IF, as the Prime Minister asserted again yesterday, defeating al Qaeda-inspired terrorist violence is "a generation-long challenge", it behoves politicians of all stripes to come up with credible remedies, ones which will endure, long after those who fashioned them have had their day in the civic sun. Modern politics does not do inter-generational mandates.
So, for the pursuit of security to have lasting meaning and popular assent, cross-party, cross-service, cross-mandate and cross-border co-operation has to be the bedrock on which ordinary citizens can go about their lives without fear of being maimed or finding their own civil liberties curtailed.
Gordon Brown's first statement on security to MPs yesterday demonstrated that, in some respects at least, when he talks the language of co-operation and consultation he really means it. We even had the sight of the Prime Minister and Scotland's new First Minister, Alex Salmond, on his first foray to Westminster since the SNP formed its Holyrood government in May, making unspun common cause on a challenge, which just at the end of last month, could have visited random mayhem to travellers at Glasgow Airport and late-night revellers in central London alike.
From next month, a new uniformed and unified Border Force is to be rolled out, spanning immigration, customs and visas, to control entry and departure at Britain's sea ports and airports. The Tories and Liberal Democrats, who both claim paternity of the idea, can hardly quibble now that Mr Brown has embraced it. We welcome this development. But, like others, we wonder whether the new integrated force should have policing powers or, indeed, incorporate the work of the transport police, even special branch officers, deployed at ports and airports.
This stronger physical presence controlling our borders is to be backed up by a more effective eBorders programme. All successful applicants, not just those from high-risk countries, will get biometric visas from March next year. Foreign nationals coming to the UK for more than six months will require to have biometric ID from the end of 2008.
However we do not have to stray far from the Prime Minister's own statement to see how big a gap can exist between aspiration and reality in such matters. Yesterday Mr Brown published the Intelligence and Security Committee's report on rendition. While the ISC found no evidence that the UK was directly involved in the highly controversial rendition of terror suspects by America, in one case our security services had "inadvertently" helped when caveats placed on information supplied by them was ignored.
The ISC slammed our own government for failing to ensure it kept proper records in relation to requests for rendition flights through UK airspace.
Is a government so cavalier with security data of such acute sensitivity to be trusted when it revisits yet again, the most contentious of Mr Brown's measures - the prospect of extending the allowable period of detention without charge from 28 days to 56, or even 58 days? We welcome the creation of the cross-party review, under Sir John Chilcot, to look again at why this country, unlike almost all our peers, bans the use of intercept evidence in court. We are not at all convinced that, with one of the longest periods of pre-charge detention to be found anywhere, it can be doubled again without posing a substantive threat to our civil liberties.
