I have an enduring fascination for political speeches, their construction and the language used, their underlying meanings.

John Reid’s speeches these days are particularly worth picking over. They have, in the past, been the entrails in which others have divined the future (the exhortation for us to be ‘slow to condemn‘ the actions of British troops shortly before the release of video footage of some of them giving a bunch of Iraqis a hiding is the one that immediately springs to mind). It’s worth looking at the widely-trailed (that being a euphemism for it being leaked to the press before he gave it in order to control the news cycle) speech he made to the Demos think tank the day before the alleged plot to bring down however many planes on whatever date was revealed.

One of the more fascinating aspects of political speeches is why they’re even given at all. The meat that the media gets their teeth into usually hangs on pretty meagre bones. On the eight pages of A4 that constitutes a hard copy of Reid’s speech, maybe half to two-thirds of a page (the dramatic beats, naturally) made it as far as the news coverage of the speech. It makes you wonder if the bits that Reid wanted to see in the newspapers were helpfully highlighted in yellow on the copies sent to journalists.

The rest, in this respect, is effectively garnish heard by a handful of people and as such superfluous to the debate that Reid claims, at the end of his speech, he’s looking forward to having. Just what the mechanism is for having this debate, Reid doesn’t say. The spirit of open debate was somewhat hobbled when Reid categorised opposition politicians, judges and commentators daring to question his omniscience as people who ‘just don’t get it’.

When you seen what proportion of the speech did make the media coverage as opposed to what didn’t, there’s a fleeting twinge of sympathy for his speechwriter who is clearly spending a good 90 per cent of his time whistling in the dark. This is followed by the realisation that the Home Secretary, the man in charge of the government department whose, as he said himself in his speech, ‘core purpose… is the protection of the public’, was delivering this guff to a think tank while (if Reid is to be believed) three thousand lives hung in the balance.

That isn’t to say there aren’t one or two croutons amongst the mountains of wilting lettuce. And they’re worth digging out and digesting if only to gain a further insight into the character of a man as potentially dangerous as Reid. His, for instance, assertion that…

…for most ordinary people the word ‘security’ has changed in everyday meaning from being the desirable objective of financial comfort in old age or the formal description of military power, to being one of the highest concerns for daily living.

…seems questionable at best. It’s to be doubted that there are many, even those affected by the bombings last summer, for who the threat of terrorism trumps worries about their mortgage, retirement or where the money for the next pint is coming from. It’s artificially stacking the argument in his favour – everybody’s worried about terrorism because ‘Dr’ Reid says they are. Has he overheard a conversation in a supermarket checkout queue along the lines of…?

Woman 1: How’s your Diedre’s GSCEs going?

Woman 2: Sod Deidre’s GSCEs! What about national security in the face of Islamist terror? When is the Government going to do something? WE’RE ALL GOING TO DIE! (dives through plate glass window)

For an ex-Communist with intellectual pretensions he also, to my mind, has a rather fuzzy grasp of what went on during the Cold War. Under the threat of the Soviet Union, apparently, ‘borders were inviolable’, ‘ethnic tensions were suppressed’, ‘religious extremism ruthlessly put down’, ’states were not allowed to fail’ and ‘migration was minimal’. Now that the Cold War is over ‘porous borders, failed states, civil wars and ethnic tensions are all resurgent’. But it seems Reid has travelled back in time to a golden age that didn’t exist to support a conclusion that serves only to stoke much needed (in terms of pushing through new legislation) fears.

Inviolable borders. How many proxy wars did we see during the Cold War where borders were anything but? Iran vs Iraq, anybody? Were Cambodia’s borders inviolable when it was secretly bombed and invaded by the US in 1973? Ethnic tensions were suppressed. What about in Toxteth, Brixton and Tottenham? Notting Hill in 1958 two years after the Hungarian Uprising? Religious extremism ruthlessly put down. Tell that to the Shah of Iran. You can’t actually – he died in exile in 1980 after his blood-soaked regime was knocked over by the Ayatollah Khomeini and his Islamic Revolution in 1979. Iran was sponsoring global terrorism long before CeauÅŸescu went up against the wall. The Salman Rushdie fatwah was in place a year before the Berlin Wall came down. States were not allowed to fail. What about Afghanistan? That was a failed state by any definition before the Russians left in 1989. Cambodia, again? What about some of the African states? Migration was minimal Discounting of course, the Poles and Hungarian’s fleeing Eastern Europe and those from Pakistan, India and the Caribbean.

Which is a roundabout way of saying that Reid took a roundabout way to say that the world has gone to the dogs since the end of the salad days of the Cold War. Forget nuclear paranoia, proxy war bodycounts and the odd occasion when we dodged extinction. He doesn’t show his working or explain how he arrived at it his conclusion. It’s historical revisionism. Just why he needed to indulge in Cold War nostalgia (he takes nearly a page of the speech to make the point) seems to be so he can say in his conclusion that ‘we are probably in the most sustained period of severe threat since the end of since the end of World War II’. It was this statement that made the headlines – its foundations of false argument didn’t get a first (let alone a second) glance. Saying we’re facing the biggest threat for 60 years sounds a lot more impressive than for 15 years.

So with the best days of our lives, trapped forever in Soviet amber, now behind us, the threats unleashed by the fall of Communism have meant new methods must be employed:

Since 2000 we have radically reformed our anti-terror legislation and introduced four new terrorism acts, almost 1000 people have been arrested for terrorism related offences, of which 154 have been charged and 60 terrorist suspects await trial.

That’s a charge rate of 15% and 6% waiting for trial. Why is the arrest rate something to brag about? It wouldn’t take much to make it 2,000 but it still wouldn’t be a very reliable indicator of how The War Against Terror is progressing bearing in mind you can pretty much get arrested under terrorism legislation for next to nothing. Does the 1000 include Sally Cameron, for example? Of the 1000 arrested, there are 846 either innocent or banged up without charge. You can only guess what damage this does to the ’social cohesion’ New Labour pay lip service to.

On the ‘4 significant terrorist plots’ thwarted since 7/7 he mentioned (and was boasting of again yesterday), he refused to expand. They just were, ok? Let just hope he isn’t being cheeky and including the red mercury and chemical vest non-plots in that number. Seeing that they’re never backward in coming forward to claim the glory, the likes of Reid and Sir Ian Blair, its seems odd that these alleged triumphs weren’t paraded in sympathetic newspapers.

Warming to his climax, Reid threw in a quote from a historical figure, as he likes to do in order to parade his intellectual credentials. This time it was…

Charles Darwin, wrote ‘it is not the strongest of the species that survive, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change’. That is why we need to see national security in a new context and all of us – politicians, businesses, lawyers and citizens need to evolve our thinking for the 21st century.

Except it isn’t evolution Reid wants. In this quick-fix, easy answers, lack of intellectual rigour approach to anti-terrorism, it’s clear that this Government aren’t interested in the long game. Reid isn’t a Darwinist, he’s an IDer. New Labour want to create the new world overnight and in their own image. (or ‘…traditional civil liberty arguments are not so much wrong , as just made for another age’, as Blair put it to Rupert Murdoch.) It’s the same thirst for perpetual ‘modernisation’ that runs through most of New Labour’s thinking, the desperation to be seen to be innovating, striving, Doing Something. Forget governing the systems we already have, we’ll build some more, and then instead of governing those, we’ll build some more…

And all in face of the evidence. As Simon Carr says of the last week’s arrests: ‘But let it be remembered that the plot was uncovered without 90-day detention or ID cards. Just good coppering’.

This has strayed dangerously close to fisking, a sport I try to avoid, if it hasn’t strayed over the line. But if you’ve got this far, I should say that I believe that we should be all too aware and watchful of the use of language, the false arguments and contradictions that underlie the Government’s rhetoric. We’re being led up into a dark, blind alley. And when the fighting starts it’s difficult to tell who’s who. As the late, lamented Arthur Lee said: ‘They’re locking them up today, they’re throwing away the key, I wonder who it’ll be tomorrow, you or me?‘.

The inherent contradiction at the heart of Labour’s execution of The War Against Terror resurfaces time after time. Reid made it again in his speech. First he said:

I believe in our values. I have no doubt they are shared by the vast majority of people throughout our country, from all social, religious or ethnic backgrounds.

But I have no doubt that it these very values which are the target of the terrorists.

Before launching into his headline-catching crescendo to say:

Sometimes we may have to modify some our own freedoms in the short term in order to prevent their misuse by those who oppose our fundamental values and would destroy all of our freedoms

Our values and freedoms are under attack from terrorists so we must ‘modify’ those values and freedoms for an unspecified length of time. The thing is, when lending something to New Labour it can be unclear as to when or whether it will be returned. Who gets to decide when we can return our ID cards and stop exporting suspects to Algeria? In giving away what makes us us don’t we risk becoming more like them. Aren’t we doing their bidding? Were cancelled holidays and chaos at the airports what he had in mind or do we have something else to look forward to? Ninety days detention without trial is apparently back on the agenda (with a vengeance, as Blair would say).

ID cards, 90 days detention without trial, deporting suspect (suspects, mind you) to countries where they may be killed or tortured, and all the rest are appeasement, pure and simple. We’re doing what we’ve been told to do by terrorists. We’re abasing ourselves. Selling our souls for dross, as Craig Murray once put it. Why not just go all the way and announce a short period of Sharia law if keeping us safe above all things is the overriding consideration?