The "EU" ...? All of it? All 26 countries?
Yes. It should have been dealt with at EU level, requiring these scanners to be installed at any airport in the EU that has more than a certain amount of passengers yearly. The UK got it absolutely right in this case, whereas we're going to have a mess of rules in the EU for the next 10-15 years until these scanners become widespread.
There's a lot of airport security which is just theater
Yes, agreed. Unfortunately, we all suffer for this theatre, particularly in airports that rely on poorly paid staff in expensive cities. Berlin-Brandenburg is a textbook example of this problem, where they simply can't find the people to actually staff security properly. Then the whole theatre also means that security checkpoints are often not open until 2 hours before the first flight, causing horrendous queues in the morning.
The other major issue is that despite huge amounts of money spent, we still haven't found a way to actually speed up the process. It's still a labour intensive process that requires huge amounts of airport real estate, whereas we really should be at the point now where someone travelling can just dump their luggage on the tray and walk through scanners without removing anything from their pockets or taking off any items of clothing.
