NOW OBVIOUSLY no one wants to get blown out of the skies en route to Torremolinos, but am I alone in thinking that the government might have over-reacted a little in banning hand luggage and severely restricting what items can be carried onto a plane?

Who in their right mind would stop a parent taking a colouring book onto a ten-hour transatlantic flight? And if there's a way to bring down a Boeing 747 using a Dan Brown paperback and a copy of the Daily Mail, I think the terrorists might have worked it out by now.

There is one simple answer to this crisis - ban certain people from flying at all. Let them use the ferries and the Eurostar. And to what kind of people do I allude, I hear you ask? Well, we've got to be a bit sensitive here, so let's reinvent Norman Tebbit's cricket test: Sajid Mahmood wouldn't get a seat, but Monty Panesar would.

Get me?

Now I realize that this is completely unfair on the 99.99 per cent of Muslims (many of them British) who bear no ill will towards this country or towards the Wicked West in general. But when you've got the entire holidaymaking population inconvenienced, not to mention hundreds of thousands of business travellers, then something radical has to be done.

If that's not an option, what about this idea that I found on an internet message board (posted there, no doubt, by a single man who lives with his mum and has a poster of the Starship Enterprise on his bedroom wall): why not tranquilise passengers before take-off and revive them upon landing like they do on Red Dwarf or in the Alien films?

No crap film to suffer, no dreadful food to eat, no seat-back kicking, no whining kids, no being pestered to buy scratch cards and cheap perfume ? you just wake up refreshed at your destination.

Sounds wonderful.

Of course, there may be safety issues regarding the very young and the very old, but let's face it, the very young and the very old shouldn't be on a busy passenger flight in the first place. Well not on mine, anyway.

IN SIMILAR vein, we must take to task Scotland Yard assistant commissioner Tarique Ghaffur, Britain's most senior Muslim policeman and one of few top cops who doesn't seem to be suing for unfair dismissal? yet.

Mr Ghaffur, who's supposed to be implementing the law, complains about stop-and-search procedures that see, in his mind, a disproportionate number of young Asians being pulled over as suspected terrorists. He moans his subordinates have "often been led more by people's physical appearances than by specific intelligence".

Well it's hardly rocket science, is it? Again, this discussion requires an element of sensitivity, but how many retired, pipe-smoking, Telegraph-reading, tweed-wearing, 65-year-old white males have committed terrorist outrages in recent years? Is it then any wonder that they breeze blithely past the checkpoints while 20-year-old Asian lads with dodgy beards, baggy trousers and bad attitudes find themselves bending over for the rubber glove?

I'm sorry, but we're at war here.

And the enemy is very clearly amongst us. The problem is in identifying the 0.01 per cent before they do something daft.