The Illusion of Safety

If it is remotely possible, I am not going to go within one hundred miles of London during the Olympics.

That’s not as a result of a curmudgeonly refusal to join in the spirit of things. I do quite enjoy watching the Olympics. When else do you get to see women’s weightlifting and doubles table tennis in the same day?

Anyone who watched the Beijing Modern Pentathlon show jumping event in 2008 – complete with untrained race horses charging headlong into the fences – will know that there will be some great stuff buried away on the red button coverage.

No, I will definitely watch some of the Olympics – but on TV. I once went to a live sporting event (the 1995 Oxford-Cambridge boat race) and it was crap. Never again. You can’t see properly, there’s no commentary to explain what’s going on, you can’t go to the toilet (in peace, at any rate...) and there are too many people.   

The reason I will not be going anywhere near London if I can help it because if I wanted to live under martial law in a place where the interests of the native population are subordinated to impressing visiting dignitaries, I would go to China or Bahrain. 

As the government installs missile batteries on the tops of buildings in London, one has to wonder exactly whose benefit they are doing this for. Because – and if any counter-terrorism experts or military brass are reading this, please feel free to correct me - if you shot down a hijacked airliner over any part of London, bits of flaming wreckage are almost certainly going to fall into heavily populated areas, aren’t they?

Apparently, some 19,000 military personnel are going to be deployed in London to make sure that foreign investors...I mean sports fans...are kept safe. More than are currently in Afghanistan.

Which brings me on – in my mind, at any rate – to this “little” device I was recently given on opening a new bank account.

I put in my card, type in my PIN and it gives me an access code which I can use to log in to internet banking.

If I don’t have it with me though (or if I have broken it my attempting to put it into my wallet and then sitting on it), I can log in using a number they sent me...in a letter.

So as well as being too big to carry around with me other than in a large bag, the machine is actually pointless because the security it offers is hopelessly undermined by the “back door” Nationwide have kindly provided.

Both the rooftop stingers and Nationwide’s calculator (which doesn’t even do maths) are designed to give the illusion of safety. In fact they create more risk by encouraging complacency about real threats.