Hands off my bike

The police are cracking down on innocent bicycles, says Harry Mount, but doing nothing about MPs with terrorist connections Ivhile I was drinking a toast at a recent farewell party for a friend off to work in America, my sole means of transport, an aging situp-and-beg bicycle with a wicker basket strapped to its handlebars, was confiscated by the police.

The party was held at the Royal United Services Institute, a Whitehall defence research body at the heart of the Westminster security area — quarter of a square mile, in the shape of a skew-whiff kidney. which stretches round the Houses of Parliament and up to Trafalgar Square. Because the bicycle supposedly constituted a bomb threat — you could in theory cram the handlebars with Semtex — the police hacked through its two locks and hauled it off to Charing Cross police station.

A few months earlier, Sinn Fein MPs were given permission to use parliamentary offices and qualify for expenses, without taking their seats, as all other MPs are obliged to do. So, it's now the case that a man like Martin McGuinness, with a criminal conviction for IRA membership, is allowed inside the Palace of Westminster, while my bicycle, which has never done anybody any harm, can't be parked within half a mile of the place.

It might be OK to inconvenience lots of people in a small way to make things a little safer — it was only mildly tiresome to go to the police station and buy myself a new lock, with police funds — to prevent a few people being killed. It might also be OK to make things a little more dangerous in the short term, by yielding to Republicans in the hope that they might in time end the Troubles.

But it's only worth being overprotective, or taking a gamble, if there's a good chance of avoiding future disaster. There has never been a bicycle bomb in Britain, so why inconvenience people on the offchance that terrorists will take to stuffing inner tubes with fertiliser?

Dr Johnson's words — society should be 'happier to be sometimes cheated than not to trust' — apply to the right to park potentially dangerous bicycles, as they do to the right to put your rubbish in potentially dangerous bins, a right denied to Tube users and City of London residents,

since their public rubbish bins were removed 12 years ago, after the Victoria Station bombing, If you're lost in the City, just keep walking in a straight line and you'll know when you've hit the square mile's ancient boundaries — you'll find a bin overflowing with bond traders' Pret a Manger wrappers.

If they bring back the bins, they won't bring back the bombers: terrorists haven't been targeting bins outside the City and, in any case, bin-bombs seem a bit quaint in the days of al-Qa'eda grand plans. The biggest ever IRA attack, in Omagh in 1998, killed 29 people — one for every 100 that died in the World Trade Center.

In any case, it's worth returning the bins and ending up with a cleaner Tube and a cleaner City even if you get in return, say, one terrorist murder a year. This ruthless equation is exactly the sort of exchange that governments make all the time. It is understood that the building of motorways means people driving faster and killing each other, but that is accepted by the government — and by drivers — as a reasonable trade-off for a quicker journey from Crewe to Taunton.

Governments are there to sort out all these trade-offs, and fill the gap between the dual personalities of the schizophrenic public: to punish the foolhardy and the dangerous for taking risks that harm others, but not to respond to every call to make life one long sentence

in a sanitised prison cell. The government could force us to stay indoors and eat off paper plates with cardboard cutlery, but we prefer to risk metal forks and uneven pavements in exchange for a happy-golucky life.

And at the moment the government is not handling the trade-offs very well. Just because extreme measures have been used in Afghanistan and Iraq it doesn't mean extreme new domestic legislation is needed. A country would be justified in killing to prevent a violent assault on its citizens it would have been better to murder the 11 September hijackers before they reached the check-in desk. But it isn't justified in imposing restrictions on the way its citizens live their lives, if those restrictions don't stop the evil they are meant to prevent.

Most of the laws that David Blunkett has introduced, has tried to introduce, or is planning to introduce are as useless as clearing Whitehall of bicycles. The proposed government surveillance of emails and the introduction of identity cards won't stop another 11 September. These measures might help when it comes to a hijacker caught at Heathrow without his identity card. But it's hard to imagine a well-equipped terrorist outfit not getting over the simple hurdles of forging cards and avoiding email.

It isn't hard to imagine the difficulties for the law-abiding who leave their identity card on the Tube or write a spoof 'Bomb Hollywood' email. The mantra trawled out in defence of draconian measures — 'The innocent have nothing to fear' — is untrue. Precisely because the innocent are innocent they don't guard against being mistakenly caught out for something they haven't done. The guilty know they're guilty and will do everything to evade security measures.

America has handled the terrorist question better, imposing a security crackdown with fewer new laws. The Guantanamo Bay imprisonments may have been harsh but they were carried out without new legislation — prisoners were simply declared 'enemy combatants', with neither the rights of an American citizen nor those of a foreign prisoner-of-war.

With fewer laws — rigorously policed and frequently tested to iron out inconsistencies and unfairness — you get closer to the ideal citizen's life: in which freedom is only infringed in situations where, if it were not, bad things might well happen.

My bicycle should only have been confiscated and Sinn Fein politicians allowed into the Commons if it was a better bet that I would stuff explosives into my crossbar than a Republican would take them into Westminster in his briefcase. I know what I still think is more likely.

Harry Mount is deputy comment editor of the Daily Telegraph.