If you want some grisly reading for a Friday afternoon, I’d recommend the National Risk Register, released by the Cabinet Office today. It outlines the “range of emergencies that might have a major impact on all, or significant parts of, the UK”. A welcome act of transparency – I’ve always thought it would be a good idea to know what our government’s worrying about, and – by extension – what we should be worried about.
Not that we should worry too much, mind. The aim of the document is to make us more informed, rather than paranoid. And, for that reason, it avoids providing a straighforward ranking of threats – a terror top-ten, so to speak. Instead there’s a graph on page 5, with one axis labelled “relative impact”, and the the other “relative likelihood”. Threats are plotted against these axes; the outcome being that “attacks on transport” come out as the most likely, with “pandemic influenza” having the greatest impact (a potential 50,000-750,000 deaths, apparently).
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