Eh?

I've been away for a day or two so apologies for the lack of posting (again). I've also seemed to miss most of the furore surrounding the terrorism attempts of recent days and have been desperately trying to catch up this morning via the Times and the Today programme...where the words "full, public inquiry" are already marching with predictable tedium in the general direction of the discourse.

Frankly, I just despair.

Regular BBF-ers will know that I am no particular fan of those who see the dread hand of the police/nanny (delete as applicable) state behind every policy announcement on potato blight, but the horrific brilliance of the technology that was used to catch these loons simply took my breath away. Yeah, I know I'm just an oldie who thought for years that wireless interweb was a form of witchcraft but do SIM cards really contain all that information about who you called, when and at what location? Numberplate recognition? I'm all in favour of it by the way - nobody can deny there is a need - but what an age we live in, eh?

I don't, however, share the view that just because our security services managed to avert a major catastrophe that it's no big deal (see the Taking Liberties blogpost on recent events here). Sorry, but it is. I heard one MP (via TIP) describing how his daughter was in the Tiger Tiger nightclub on Thursday and despaired of the fact that an eighteen year old celebrating finishing her exams is "fair game" because she's a "slag". This mindset combined with murderous intent cannot be dismissed with alls-well-that-ends-well, not least because such attempts are hardly isolated incidents.

The threat level here is now at "critical" which means that all bag-carriers are frisked on the way into the Parliamentary buildings which I, for one, find mildly erotic. But in spite of being "no expert in such matters", Atkins suggests in his post that "it would seem to make sense, at least chronologically to issue these warnings before the baddies did their thing." Dammit, yes! After all, clairvoyance is a requirement in most jobs in the public sector nowadays. Maybe we should replace Jacqui Smith with Derek Acora?

In spite of all this, I was wandering around the Whitehall area yesterday and spotted no less than two protests against the Government (one outside the Treasury on the corner of Bridge Street and one on Parliament Square) so in spite of the dread warnings from the liberty lobby about people in possession of victoria sponges in the Westminster area being sent to the Tower, life largely continues as usual here. But with more police, naturally.

On the subject of liberty, I was chatting with someone last week who was putting forward some interesting theories about how much information we voluntarily put into the public sphere about our private lives, and how we are each eroding our own multiple identities by so doing. Thinking about it, it seems to me that the real breakdown between public and private is being done by us lot with our Facebook profiles and the Lord knows what else rather than the Government who has trouble administering the CSA database adequately.

To conclude with one thought: just as night follows day, the calls for "public inquiry" into unexplained "security failings" have started already. Public inquiries, for the uninitiated, are bodies which are convened at the persistent request of campaigners which provide a fully independent assessment of the situation and how it was handled. If the inquiry finds the Government/security services are not to blame, then they are rebranded as "Government Whitewashes" and fresh demands for fully independent inquiries emanate from those groups who seem to think that the correct conclusions are not reached until they fully converge with their particular point of view.