"Un-British Snitching"? Un-British, All Right!

I don’t know where Alan West gets the idea that malicious gossip is un-British. But he intended his “snitching” remark to attract attention, and it has duly done so, thereby distracting us all from his perfectly ludicrous suggestion that we now face our greatest threat ever, that it will take decades to defeat, blah, blah, blah.

Are there warships aiming their guns at us from the Channel or the North Sea? Is there nightly aerial bombardment of our cities and towns? Are hostile forces massing to sweep across the Central European plains, through the Baltic, and down over the top of Scandinavia?

The non-existent “Al-Qaeda global terror network”, with its imaginary training camps in Pakistan, poses such a grave danger that it is apparently unable to supply any explosives whatever to its “operatives”, who have never been anywhere near Pakistan, and who seem unable to do anything more than occasionally botch what the IRA used to do regularly and with devastating competence.

The Police didn’t even notice these would-be car bombs, because they would have had to patrol the streets in order to notice them. And MI5 either had no idea (in which case, it should be disbanded), or allowed these putative attacks to go ahead (in which case, its officers should be prosecuted).

Still, we need identity cards, don’t we? We need Control Orders, don’t we? We need ninety-day detention without charge (not trial, charge), don’t we? We’ve been right to give up our opposition to torture, haven’t we? After all, these things are so effective, aren’t they? And how else are we to defend our liberty and “way of life”?