Careless Talk

Through some combination of vigilance, good work and good luck Britain escaped from two terrorist attrocities relativelu unscathed last week. For this we should all be very thankful.

I'm not going to pretend to understand what would drive somebody to do these things. And that it appears that so many of those responsible are doctors or other medical staff - people who we would assume would be dedicated to saving lives, not taking them - is even more shocking.

The comment I want to make actually concerns something that I heard on Radio 5 on Saturday afternoon whilst the incident at Glasgow was still unclear what had happened. They were interviewing somebody who was part of one of the government's security advisory groups and whilst talking about the security measures that had meant the attack in Glasgow had been relatively ineffective, he said something along the lines of "The real nightmare scenario that would do the most damage and be hardest to guard against is ..." and proceeded to describe it in quite a lot of detail.

I've got to say I was quite surprised - is that something we really want broadcast on national radio. Even if we take it that the likes of Al Qaeda are organised enough to have considered all the options, etc..., we probably should consider that there are other people out there who might maybe be inspired for some reason or another to commit such an attrocity.

Is this a symptom of the culture we live in, with so much constant news coverage that everything gets analysed to the point of overload and "experts" get stuck on the air to comment on situations where so little is known, that they have to say something and sometimes this is something that probably shouldn't be said. Or am I just being a bit paranoid here?