This is funny because just a few months ago, I was forced at Heathrow to chug -- not allowed to pour out! -- my entire water bottle that I had filled prior to my flight. The security person watched me do it and added, "bathroom's over there".
Anything a border official says is implicitly backed with the threat of, at a minimum, detention without trial and without basic humane treatment like access to drinking water. Heathrow has well publicised cases (and is not unusual in this).
It's probably much more boring. The choice was likely between leaving the whole water bottle and its contents in a bin of forbidden/discarded items, going home and missing the flight, or chugging it, or arranging a courier for said bottle.
Probably the act of defiance of pouring the contents onto the floor where there was no drain was implied to be disruptive and would have lead to harsher sanction for no reasonable payoff.
As suspected, your claim is grossly exaggerated. You have one blog post from a decade ago (which I remember reading at the time since I met the author at a conference) which is about being denied entry as the grounds for travel were misdeclared, and not about oppressive security theatre at the passenger screening area.
> which is about being denied entry as the grounds for travel were misdeclared
Yes but not really. It's mainly about the kind of treatment you face when you get on the wrong side of the airport machine, and as such it's exactly what you're implicitly threatened with if you step out of line.
Heathrow is a fucking miserable place with spiteful staff and it would not surprise me one bit if someone decided to fuck with a traveller this way. I saw a girl running to catch a bus to another terminal for a connecting flight, and the guy controller her made an enormous stink about her "breathing on me". She was polite and apologetic but she got pulled aside and made to wait for everyone else to get through, got sternly chastised before being allowed to continue (whereupon she missed the connecting bus and presumably her flight). Same trip I saw them them shouting and swearing at disabled travellers who needed wheelchairs. Every other member of staff in the airport was stood around fucking with their phones and seemed furious whenever they had to do their job.
Given that the border officer has discretion to refuse you entry, failing to down your drink can turn into attempting to enter illegally if they want it to.
> If the median UK salary is >£35,000 I really wonder how arrive at the conclusion that missing a flight will set you back "years or decades"...
Ok, now take that figure and deduct tax, housing, food, utilities and so on - how much do you think is disposable/saveable? And then take the typical cost of a last-minute replacement flight and compare those two numbers.
it would be incredibly inconvenient, and maybe missing other parts of a full vacation would set them back, but thats not the only reason people buy flights
