airport police.
Members of the public will be expected to pat themselves down, peer inside their own shoes and use a mirror to check if they are looking shifty, before going through a doorway and saying 'bleep' loudly if they are carrying any metal items. The move is expected to save millions of pounds a year, and hopes are high that safety might even be improved.
Trials of the new system at East Midlands airport have been overwhelmingly positive, with nine would-be hijackers discovering shoe bombs and plastic explosives on their persons in the first month, and several football hooligans grassing themselves up for carrying metal knuckledusters and flick-knives.
"It's not perfect, no security system is," explained home secretary Theresa May. "If you ask me whether a determined terrorist could defeat this, I'll have to say it's possible, but they'd need to be a pretty convincing fibber to get past the mirror test, and anyway, the 'bleep' thing would always get them."
There have been only a few slight hitches so far. In one unfortunate episode, a hardened terrorist managed to grab himself before he could turn himself in, and held himself hostage for several hours before tragically disarming himself and simultaneously killing his captive in a controlled explosion.
In a slightly less serious incident, one passenger insisted on performing a deep anal cavity search upon himself, obstructing the check-in queue for Monarch Airlines for several minutes until an off-duty stewardess eventually threw a glass of cold water over him. "You can't be too careful," he explained to journalists afterwards.
