Absolutely blistering analysis in The Business of the British government's gross and persistent failings over the jihad:

‘If Mr Blair had truly woken up post-9/11, the laws now being belatedly proposed would already be on the statute book; the jihadists masquerading as Islamic preachers pouring poison into vulnerable young Muslim minds would already be expelled or incarcerated, as they have been in France. But that has not happened and there is no rush to change the status quo, despite the mood of crisis gripping the country. Instead, the feckless British Parliament is off on an 80-day holiday and the new laws will have to wait until spring 2006 before they become operable. There could be no more dismal measure of the extent to which Great Britain is now a country without opposition - indeed in the wake of the attacks has become a country ruled by a mushy government of national unity incorporating all three major parties - than the fact that not a single significant opposition figure has complained about Parliament's extended vacation in the midst of the terrorist crisis; nor has anybody demanded an early recall. Lying on a sunny beach for as long as the most indolent of university students on extended vacation clearly matters more to opposition politicians than demanding an urgent and robust response to those who would destroy us…

‘Nor should the welcome news that the failed 21 July bombers have been caught deflect us from asking some hard questions about the performance of the police and the intelligence services. We cannot be sure that MI5 and MI6, in particular, are equipped for this new terrorist era. With a joint budget only one third of Labour's useless Department of Trade & Industry, it would be miracle if they were. It is now apparent that MI5 did not have enough manpower to track Mohammed Sidique Khan, one of the 7 July bombers, whose name came on to the intelligence radar in connection with a lorry bomb plot which was disturbed in March 2004. Hussain Osman, the suspected bomber arrested in Rome on Friday, was able to leave Britain at a time when his name and picture were splattered across every airport and ferry terminal in the country. Yet he found it as easy to leave as the 310,000 to 570,000 illegal immigrants (to borrow the Home Office's range) have found it to stay. Even in the current state of highest alert, Britain's borders remain hopelessly porous; and its security services congenitally inadequate.

After 9/11 the White House "woke up" enough to convene the 9/11 Commission, which produced a brutally frank report questioning the preparedness of the US intelligence, security and political apparatus. Great Britain badly needs an equivalent inquiry in the wake of its own terrorist attacks. Its remit should be everything from the causes of home-grown Islamo-fascism to why Londonistan was allowed to take root; to the proper shape of, and resources for, the security and intelligence services in an age of global Islamic terror. It is the proper purpose of responsible opposition and a free press in a mature democracy to ask probing questions about these things and to call for such matters to be investigated, even at a time of national crisis. Instead, the media has been muted and the opposition co-opted in the government's cause. It is time the opposition (and the media) woke from their current consensual slumber and started insisting on answers to the hard questions that victory in the war on terror demands.’