Trust and the war on terror

Jon Bright (London, OK): Heard this radio ad yesterday which I had to put a post up on.

[audio http://www.met.police.uk/so/docs/ct.mp3]

It's from the Met's "Trust your instincts" campaign - they are asking members of the public to phone a confidential hotline if they see any suspicious behaviour. We are asked: "How d’you tell the difference between someone just video-ing crowded place and someone who’s checking it out for a terrorist attack?" Answer - you don't have to, the Met will do it for you. "Trust your instincts: not each other" is the slogan that could have been.

You can see their point, of course - while we still, thankfully, live in an age without overarching surveillance, public tip-offs are an extremely important part of the counter terrorist operation. I'm certainly not suggesting people shouldn't phone the police if they genuinely think someone is building a bomb. But I also think this kind of advert, phrased in its casual, offhand manner, is only going to contribute to the general "atmosphere" of the war on terror - a low grade, residual fear, where everyone is a suspect and enemy is genuinely indistinguishable from friend. Can such an atmosphere, once created, ever truly be removed from a society? Or will we be living with adverts like this for the forseeable future - and with what consequences for much vaunted exercises building "community cohesion" and Putnam's vanished "social capital" ?

PS: Sunny Hundal posts on this on Liberal Conspiracy and adds a witty picture.