Brown’s speech yesterday on counter-terrorism showed that politicians are beginning to grasp that the problem is not just terrorist violence but the ideology of separatism that breeds it. However, listening to it one wondered how all these new initiatives would tie together. Riddell sums up the problem, It was a classic Brown exercise, the super-swot who has read every book and report and talked to everyone. He is correct that toughness is not enough and isolating extremists is equally important. But there were at least 50 initiatives, reviews and advisory groups in his 20-minute statement yesterday. Most can be justified in their own terms. But the question, as always with Mr Brown, is whether he is trying to do too much: whether quantity may be the enemy of effectiveness.