The only place I ever read the Daily Mail is (oddly) in my local takeaway curry place: it takes about as long for me to be properly horrified at each page of the Mail in turn, as it does for them to prepare that dangerously immigrant dish, the jalfrezi.

Is this actually the case? From reading The Register, it sometimes sounds like they've hardly solved a thing.

Payment in ID requirements, though, isn't a coin that buys us anything: all the 11th September people had valid ID, and all the 7th July people were British citizens. (I was going to add, "And the last time we had a sustained terror campaign in the UK we got by without monkeying with civil liberties", but then I remembered that whole Gerry-Adams-being-dubbed-by-actors thing.)

Does your curry house have the Mail too? actually all newspapers love to say violent crime is up, it's a great story. In fact violent crime has been falling for a decade.

Yes, exactly. If we really do need new laws for these new terrorists, which is not something I yet buy, then what I'd like to see is specific rules that they can only be used to combat terrorism: some kind of "fruit of the poison tree" arrangement whereby once a copper decides to use anti-terrorism legislation on somebody, they can't then use information gained that way to prosecute any other offence. (Well, except murder rape and GBH, I suppose.)

Peter