The Curmudgeon

YOU'LL COME FOR THE CURSES. YOU'LL STAY FOR THE MUDGEONRY.

Wednesday, April 25, 2007

Don't Be Afraid, Just Think of the Devastation

A decade of smouldering hostility between New Labour and the English language flared once more into open conflict today at the mouth of the Minister of Owlishness. The Vicar of Downing Street himself may also have been a little surprised, since Reid's latest emission appears to overturn six and a half years of accepted Government policy by stating that Britain's security policy should not be based merely on scaremongering. "Security policy fed only on fear would debase the values and ideas the British at their best" - Wilberforce, Cavell, Tony and Gordon, for example - "have advanced for centuries," he said.

Fortunately, the Minister was quick to regain the level of incoherence appropriate to his place and person. "For all its uncertainties, our future has to be about advancing liberty and security not liberty or security," he went on. For the benefit of the simple-minded, he paraphrased this mot as "scaring people does not produce security"; apparently freedom and fright enjoy a rather intimate connection in whatever passes for the mind of John Reid. "We are led to value security through what our liberties enable us to appreciate," he next pronounced, quoting his much-rejected draft script for the film 300; whereupon he proceeded to demonstrate the benefits of security without scariness by conjuring up a picture of the devastation al-Qaida could cause by attacking our new, safe nuclear power stations and crippling our generous, socially responsible and divinely deregulated financial markets.

"I believe it is crucial that the home secretary wakes up and thinks about the security of the nation first and foremost every morning," Reid informed. The bit about waking up is certainly reassuring. "That is what I do now," he concluded. He was speaking to a counter-terrorism conference at the Royal United Services Institute, which according to its website is the leading forum in the UK for national and international defence and security and the oldest institute of its kind in the world; so presumably his audience remained sufficiently calm to avoid doing anything that might provoke him.

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