Cynical con
PetroneIla Wyatt
Every year I receive a letter from my insurance company with regard to the cost of protecting my rented house in St John's Wood. Generally the insurance premium is around £3,000. I can just about live with that. But stick around.
A few days ago, as I was perusing my mail — fan letters, hate letters, bailiffs' letters, etc. — I found the annual info, from the aforesaid organisation. To my horror, my insurance bill had shot up to about £4,000. A massive 600 quid had suddenly been tacked on to it.
I went through the letter trying to find out why I was paying so much more. There were the usual things — fire, lightning, earthquake, theft, storm, tempest and flood, burst pipes, fuel leakage, subsidence. But this time another category had been included: Terrorism.
I was being forced to pay £600 to protect my house against a terrorist attack. I rang up the insurance company and asked, 'Has there been one instance of a terrorist blowing up or otherwise destroying a building in London, let alone a private house?' Of course they said no. But they said you never could tell. It was all part of the War on Terror.
Frankly, I am becoming sick of this War on Terror. Politicians have been telling us for years now that London would be attacked. And what has happened? A few short-range weapons of little destruction were found and enough sarin to fill a few sleeping pills. Where is the terror in all this? In my view these terrorists are not nearly terrifying enough.
Yes, September 11 was appalling, but I very much doubt that a ragbag of Arabs without a proper organisation could engineer something similar again. Our leaders deny this, of course. Now Mr Bush is trying to link September 11 to Iran, which is branded part of the 'axis of evil'. This is despite the CIA insisting that the Iranian government had nothing to do with the attack. Mr Bush and Mr Blair are desperate men, seeking justification for a war most sensible people now believe was wrong. So they talk incessantly about the War on Terror. (So, incidentally, do quite a few Tories I know.) As far as I am concerned, the whole thing is a cynical con. The only thing it has achieved is to provide companies with another excuse to extract money from the public. Will I be asked to insure my fridge against an attack, just in case some deranged terrorist does a kamikaze for a cold shish kebab? The only one I know who attacks my fridge is the dog.
I hereby declare war on this War on Terror. It has, I suspect, been a means of diverting our attention from the home front where the real terrors lie. Yes, we are terrified, Prime Minister. We are terrified of poverty; of not finding work; of not getting to work because of strikes and delays on the Underground; we are terrified of becoming ill and not receiving proper treatment on the NHS. We are frightened of sending our children to state schools and frightened that we don't earn enough to send them to public ones. We are terrified of being burgled; we are terrified of going out at night and being mugged — or worse, especially if we are women.
This is the terror that the government should be waging war on. A bit belatedly — but in time for the next election — Mr Blair has now woken up to the fact that the British people have other concerns aside from that of being blown up. So this week he momentarily changed tack and waffled on about how the Sixties is responsible for all society's 'ills'. There is to be a five-year plan for the criminal-justice system. Although I wonder if any of the limited measures will ever be put into place.
But it won't be long. I imagine, before Blair is back on the terrorists once more. He is hoist on his own petard; he has trapped himself into continuing to try to scare us, lest support for the Iraq war falls from 30 per cent to nil. And the Iraq war is the one Big Thing of his premiership. It is therefore up to the media and MPs to restore sanity. The very least our Members of Parliament can do is not to fall in with this tripe. It would be the first public duty most of them have performed for years.
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