…says person who read Home Secretary John Reid’s latest attempt.

OK, just my pathetic try at subverting that Telegraph headline (and the best I can do at 4am). But, in the almost six years after 11th September 2001, there has been one terrorist incident in Britain. Sadly, 52 people were killed. However, the other sixty million people in the country were not killed.

In 1992 I lived in London for six months. In 1996 I lived in London again, for four months. In those ten months there were five IRA bomb attacks in the capital. I was quite near the Canary Wharf bomb when it exploded.

But everyone just got on with life. There were no stupid new laws introduced, no civil liberties restricted for the tens of millions of law-abiding citizens of Britain.

There probably will be another incident sometime. But the biggest threat this country faces is from people such as John Reid, with his dire warnings of ‘devastating consequences’ and ‘incalculable damage’. It is people like him who are undermining and destroying our way of life.

Next week’s local elections are our chance to tell Mr Reid and Labour exactly what we think. The poll may bring ‘dire consequences’ for them.

UPDATE: (29 April 2007)

‘Leaking the news of an upcoming police raid, said Britain’s top antiterrorism policeman last week, is wrong. Indeed, said the Met’s Peter Clarke, it is “beneath contempt”, the act of those who “do not care what damage they do”. These are strong words, stronger still when they were apparently directed at John Reid, the home secretary.’ The Times