Last Sunday night Panorama screened a dramatisation of a multiple terrorist attack on London, with a studio panel made up of politicians, emergency services experts and medical staff. The overall feeling left by the end of the programme was that London, like much of the rest of the UK is ill-equipped and ill-prepared to deal with any kind of large scale terrorist attack. There were also 143 complaints to the BBC, including people complaining it was too realistic (sorry, not in my book it wasn’t), or that there should have been some on screen graphic indicating that it was fictional (um, so like the date 25 May wasn’t a giveaway, or that there was this Panorama logo on screen, or perhaps they missed the scrolling text indicating it was fictional.) Hey people look at what you watch before you start complaining.

So what of the conclusion that we cannot cope with multiple terrorist attacks? I’d like to write a carefully studied response to this – to agree that we should do something; that the government should plough money into planning, training and ensuring our safety during such incidents, and that those affected are treated promptly by medical staff. But I can’t. Did we have all this hand-wringing in the days of threat from nuclear war. No. Instead we got a couple of public information warnings, some leaflets delivered through the post and advice on how to live under the stairs.

Furthermore, if the government was to provide the resources to ensure that incidents were handled in an effective manner, the cost would be massively prohibitive given the likelihood of such attacks and the number of lives lost. I know that the loss of one single life is hard to bear, but if one does a cost-benefit analysis, the conclusion undoubtedly would be that spending the effort is simply not worth it. The best we can hope to do is put effort into detecting and preventing terrorist incidents and building a society that isn’t prone to these risks. Unfortunately following the responses to the attacks in the United States, and the massive miscalculation of the continuing Iraq war, we are all targets.