I agree with the Don. People expect less and less of their governments, but there remains a deep-rooted belief that very high up the list of a government’s priorities should be protecting national security from ANY breach, however small - and that government is the only agency capable of co-ordinating this.

People don’t think that the government should protect them when they’re crossing the road; most people treat that as their own responsibility. But no-one proposes that individuals should take out terrorist insurance, or co-ordinate their own protection against terrorist attacks.

So it’s not a question of risk, or consequences. It’s a question of whether or not the government is competent at doing what people expect it to do. Can it do - and is it being seen to do - the basic things that people expect as the least a government ought to be doing. If it doesn’t - or is seen not to be doing -

Where does this leave me? Agreeing with the government’s approach? No. But it suggests the normal lefty approach to this issue is wrong, because it ignores the things most people see as important.

If the left wants to win the argument on this we need to stop arguing that detention without trial etc impinges on civil liberties and start arguing that it doesn’t make people safer, and that we have alternatives that do. For example, an argument that’s underused is the argument that control orders, raids based on little intelligence, detention without trial & increased stop and search powers have no effect on our ability to stop terorism, and the only thing that counts is more and better intelligence, which they prevent by isolating the communities that could provide them.

The argument “x is safer than y” beats the argument that “y is safer than x but x protects the civil liberties of suspected terrorists” every time.

There’s nothing innovative about locking people up without trial: Heath did it in Northern Ireland in 1970 with disasterous results. And there’s no evidence that its benefits outweigh its risks.

http://psweb.sbs.ohio-state.edu/faculty/jmueller/ISA2005.PDF

Unity, great work (although it took me 2 goes to read the whole thing through).

About the twin towers worst case scenario thing - another point is that rather than being surprising that it was as few as 3000 when it could have been 50,000 - the surprising thing is that it was as many as it was! Assuming it was genuine, on that video of bin Laden that was released shortly afterwards he said that they hadn’t expected the buildings to be totally demolished only the floors above where the planes crashed at best.

Giddens’ mistake here is to think that ‘things changed’ in 2001 and on that basis the lack of any terrorist attacks on the same scale subsequently looks like a freak occurrence which surely can’t last, whereas in fact the 2001 attacks were the freak occurrence and the lack of such large scale attacks subsequently is things going back to normal.

What Giddens doesn’t say, but I think lies behind these calculations, is that the political fallout for a centre-left government of a terrorist attack taking place is lethal.

If a terrorist attack takes place, people will quickly ask whether it could have been prevented. If it gets to be widely believed that the government ignored the threat, or failed to bring in laws which could have stopped the terrorists, then that is game over end of government.

Going on and on about being tough on terrorism and legislating to restrict civil liberties is a way of trying to minimise this risk - out of a mixture of a belief that doing this will genuinely reduce the risk of a terrorist attack and also that if one takes place, they can say that they had been trying to do all they could to stop the terrorists, but were prevented by the Labour Left/the House of Lords/the Liberal Democrats/David Cameron/Shami Chakrabati/whoever.

As an example, the political consequences for Labour of the London bombings would have been much greater if the Tories had been arguing loudly for years that we needed to extend detention without trial to stop terrorists, and Labour had been refusing to do so, or to pass any new anti-terror legislation on the grounds that the risk didn’t justify the reduction in people’s liberties.

This isn’t a justification of any of the government’s recent legislation, but it is impossible to explain why they have been making it such a priority with such apparently weak arguments without the political dimension.

None of which alters the point that Anthony Giddens is a first grade idiot, mind.