Don't Worry, Gromit, Everything's Under Control

The Secretary of State for Internment and Repatriation, Jacqui Smith, has warned of a "growing" threat of "attacks on crowded public places" featuring "the use potentially of dirty bombs and other things". Is it possible that the very same something which John Reid wasn't thinking about while he was Minister of Defence has come home to roost? Smith went on to say that the terrorist threat "is something that we need to take seriously", and claimed that "we are in terms of the resource and the capability we are putting into it". Nevertheless, the British public is required to "remain vigilant over the Christmas period" and also "urged ... to get on with their daily lives". Don't let them interfere with your way of life, but remember to do your bit for the clash of civilisations effort.

Although Smith specifically warned of a threat, Smith "did not suggest there was a specific threat"; but she did emphasise "how the number of people tracked by the intelligence services because of suspected involvement in terror plots had risen from 1,600 to 2,000 in just a year". The argument seems to be that the more the intelligence services are looking for something, the more plentiful that something becomes - an argument which served the Vicar of Downing Street rather well during the early part of his crusade against Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass ethereality. I am not certain Smith has waited quite long enough for this particular set of emperor's clothes to come back into fashion.

Possibly with a straight face (it was only Sky News), Smith also "insisted the government could be trusted with sensitive biometric data despite the debacle over the loss of sensitive data relating to 25 million people held by HM Revenue and Customs". As you would expect, the recent fiasco is precisely the sort of thing the Government's magical biometric snake-oil scheme is designed to prevent: "The whole point about the identity system is that, actually, you will need to have both biographic details and biometric details, which incidentally will be kept on separate databases", actually. Clearly, then, in order for your personal details to fall into the wrong hands, some penny-pinching bureaucrat will actually have to lose four discs instead of two. I feel safer already.