MI5, Blair, Brown... anyone else want to tell us we're in danger?

A sequence of warnings last weekend about the ever-present (indeed, ever-increasing) homegrown terror threat, and how we're all going to need to hunker down, be very careful and vigilant, and while we're at it, it would be nice if those silly MPs who were worried about old-fashioned things like civil liberties could make sure they get in there and vote for 90 days' detention of terror suspects this time?

First out of the trap was Dame Eliza Manningham-Buller, head of MI5, who claimed in a major speech on Friday:

• there are around 200 terrorist 'groupings or networks' operating in the UK, involving over 1,600 individuals.
• "More and more people are moving from passive sympathy towards active terrorism through being radicalised or indoctrinated by friends, families, in organised training events here and overseas, by images on television, through chat rooms and websites on the internet."
• there are around 30 plots to 'kill people' or 'damage the economy', often with 'links back to al-Qaeda in Pakistan'.
  
• By 2008 MI5 will be twice the size it was at the time of 9/11.

How much of this is true? Certainly the last part. The rest may well be, although we'd be none the wiser if it were complete hogwash, of course. But my purpose in this post is not to take issue with MI5 specifically, but to point out that Dame Eliza's intervention is the first kick in a carefully orchestrated ball game, the culmination of which will be a sustained and concerted effort by the government to introduce the 90 days detention of terror suspects, which it failed to do last year. Tony Blair and Gordon Brown have both chimed in on message with support for the MI5 statement and reassurances to the public that terror is the top policy priority. Even John Prescott got in on the act yesterday. No doubt, the MI5 speech will also be used as further ammunution to boost public support for the introduction of ID cards.

Hasn't it dawned on the government that we'd be a lot more likely to trust politicians who tell us it's necessary to trade civil liberties for safety from terrorism if it wasn't so obvious that key spokespeople from the police, the armed forces and now the security services were being hamfistedly pressed into force to try to sway gullible MPs into voting for yet more draconian measures? Why can't we have an honest debate about how large the terrorist threat is, and what policies to counteract it might actually work? As Dan Ashcroft lamented in Nathan Barley, the idiots really are winning.