Labour's State Security apparatus

Brown's inane proposals to introduce security screening at large mainline train stations have quite rightly been dismissed as wholly ineffective by security experts. Packed suburban commuter trains into London offer a far more attractive target to Islamic suicide bombers than a half-empty Virgin intercity. And why pay several hundred quid for an intercity ticket when Livingstone's Oyster card will get you on a suburban service for chips? And of course no screening for tubes and buses where the bombs have actually gone off. No, Brown's proposals are nothing more than a ratcheting-up of the apparatus of State Security disguised as an anti-terrorist measure - his real intention is to get us all used to the hostile stares of gun-toting thugs and State Security Forces demanding our papers.

I recently listened to the views of a very stupid police officer on how to deal with the 'problem' of groups of youths on the street. High fences and razor-wire erected everywhere were this idiot's preferred remedies, combined with Mosquito sonic repellents erected on lamp posts every 30 metres. He saw nothing wrong in turning the streets into something akin to the Warsaw Ghetto - his sole concern was the convenience with which teenagers could be coralled into barbed-wire pens by response cars to make the job of police officers easier.

Unfortunately, when the government takes the advice on a grand scale of 'security professionals' as deluded and as intellectually ill-equipped as this, you get proposals such as Brown's.

The time is long overdue to bring our Police Forces back under local control, to silence the fatuous blitherings of slow-minded plods who imagine they are expert at anything, and send them back out walking their beats.

Let's also devolve the administration of Welfare payments to local level - and get some of our 5.3m economically inactive (including a very substantial proportion of Pakistani, Somali and Bangladeshi young men) doing something useful - cleaning hospitals, or doing 12-hour shifts in McDonalds - that keeps them away from the illiterate and unschooled village Imams and the internet bomb-making manuals.

The answer to our security lies not in the power of the State, but in our own control of our neighbourhoods and communities.