As I write this they are burying the victims of the two bombings in Turkey, both Turkish and British, the death toll in Iraq increases yet again, and it is reported that Britain is about to go on Red Alert, with armed police on the streets to prevent the anticipated and seemingly inevitable terrorist attack anticipated here.

I can't remember, even at the height of the IRA terrorist campaign, such an underlying combination of suppressed hysteria and political paralysis. We are told we are waging a war on terrorism but there are reports that a group of Algerians arrested in Scotland for suspected terrorism are about to be released wholesale. The Financial Times on Saturday reports that an attempt to buy a large quantity of saponin, believed to be going to be used to amplify the effects of a ricin chemical attack earlier this year on London was thwarted only by the vigilance of probably a clerk in Amersham International. The report includes the statement that the finance for this purchase 'was supported by the Muslim community'.

There are reports that a Cabinet Minister has been forced to tone down a speech calling on the Muslim community leaders here to be more vocal and forthright in their condemnation of the terrorism conducted by members of their religion, but simultaneously that moves are afoot to convert 4 schools in Glasgow to be Muslim faith schools because 90% of the children attending them are of that faith.

There are no reliable figures, because apparently our government does not know, or will not tell us, just how many illegal immigrants are in this country, nor how many of both them, and those to whom British citizenship has been granted, or were British by birth such as the 'shoe bomber', have been converted to extremism by the radical elements of their faith in Mosques in the UK. We can assume that those captured in Afghanistan fighting for the Taliban and currently languishing in Cuba, were merely the tip of the iceberg.

Our police are constrained by laws which are totally out of date, our press by laws which forbid the publication of facts which are judged to be either politically incorrect or even 'racist', and our cities and towns beset by crime caused by drugs by armed criminal gangs whose leaders go scot free. At the same time leading politicians of the Liberal Democrat, Labour and Scottish Nationalist parties openly support rabid anti-American attitudes and demonstrations.

This isn't freedom or democracy or the rule of law, it is chaos.