Author Archives: Iain Roberts

By any measure, we’re beating terrorism in the UK. In the western world, the number of terrorist attacks has been falling since the end of the Soviet Union. In the UK there have been just a handful of attacks over the last few years. Across the whole world, with the exception of Israel, an individual’s chances of dying in a terrorist attack are less than one in 10,000 (the level at which experts generally deem a risk as to be not worth worrying about) – typically a lot less.

We also have no reason to think that terrorists have the ability or equipment to deliver some enormous attack with nuclear, chemical or biological weapons, or will gain it any time soon. Even if they were able to, we’ve no reason to think that it would usher the end of civilisation.

The Japanese Aum cult devoted years of research by over a hundred scientists to developing chemical and biological weapons. Hundreds of millions of dollars was spent and no avenue was left unexplored. Aum launched 17 attacks in Japan in the early 1990s and yet their deadliest attack killed just 12 people. Al-Quaeda don’t have those sorts of resources. Even the security services (understandably keen to maximise their budgets and importance) have been unable to suggest any more than that terrorists may develop these weapons at some time in the future. Despite what we might see in the movies, big terrorist attacks turn out to be quite difficult to pull off.

Unlike the US (where billions of dollars invested in Homeland Security has failed to turn up any significant threat), the UK has discovered terrorist threats within our shores. But what risk do the threats pose? How do they compare to the risks of, say, organised crime or obesity? Judging by the cases that have been made public, the risk is pretty low.

Try to imagine a law that said “you can watch this film totally legally at your local multiplex, but it’s illegal to possess a still image from the film and you could be imprisoned if you do.” Sounds a little odd?

How about a law saying “you can engage in a wholly legal activity and take a legal photograph of that activity, but if you keep the photograph, you could be sent to prison.”

In fact, just such a law is currently passing through parliament and, worryingly, it isn’t clear that the Liberal Democrats will even oppose it.

The legislation in question is …

I wonder whether it was incredible chutzpah or mere ignorance on the part of our Chancellor Alistair Darling. On the Today programme, he suggested that the loss of records on half the population was an argument IN FAVOUR of ID cards.

The reasoning goes something like this: OK we might hand over all your person details to criminals, but when you have a biometric ID card, they won’t be able to exploit it. Sure, they’ll know a host of intimate details about your life but without your fingerprint or iris, all that information will useless.

Perhaps I overlooked the part in the ID card costings where the Government pays for every person in the country to have a home iris-reader to authenticate themselves to their Internet banking service; but this is either hopelessly naive or exceptionally foolish.

Let’s be clear about this: the cards themselves are not the issue. Sure, they’ll be horribly expensive. Yes, we know that biometrics are a long way from the infallability that ministers tout, and that the Government’s own trials make the flaws glaringly obvious. But, honestly, the card isn’t such a big deal.

Books and newspapers are filled with news and debate about crime. As far as I can tell from the evidence, crime in the UK peaked in 1995, dropped sharply up to 2000 and has dropped more slowly since. There are variations for individual categories of crime, and the whole business is complicated by changes in the way recorded crimes are counted, but the overall trend is clear.

This might give pause for thought to those who give the credit to Labour’s increasingly authoritarian laws. It normally takes a year or two from a measure being introduced in Parliament to it having an effect on the streets. If government law and order policies have made the difference, we would have to conclude that John Major gets the credit: whatever his Government did in the early ’90s must have done the trick. Blair, by contrast, appears to have managed to slow the fall: any new policies introduced around 1997 and 1998 would have started making a difference around 2000, at just the time the drop in crime petered out.

As it happens, I don’t think the evidence supports the law and order policies of either party making much difference. The economic upturn of the early ’90s probably had a much bigger effect. ASBOs, CCTV, high prison populations and rafts of draconian measures brought in or accelerated over the last decade seem to have made little or no difference.

But is there a link we’re missing? Figuring out why crime falls and rises isn’t simple. After all, if it were just a reflection of the economic state of the nation, why was crime so much higher in the 1980s than the 1970s?

I’ll admit that I really don’t know, but take some consolation from the experts not knowing (or, at least, not agreeing) either.

Which brings us onto David Steel as our modern saviour, a secular deity perhaps. Did Sir David deliver us from evil more effectively than the church has ever managed?