Globaliser -
Whatever Customs might be doing behind the scenes, it didn't matter to me - I just had one carry-on bag. The thing that struck me was that I never cleared Customs. There may have been some passageway where the shoulder marigold brigade lurked behind a one-way mirror waiting to pounce, but it wasn't explicit. From the moment I left the Martinez in Cannes to the point I checked in to the Sheraton in Edinburgh, I made no declaration, explicit or implicit, to those chaps and chapesses who guard our shores from portable harm and Gordon Brown's purse from light-fingered duty evaders.
There's an argument that for EU arrivals, this is as it should be. It's certainly a new freedom that I cherish. But flights from Israel and SA (at least) arrive at T1, and unless they have a separate customs check before the transfers hall their hand luggage is similarly sacrosanct. Even if the checked baggage is given intensive scrutiny behind the scenes, there's simply no place that people could declare goods on which duty is due, assuming they wanted to.
I appreciate that somewhere like Heathrow it's very difficult to efficiently segregate the different classes of incoming pax, but it seems a bit ironic given the draconian levels of security we currently enjoy.
R