LOSS OF INNOCENCE

Unless you have absolutely no knowledge of Lewis Hamilton, the new smoking ban or the threat of terrorist attacks, the papers this morning will provide pretty repetitious reading. Only the Daily Star (now there’s a surprise) fails to lead on any of these issues, instead focusing on a reported orgy in the Big Brother household. It does however, manage to sneak the heading “Bomber in a Burka” onto its web front page. Whilst the Star’s journalists (I use the term liberally) must spend hours sitting around mixing words with headline grabbers, such terminology does nothing to ease the tension currently being experienced by the country.

Considering that both the police and the security services have made very few official announcements on the circumstances surrounding the bombings, most papers have managed to generate several pages of coverage based on sheer conjecture and innuendo. It has been left to The Times, however, to bring something new and relevant to the debate. Melanie Reid and Magnus Linklater have penned an interesting article with the sad but apt heading “Scotland’s shield of innocence broken”. With a previous good record on race relations, Scotland now finds itself, like much of the Western world, a target for extremist and radicalised terrorists. The fact that some parts of Glasgow had sectarian divides which mirrored the worst areas of Northern Ireland, it emerged from the IRA era unscathed. The Lockerbie Bombing was as the journalists point out, an anti USA attack, and not a domestic act. The Scottish population, particularly in the main cities, will now have to exhibit the “vigilant” attitude that the populous of England have exhibited since the mid 1970’s.

The other interesting element linked to the bombing stories is the use of mobile phone images and video footage. Most phones have imaging features as standard, and most of today’s papers front-page pictures come from these sources. One 17 year old member of the public has been reported as making £20,000 from newspaper sales alone for pictures he took of developments outside the Tiger Tiger nightclub in London. Whilst police have acknowledged the importance of these initial images at such an early stage of the attacks, the issue of public involvement does cause me long term concerns. If such photographs lead to identifications and subsequent arrests and charges, then it is hard to argue against this type of public involvement. However, in the long run we are in danger of turning into vigilantes, a human variant of “CCTV" , spying on our neighbours with the hope of fame or financial reward at the end of it. George Orwell should have patented some the ideas he used in his novel “1984”, he would have made a fortune. Do we really want to see society develop along the lines where we ourselves police our friends, family and neighbours?