Britain doesn’t need a Snooping Act, or another new terrorism committee

I would have loved to have been in the room when David Cameron’s advisers were thinking of an acronym for the new anti-terror committee. Something that sounded scary enough, but not too Monty Python. They eventually went for TERFOR, according to the Mail on Sunday, although it’s still unclear what the T will stand for. But there’s still time. It reminds me of an old New Statesman competition where readers were invited to invent a committee whose acronym mocked its existence. The great Robert Conquest won, teasing the mag for its sympathetic approach to the Soviets: his proposal was Institute for New Statesman Editors and Contributors for Underwriting the Russian Experiment – INSECURE.

But insecure is something that the Prime Minister ought not to be after last week. The Woolwich murder, for all its savagery, has not exposed scandalous failings in our national security apparatus. After 9/11 and 7/7 there was, quite rightly, focus on our unpreparedness and lack of understanding.