Matthew's Journal

Apparantly, the security services have foiled a plot to blow up "up to 10" transatlantic flights leaving the UK at some point in the near future. Relatedly, they're now cancelling great numbers of flights into and out of the UK, and requiring people to travel with no hand luggage; the claim is that other cells might strike now worried they're about to be caught, too.[1]

In an entirely coincidental piece of timing, yesterday John Reid was going on about how we had to be prepared to sacrifice our hard-won freedoms to protect our freedoms[2]. It seems likely that today's events (and maybe the prosecution of the people arrested at some point) will be used to help frighten us into accepting ID cards, and other curbs on our civil liberties.

For reference, here are some numbers. 2,976 people died from the terrorist attack on September 11th, 2001[3], and 52 people were killed in the London bombings of July 7, 2005[4]. A Boeing 747-400 holds around 400 people[5], meaning that an upper limit on the expect casualties in this case (assuming complete success, and full planes) would be around 4000 people.

Those are quite large numbers, but let me try and put them in perspective. In 2005, 3,201 people were killed on the UK's roads, and 29,000 were seriously injured[6]. In 1995 (which seems to be the most recent stats available), over 120,000 people died as a result of smoking (that's about 1/5 of all deaths)[7].
The Irish troubles killed 3,523 people between July 1969 and the end of 2001[8].

I'm ignoring for purposes of argument, the enormous casualties of war and terrorism elsewhere in the world, particularly in the Middle East, because they're not related to the point I'm trying to make. In the UK, you are very unlikely to be killed as a result of terrorist action - a road traffic accident is more likely to kill you, to oversimplify a little. And yet it's terrorism that dominates the headlines, on an alarmingly regular basis. I'm not belittling the tragedy of people dying in terrorist attacks, nor saying that we should do nothing to try and stop them. I'd just like to see a sense of perspective restored.

Terrorism is not the greatest threat to British society - for the most part it just causes inconvenience and disruption. I'd argue that a greater threat is politicians using "the terrorist threat" to justify their own mad authoritarian schemes. You're either supporting them in their scramble to remove our ancient and hard-won civil liberties (habeas corpus anyone?), or you're opening the UK up to massive terrorist attacks. This article talks a lot of sense about how by abandoning our own freedoms because we're afraid of terrorists, we've given in to those terrorists. I'd go further and claim that politicians who use the excuse of terrorism to undermine our civil liberties are little better than the terrorists themselves.


[1]BBC article
[2]BBC article
[3]Wikipedia article
[4]Wikipedia article.
[5]Boeing website.
[6]DfT statistics
[7]Department of Heath Statistics
[8]Cain project, University of Ulster