There’s a good piece on Spiked about yesterday’s horrible murder in Woolwich:

…rather than treating this as a knife crime committed by two deluded men, the authorities and media have treated it as a declaration of war. The powers-that-be have gone on to an actual war footing in response to it. PM David Cameron flew back from a political gathering in Paris, and is currently chairing a meeting of COBRA. It’s the second time COBRA – the government’s national emergency committee that convenes in the Cabinet Office Briefing Rooms – has met since the stabbing occurred. Politicians say we will ‘stand firm’ in response to what happened, as if Britain had just been invaded by a foreign army rather than having witnessed a horrible knife attack.

…You know what would have been a far better response? If Cameron had stayed in Paris, if COBRA had never met, if the two stabbers had simply been arrested and investigated by the police alone, and if their act of pseudo-political knife crime was covered on page 4 or 5 of the papers, not on page 1.

It’s a terrible crime, of course, but it isn’t a crime of the same magnitude as the 7/7 bombings. By treating it as such, all we’re doing is guaranteeing that sooner or later somebody else will be hacked to death by killers demanding passers-by film them for posterity.