Better safe or smug?

Charles Moore on the defeat of Tony Blair's proposal to allow police detain terrorism suspects for 90 days without filing charges:

I detect something small and stupid in these debates, and I fear it is particularly characteristic of the British, especially the southern English middle classes, in a certain mood. Just as Parisians do not really notice unrest until it reaches the beaux quartiers of their city, so we southern bourgeois tend to go into internal exile from what is really happening in our country. More likely to be suburban or rural than people who are poorer or younger, we react to urban violence, ethnic tensions, Islamism, terror, by giving private thanks that we are not in their front line. Bored by the politics of it all, we go off to the golf course.

And because we are, underneath, a bit frightened, we affect a robustness that falsely equates courage in the face of threat with doing nothing ("We're not going to let terrorists change our way of life"). Our justified admiration for our armed services makes too much of the decolonisation model, praising ourselves most when we avoid problems and walk away from them.

We also develop a resentment of those who draw these problems to our attention, whether nationally or internationally. A useful index of this is what people say about Jews, and about Israel. When I was a boy in the 1960s, Arabs were trying to destroy Israel. The dominant Western reaction was that it should be defended in the interests of freedom. Today, Arabs are still trying to destroy Israel (and the Iranians have just reverted to making it a stated object of policy), but now, in Western Europe, that seems to be Israel's fault. It has become respectable once again to see Jews as the problem, the infuriating nuisance.

Labor MP Kitty Ussher says MPs who voted against the anti-terror measure will have blood on their hands in the event of another attack.

I myself am precisely the type of liberal, Guardian-reading lefty who is instinctively concerned at the power of the police. I went into politics to sort out health and education, not to strengthen the long hand of the law. But, let's face it: the police are far better placed to judge what type of legislation we need to combat the terrorist threat than I am. And to spurn that advice is to threaten our national security and the therefore to make life that bit more dangerous for the 60 million British people we purport to represent.