I’ve been racking my brain for the last couple of minutes to see if I can find a more lampooned government idea than the colour coded alert level. The traffic-cone hotline comes close, and while we’ve all laughed at leaders’ poor grammar and habit of walking into doors, they’re not really government ideas.

So I’m left with the alert system. Which looks like this on t’internet:

And so on, and so forth.

So it is with probably a little sadness on the part of comedians that we hear that the alerts may be going.

The widely-derided US system of colour-coded terror warnings may soon be binned, according to reports.

The system, brought in eight years ago in the wake of 9/11, ranges from green (low risk of attacks) up through blue, yellow (“significant” risk, the current level for the US as a whole) and orange (“high risk”, the current level for the aviation sector) to red (“severe” risk). It is currently being considered by a wide-ranging internal review of domestic security set in train by Obama administration homeland-sec chief Janet Napolitano.

The AP cites undisclosed official sources as saying that a proposal to scrap the multicoloured plan is under consideration by the multiple federal agencies involved.

Considering that no government is going to say that the alert level is “low” or “guarded”, in case they look stupid when something does happen, and that being all the way to the top makes the government look stupid if nothing happens, the alerts have always been a bit pointless. Glad to see people thinking new things about how to convey their scaremongering message…