The Horsell's Mouth Politics, pedantry and personal interests

The Home Secretary has revealed that the level of terror threat to the public has been officially increased to “severe” by the Joint Terrorism Analysis Centre. This comes a few days after flights to and from Yemen were suspended. Does anyone else see a pattern emerging here?

I have said before that I anticipate more and more security alerts as we run up to an election as Gordon Brown appeals to us to believe that he is the only person able to look after us.

But let’s look at how likely this really is. Today, the threat level gets raised to “severe”, meaning an attack is “highly likely”. Yet Alan Johnson accompanies this move by stressing “there was no intelligence to suggest a terrorist attack was imminent“. Eh? Of course we wouldn’t expect him to release details of operations being picked up by GCHQ or MI6 but it’s still an odd thing to say given that the reason that the threat level is raised in the first place.

In addition, the threat level has been set at “severe” or higher since August 2006. In that time, we have had one very amateurish attack on Glasgow Airport where the perpitrators were the only victims (and they were only 50% successful in that given that they had both intended to die and only one did). Another very unsophisticated attack in London was foiled - both were also probably connected to Gordon Brown becoming PM that week and so might not have happened but for that event.

Nothing else has materialised that even comes close to the level of violence seen on the mainland at the height of The Troubles. During that time, there was no terror threat indicator made public via the BBC and Prime Ministers made speeches not outlining in the gravest terms actions that were being taken against a perceived threat but of defiance in the face of enemy action and sympathy with those killed.

In my view, the decision to make public the UK terror threat level is little but a publicity device that keeps terror in the news and in people’s minds when actually the security services would be much better left to their own devices to fight the issue out of the limelight. What possible use can it serve to tell people that they are in danger when you absolutely can’t tell them why? During the Second World War, the very opposite approach was used by the government and people were told that they should simply keep calm and carry on.

And why were they not given more information? Because the government believed, rightly, that the result would be a scared and frightened population. Which can be the only reason therefore that this government has chosen the approach it has - and we ought to ask ourselves why.