If you can’t hear me very well this morning, it’s owing to the neighing coming from the bolting horses and all the stable doors being belatedly slammed shut. For behold, our intelligent, wise and on-the-ball government has just announced that we need new anti-radicalisation laws. This creative dispatch comes fourteen years after the attacks on New York and ten years after the London bombings.

Never mind, let’s look at what the new arrangements will involve.

The new rules will require public bodies to identify and report those “vulnerable” to extremist views. Strange use of the word “vulnerable” and it reminds me of that other odd usage, as in “those vulnerable to committing a crime.”

Deciding your vocation is to be one of Allah’s suicide bombers is not, I suggest, about vulnerability; it is produced by a psychotic and murderous disposition. The prime minister wonders aloud why all these young Muslims are taking themselves off to Syria to learn how to be murderers or sex-slaves.

Because they want to, Dave. Because they want to. The “cause” of radicalisation is a perverse exercise of the faculty of free will.

Councils will have to “consider whether publicly available computers should limit access to extremist material.”

What’s to consider?

“Schools will need to demonstrate they are protecting pupils from being led to terrorism by having robust safeguarding policies in place to identify children at risk, and intervening as appropriate.”

So this is our government’s secret weapon against terrorism: more bureaucracy, clip-boards and box—ticking. “Safeguarding” didn’t deter career paedophiles and it will do nothing to curtail the activities of those just itching to rampage with a Kalashnikov and kill as many Kuffars as possible in a shopping centre or, as it might be, on a beach 

You needn’t be afraid of a terrorist attack, for our government will keep you safe. We have stockpiled huge quantities of jargon and we are prepared to deploy this jargon at a moment’s notice to face the threats that confront us..

For example, “Universities will have to carry out a risk assessment to determine where and how students might be radicalised.”

A risk assessment – that’s the device which strikes terror into the heart of every jihadist

“Healthcare workers should be trained to recognise signs of people being drawn into extremism.” Are these the same health care workers who fail to notice when an aged hospital patient is dying of thirst?

“Prison bosses should carry out cell-sharing risk assessments for inmates.”

Of course, before you can kill your terrorist, you have to recognise him for what he is. I mean that tall chap with a beard and going into the kebab house might have no more sinister intent than breaking his Ramadan fast. How to decide if he wants to blow us all up? Education Secretary Nicky Morgan suggests we enquire as to whether he has “an extreme intolerance of homosexuality.”

I can imagine the line of enquiry: “Excuse me, Sir but may I examine your suicide belt? And, incidentally, are you an admirer of Doris Day and Judy Garland?”

Predictably, the general secretary of the National Union of Teachers, Christine Blower, said the Government’s Prevent programme was “causing significant nervousness and confusion among teachers.”

Well, that’s the first thing I’ve heard in its favour. Anything that scares the chalk out of members of the NUT can’t be all bad.

Of course, do any of these things and the enemy will soon see you off by shouting, “Islamophobia!”