The politics of fear?
by Duncan O'Leary
There’s a bit of a storm brewing over Peter Hain’s comments in an interview this morning, when he implied that Britain would be safer under Labour than either the Lib Dems or the Tories. Predictably he’s been accused of playing ‘party politics’ with terrorism, but is this really fair? How to tackle terrorism is not a neutral issue – different parties hold different views on it and presumably one of them would be more likely to make Britain safer than the others. Clearly the issue is more complicated than this, given the trade-offs that each position entails, but it still seems curious that politicians can argue that they would make Britain fairer, wealthier, or better educated, but not that they would make it safer.