After last weeks terrorist scares and multiple arrests, there has been a variety of cynical and conspiracy-theory ridden posts about the “convenient” timing of these arrests and musings about whether or not there’s some Orwellian (as opposed to Channel Fourian) Big Brother style scheme to subdue and placate the general populous into giving away what few civil liberties they might feel they’ve got left.

This is as illogical and ludicrous as it is preposterous.

Don’t misunderstand me - I’m sure that, if they could manage it, the current government would like nothing better to do than to spy on us 24/7, hand over its citizens to the US under an extremely biased and one sided extradition treaty on some of the most tenuous and spurious charges imaginable and introduce voluntarily compulsory ID cards.

But we are talking about the same government who couldn’t even pretend they’d found some weapons of mass destruction in a sand pit in Iraq thereby justifying the war against them, nor provide some convenient evidence to show how an innocent Brazilian who was shot on the tube just happened to be dating Osama Bin Liner’s pool cleaner’s son’s dog’s breeder’s daughter’s cousin, nor hide the fact that they’d freed 1023 foreign prisoners who should have been deported back to a more civilized and competent country.

So if you’re telling me that you think the government organised a massive PR stunt on the kind of scale that would have the Ministry of Truth nodding in smug approval then I can only point out that on past record, the presiding government seem generally unable to organise an evening consisting of imbibing a superfluous, nausea-inducing amount of inebriants in a fermented alcoholic beverage manufacturing establishment.

On the other hand, this is exactly the sort of disruptive, morale quelling, market lowering stunt that only the government could pull off.