UK: The threat is not Osama Bin Laden – it’s a laden bin
To my knowledge, few if any of my neighbours are terrorists, writes Michael Deacon.
London Telegraph >> Originally Published 28th March 2009
Jacqui Smith, the Home Secretary, says a terrorist attack in Britain is “highly likely”. Do not mistake her words for defeatism, because the Government has conceived a plan to extinguish the threat. It has started a poster campaign.
I first saw one of these posters the other day. It featured a photograph of a wheelie bin stationed on what looked like an ordinary street. The bin was groaning with plastic bottles and other containers. I couldn’t see what their contents had been, but they were plastered with those fearsome orange warning labels you get on weedkiller. It was an eyesore, because whoever owned the bin hadn’t bothered to put the lid on it.
But such a flagrant disregard for basic hygiene shouldn’t surprise us, for this was none other than a terrorist bin. “These chemicals won’t be used in a bomb,” trumpeted the caption, “because a neighbour reported the dumped containers to the Anti-Terrorist Hotline.” It then gave the number of the hotline.
I hope it isn’t treasonable of me to wonder how useful this poster is. To my knowledge, few if any of my neighbours are terrorists, yet I can’t help suspecting that, if they are, it is unlikely they’ll deposit left-over bits of bomb-making apparatus on the pavement in full view of passers-by. Suicide bombers by nature are gung-ho in their behaviour but I feel that even by their standards this would be reckless.
And, eager though I am to carry out the Government’s wishes and rummage through my neighbours’ bins, I’m unsure how to decide which chemical containers are evidence that they’re terrorists, and which are merely evidence that they’ve been eliminating an outbreak of ragwort in their back garden. Terrorist paraphernalia tends not to be helpfully labelled (“WARNING: contents will cause death on untold scale if detonated on Tube network”).
Still, the poster achieves one thing. It makes it clear whose job it is to root out terrorists: yours. “Don’t rely on others,” scolds the poster’s slogan. “If you suspect it, report it.” I’m ashamed to say that, until I saw the poster, I’d complacently assumed that I could rely on the intelligence services, the police and the Government to locate and thwart aspiring jihadists. Now, to make amends for my laziness, I am spying on my neighbours with patriotic gusto, and shall relay my every paranoid imagining to the hotline.