Is Blair over-egging the Terrorism Pudding?

I don't want to appear flippant, nor do I want to tempt fate, but I think he is.

Blair, Clarke and Blunkett between them want us all to think that dark Islamic forces are hiding around every corner waiting to blow us up... any second now. Boo!

This insidious "monster under the bed" strategy is designed to make us all fear for our lives and blindly hand Blair carte-blanche to enact any power he sees fit. Well bollocks to that!

I don't doubt that more bombings are on the way. What I do doubt is the claim that we are living in more dangerous times and that somehow the current threat of terrorism is different to all the previous threats we have witnessed. The method of delivery might be different, but the end result is the same... Bombs blow up, people die. The IRA did it for years before Blair got into power.

Just over a year ago, Justin Lewis wrote in the Guardian:

Since January 2002, the Times, Financial Times, the Guardian, the Mail and the Mirror, have, between them, run an average of 400 stories about international terrorism every year. And the trend is upward, not downward. If we compare that with a four-and-a-half-year period before 9/11 (from 1997 to mid 2001), this amounts to a five-fold increase in news coverage.

Conventional wisdom - informed by a steady stream of political rhetoric - says that this is a response to the increasing risk posed by global terrorism since the attack on the twin towers. Indeed, the British government's recent leaflet advising citizens what to do in the event of an attack - together with a succession of warnings from the US government - imply the risk has reached unprecedented levels. And yet what is strikingly absent from both public discussion or news coverage is that there is little concrete evidence to support this view.

The US government's own figures on international terrorism - which it defines as the targeting of non-combatants or property by non-state agents and includes the actions of groups like the IRA, the UDF and Eta - suggests that the most active period of international terrorist activity was the mid-80s. With occasional blips - such as 1991 and 1999 to 2001 - the annual number of terrorist attacks has been in general decline since then.

Are New Labour spinning the perceived terrorism threat? I think they are. We all know that New Labour are masters of spin. Would you put it past them? They are playing dangerous games with our civil liberties and calling us all pathetic liberals if we dare to disagree. Blair all but said, you are either with me or with the terrorists.

Of course it will only take one more terrorist bombing for Blair to shout from the rooftops... "See... I was right!". Well no Mr. Blair, you were wrong. You failed to produce a single case where 90 days of internment would have stopped a terrorist attack. Yesterday, Parliament told you you were wrong. Accept it. Get over it.

Filed under: Politics, New Labour Spin