M. Jacques Myard, the bouncy French deputy, was talking on the wireless the other day about ‘unsecurity’. I am not mocking his English; there was a word unsecure in the 17th century, and we still talk of unsecured loans. But the meaning of security is like a pea in the butter-dish — hard to get hold of. In France security (or its French analogue) is an unsubtle codeword for ‘safety from mugging by foreigners’. By foreigners I don’t mean French people, but Algerians and other immigrants widely feared and hated. Hence Le Pen and, in Holland, Pim Fortuyn, the murdered populist with the strangely pronounced surname.
Security means lots of things, but if it means anything to British voters it is likely to be ‘safety from being blown up by terrorists’, or in an economic context ‘the ability to repay mortgages’.
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