Labour’s got it right. Don’t panic.

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Fascist state or resolute nation?

Bumbling amateur militia or growing resolve against terror?

Now you don’t have to choose.

Hello. I’m North Northwester.

And you know, many people ask me: ‘North, how do you do it? How do you keep your steely resolve to fight the Islamist ideological menace, build a successful career in the bloated bureaucracy, enjoy a wonderful marriage, preserve your youthful good looks and athletic physique and still manage to dance like Fred Astaire and Dorothy Lamour rolled into one?’

And I have to smile.

You see folks, I get by and I do alright - and better than alright - with the wonder ingredient made available to me at no financial cost at all by my very first girlfriend.

It’s called a sense of proportion.

Let’s start with the official government version, straight from the Ministry of Truth Information Noticeboard itself: the BBC.

Sixty thousand civilians are being trained to spot terrorists, Gordon Brown revealed yesterday.

In the latest Labour anti-terror initiative, huge numbers of staff on rail networks, at airports, shopping centres, public buildings and sports venues have been picked out by MI5 and the police to be taught how to watch for 'suspicious behaviour' and respond swiftly in the event of an atrocity.

Gee Willikers, mister, it sure looks like the gum mint’s finally taking this I Slam Mist terse threat serious-like, don’t it?

Up to a point.

I mean, the bean-brained bozos have only just finished spending ninety Mega-sovs on the old peeler’s technique of ‘Set a thief to cosy up to, recruit and train a thief and excuse the actions of all the other similar thieves worldwide,’ by using ardent Islamists to inoculate young British Muslims to the attraction of blowing themselves into halal mincemeat along with as many of their fellow ‘British citizens’ as they can. (See Julia’s forensic discussion of this act of governmental brilliance here.)

Not only did Nu Labour jump on the ‘Islam is a religion of peace’ bandwagon to ‘prevent retaliation against innocent Muslims’ before the dust had properly settled at Ground Zero, but they have been schizophrenically busy these last eight and a bit years pointing out all the differences between ordinary Muslims* and the terrorists – even when they aren’t there, in the case of violent Jihad being anti-Islamic behaviour, rather than being the bang-on ultra-orthodox recommended by Mohammed real thing.

Oh, and freezing out the actual non-violent, non-Islamist Muslims.

So, ordinarily, I’d expect flares to come back into fashion or to be invited to attend the Hollywood Première of Pride and Predators: the chick flick SFX Sci-Fi blockbuster for all the family before Labour got something right about our side of ‘the war on terror.’

Perhaps I was wrong.

Officers had initially been alerted to the suspects when the storage firm near Heathrow called the police after becoming suspicious about the substance they had been asked to look after.

That’s a bona fide example of alert British civilians noticing and reporting something that could have killed many people.

I’ve been doing my level best to find the details of the American (video-shop employee?) who discovered and reported terrorist videos to the US authorities; so foiling a bombing plot. Google’s inhaling – or my use of it is – and so I’ll leave that as an exercise for the reader to ignore complete.

So maybe training a few score thousand more of us up to look out for and spot suspect behaviour isn’t such as bad idea, after all.

It surely beats the BBC and police spending our money on persecuting Undercover Mosque, for example.

There are excellent precedents for this.

Way back in World War Two, British subjects were alerted to the possibilities of spies and saboteurs from Germany, and so were made alert to Nazi and Fascist infiltration. Quite a lot of German spies were indeed captured and either turned or received short suspended sentences in the Tower of London. Of course, there were also many absurdities and mis-identifications as in any war, but still and all ‘Careless Talk Costs Lives’ worked, and it’s not like anyone much is suggesting executing convicted terrorists even after their ultra-long, ultra-meticulous trials. Well, there’s me, but clearly I don’t count, what with me being Right-wing and all.

And the Royal Observer Corps of unpaid volunteers added to Britain’s patchy and experimental radar cover in watching for German bombers coming over to revenge Versailles, or something, and the OC lasted well into the Cold War, and that came out alright until Messrs Bush 1, Clinton, Major, Blair, Bush 2 et al let the old Russian bear re-grow his claws. Honestly, Ron and Maggie leave the room for a few minutes and the children mess it all up.

And the old Home Guard, the LDV, actually contributed a great deal to the war-winning effort by allowing Regular Territorial and Hostilities Only troops to ship overseas for the various glories, farces and horrors of North Africa, Crete, Italy, and the Far East.

The Home Guard did spy-watching and coast-guarding and anti-aircraft work around London (freeing up Royal Artillery – I think – for service overseas) and I think at one time there were 100,000 or so of them on military-styled duties in the early and desperate years of the war.

And all this was volunteer work; the exemplary public service ethic that honest Victorian government and civic conservatism had bred up in the imperial homeland. People felt some duty to the greater society in which they lived and they did something about it when the need arose.

So if the government is drawing some people into the effort against Jihadist terror, and they do respond to things they see appropriately and in a timely fashion, then lives may be saved. They really would represent community spirit and community involvement [as distinct from the bogus, Marxian exploitation-based ‘community’ with its endless demands for more privileges and grievance-generating victimology professionals at the public expense].

And it’s not like most people I meet at work or in the pub are aware there’s a war on at all – for my colleagues it’s all trigger-happy Americans and evil armaments-corporations and a 'climate of fear' as if we should jump for joy each time a bomb goes off somewhere.

Some of the libertarians have problems with this.

Here’s Old Holborn:

I think we have a right to know from Jackboot Jacqui, just who has been recruited into Brown's secret army, what they have been trained in and just what powers they think they have been given.

I’m well aware of the authoritarian drift of this government and I despise it and I’m against it, but I doubt very much that Labour is training waiters and train guards to spy on us; scanning us for copies of Atlas Shrugged or Law, Legislation and Liberty - especially not when our internet browsing is so easy for them to track.

OH, they just might be getting this one right and for the right reasons.

Even a stopped clock's right twice a day, right?

I’m not forgetting the Police raiding Damian Green’s home, and the microchipped wheelie-bins and the dustmen who send the council eco-police around to lecture and fine us, and it’s all reprehensible I’m sure and worth flaying Nu Lab for. But.

But you have no civil rights when you’re dead.

None at all. So I think it’s worth doing this.

Now, Labour may still foul it up. Dumb Jon observes here how they’re pussy-footing around who they’re looking for but the volunteers on the ground aren’t going to be fooled, and the actual paid professionals are still putting on a pathetic show of their actual jobs as Sue points out here, so yes, they may make it a tick-box exercise or so Politically Correct that you have to report ten hoodies per burqua, and to photophone one hundred twinsets and pearls per kaftan you snap, and they are the party that put the Thatcher economy on 24 black at Las Vegas and retired to the bar, and normally I’d expect to see Elvis riding into Castle City on a velociraptor singing I Will Survive before they did something original and independent of the US in anti-terrorism…

And it’s 60,000 more pairs of eyes on those rucksacks on the Tube.

Good luck to them.

Home.

* I repeat for the bewildered: it is a tribute to the peaceful and law-abiding majority of Muslims in Britain that they ignore most or all of the head-hacking, anti-Semitic, woman-hating stuff and just try to get on with their lives.

Coming soon. The answer.