So a man gets fifteen years for plotting to massacre Taylor Swift fans. The security services are praised, the public sighs in relief, and the government pats itself on the back. All very predictable.
All very contemporary. But let us not confuse the successful foiling of a single plot with the broader state of national security. The reality is that we are locked in an endless game of whack-a-mole, where every thwarted attack breeds a dozen more embryonic conspiracies.
The plotters are often lonely, radicalised online, and armed with little more than a kitchen knife and a grievance. That is the new normal. The Victorian era had its Fenian dynamite campaigns; we have the internet and its discontents.
The Fall of Rome had barbarians at the gate; we have the barbarians within, scrolling through Telegram channels. The praise heaped on MI5 and the police is deserved in this instance, but it obscures a deeper truth: we are not safer, we are merely better at catching the incompetent. The truly capable terrorist, the one who plans silently and acts without digital footprint, remains a spectre.
And meanwhile, we trade liberty for security, surveillance for peace of mind. The irony is that the very tools used to catch this man – the data dragnets, the behavioural monitoring – are the same ones that erode the civil liberties we claim to defend. But then, what is freedom when a concert hall becomes a potential mass casualty event?
We have become a nation of anxious spectators, grateful for every near miss.
