Thursday, July 05, 2012

A proportionate reaction then...in a bag...

If I was a terrorist I guess I’d have a list of possible targets. Clearly there are ‘prestige’ buildings that if I successfully attacked would attract a lot of attention (assuming that’s what I wanted). There are also high profile individuals and facilities and so on. But bang at the top of my list would obviously be setting off a home-made slow burning bomb in a carrier bag on the cheap bus service from Preston.

I heard a spokesman say that the reaction of the emergency services to an electronic cigarette on the bus from Preston was ‘proportionate’. Yeah right. Decontamination areas, military personnel, police dog handlers, firefighters, armed police and other specialist units apparently. Not to mention searching everyone and closing the motorway for four hours (imagine what would happen to me if I closed a motorway by dicking about to no effect for 4 hours!) And more police and fire vehicles than you thought existed in the world. Give a load of blokes the chance to dress up and order people about and generally go into publicly funded drama queen mode and they'll just love it. And afterwards they can be really pompous and self righteous and refuse to admit that they cocked up big-time. They look like bloody seven year olds…Unless this was cooked up as a rehearsal of course.

Thing is that the whole anti-terror shenanigans is gigantically rubbish on the value for money front anyway. I’m not saying that you should always work every cost out according to how many people are actually saved from death or injury or whatever but there are so many things that could be done with the money that would save more lives –Road safety? Safety at work? The starving millions?

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