Not one bomb has gone off.
Our esteemed protectors have foiled each and every one of these hundreds, and hundreds, and hundreds of dastardly plots.
Of course.
Yet their astonishing success means that they need far more extensive and draconian powers than they currently possess, in order to do things that were unthinkable in the days when bombs were going off on a regular basis.
Of course.
Funnily enough, those powers were first proposed in the years between the end of Irish Republican terrorism and the supposed beginning of the Islamist terrorism that never seems to materialise in actual fact.
When Michael Howard wanted to enact these measures, then mainland Britain, at least, positively prided itself on having no terrorist problem of any kind whatever.
Not because people were being foiled from blowing us up, but because no one had any desire to do so.
Now, however, we positively pride ourselves on the aversion of at least one such attempt every day.
With never a day on which anyone, anyone at all, manages to slip through the net.
Of course.
Of course.
Meaning that the net needs to be made vastly tighter than it already is.
Of course.
At last someone who gets it. Michael Howard, Shadowed without disagreement by Tony Blair, wanted to do all this more than 20 years ago. It has nothing to do with terrorism. What terrorism in those days?
ReplyDeleteOr in these days.
DeleteBut when he was Shadowing Howard, first at Employment and then at the Home Office, Blair did not merely agree with him. He consistently outdid him from the "something of the night" right.