Still on your own

Since we wrote our last update on the 'war on terror' in the UK, nothing has changed – apart from the victim count, that is. The extra number of robocops posing in public places has not increased the safety of the public one bit.

On the contrary, now that Cressida Dick has been promoted by Home Secretary Amber Rudd to be in charge of all the London robocops – you remember her surely: the one who was in charge of the team that executed a completely innocent man with a shot to the head whilst holding him down on the floor of a tube carriage – now that she is in total charge it seems obvious that the safety of the public has if anything decreased. After that incident no one was held to serious account and Cressida was even promoted, so remember: if you hear a bang and you follow Government advice and run you may very well be the one who gets plugged.

In the meantime, there have been more attacks and more victims. As in the past, only the incompetence of the dim attackers has prevented major tragedies. We have been lucky. But terrorists seem now to be avoiding the suicide option, preferring the live-to-bomb-another-day approach. And, of course, if you can close an entire motorway for 12 hours by dumping a bin-bag full of junk at the side of the road, your greatest fear is a fine for fly-tipping. Unless, of course, the terrorists can't resist taking some drive-by action on these sitting ducks.

The public cannot be passively protected from these attacks. Without helping these rather slow terrorists by telling them about the many easy ways there are to kill and maim, we suggest that our readers just imagine the things a terrorist can do in a crowd with the stuff that is under the average household kitchen sink or in the average garage. In the past year the trend to low-tech 'quiet attacks', whether by terrorists, gangs or just spurned lovers has been unmistakable. A time will come when we are walking around wearing hoods to protect our faces. Oh, just a minute…

You are on your own, a puppet of probability. Is there some calculation at the back of the Government mind that relates the number of incidents over time to public unrest? It seems that the thing that worries our masters most is not terrorism but the backlash it might provoke – as long as the citizens are content to play football on the jammed motorway and not turn in rage on their protectors gingerly investigating a bin-bag by the side of the road our masters will carry on ruling serenely.