At least the British people get it

In his book The Wisdom of Crowds, James Surowiecki writes that ‘under the right circumstances, groups are remarkably intelligent, and are often smarter than the smartest people in them’. Our poll today shows that the response of the British people to the terror emergency has been robust and clear-sighted. While many in the political and media elite have offered only hand-wringing, point-scoring and a feeble enthusiasm to blame the West for everything, the voters themselves grasp the scale of the threat and the need for a firm response.

As low as their opinion of politicians may be, most of them have not been seduced by the preposterous suggestion that this security alert was an elaborate hoax, a ploy to enable ministers to grab even more powers or divert attention from Lebanon. The British people are innately decent: as our poll shows, they know full well that most Muslims are moderate. But decency is not the same as weakness: the voters also know that militant Islam represents a clear and present danger, and one that is, regrettably, in our midst.

It is more important than ever to understand the origins of that danger; and John Reid, the Home Secretary, was correct in a speech delivered hours before the arrests to say that many still do not ‘get it’. Last weekend a group of Muslim MPs, peers and community organisations published an open letter warning that ‘the government must not ignore the role of its foreign policy’, which allegedly provides ‘ammunition to extremists who threaten us all’. Referring to Iraq and Lebanon, the letter urged the Prime Minister ‘to show the world that we value the lives of civilians wherever they live and whatever their religion’.

Veterans of the Cold War will recognise the old trick of ‘moral equivalence’: the letter implicitly equated a plot to blow up airliners on their way to America with the unintended killing of Lebanese civilians by the Israeli bombardment of Hezbollah.