Dominic Lawson: Gordon Brown pledges to protect us from harm. But does he have a guilty conscience?

What a marvellous stroke of luck for Gordon Brown that his first week in office was marked by unsuccessful car bomb attacks in London and Glasgow. It's the sort of thing an incoming Prime Minister could only dream about: no one was hurt or injured, so there would be no great criticism of the security services. The police can just get on with the job of detection, while Mr Brown can jut his powerful jaw and make noble utterances about the great British character in adversity.

In the days running up to Mr Brown's accession, the story was spun that there would be no more spinning from 10 Downing Street. Who needs spin, when some of the most incompetent would-be mass murderers ever to have been affiliated to al-Qa'ida's cause are doing their inadvertent best to rally the British public behind our new leader?

"PM defiant over al-Qa'ida threat" was the main headline on the BBC news website throughout the weekend. On Monday, a headline in this newspaper declared "His agenda has been torn apart, but the new PM is unshaken." Yes, it's true: the announcement of Mr Brown's intention to abandon the remaining elements of the Royal Prerogative - leaked to the press ahead of Parliament in the manner that was supposed to have gone out with Blair - has had to wait a day or two. That is a small price to pay - no price at all, in fact - for being able to say to Andrew Marr on a Sunday morning: "We will not yield, we will not be intimidated. It's very important that we, the British people, send a message to terrorists that they will not be allowed to undermine our British way of life."

Some commentators have argued that Mr Brown's remarks were a splendid contrast to the "showboating" style that Mr Blair would have employed in identical circumstances. Yes, it's wonderful that we no longer have to put up with the wobbly chin and the catch in the voice; but Mr Blair would have used almost exactly the same words - with one exception. He would not have felt it necessary to use the word "British" twice, entirely redundantly, in the same sentence; Mr Brown, however, will never pass up an opportunity to parade his, and our, Britishness - hardly surprising, since the greatest threat to his political power is not Islamist extremism but Scottish separatism.

Mr Brown's words were noble in sentiment, of course, but sentiment is all it amounts to. This was a classic illustration of the rule that all political statements of which the opposite is unimaginable are essentially meaningless. Try: "We will yield, we will be intimidated. We will allow this to undermine our way of life."

The new Prime Minister also stated - and here he was saying something significant - that the battle against Islamic extremism was similar to the fight against Soviet Communism, and therefore required a similar approach. In one sense he is absolutely right - in both cases there is a profound ideological challenge to the Western notion of individual freedom. In another sense, I worry that the analogy with the Cold War is dangerously misleading.

The Soviet Union really did have the capacity to destroy us, militarily. It had occupied half of Europe, in effect imprisoning their populations in a military garrison. The hugely spectacular annihilation of the World Trade Centre convinced the US government that the fight against "terror" required a similar military commitment on our part. The British government - and in this Mr Brown does not seem to dissent from his predecessor - shared this view. That is why we have thousands of troops in Iraq and Afghanistan, whose lives are in much more immediate danger than those of their Cold War predecessors performing interminable tank manoeuvres on the German plains.

The truth is, however, that we need to deal rhetorically with the sort of Islamists who attempt to blow up West End night clubs as we dealt with the IRA: above all, as criminals. First, that is what they are. Second, to behave otherwise is to flatter them, to give them the status they crave. Tony Blair seemed strangely desperate to emulate Margaret Thatcher's achievements as a war leader - perhaps he was scarred by the hopeless experience of fighting a by-election for Labour in the immediate aftermath of the Falklands war.

Yet one of Mrs Thatcher's greatest displays of resolve was her refusal to accede to the IRA's demands that its men in the Maze prison be given political status. At the time, it was thought that the deaths on the resultant hunger strike by the likes of Bobby Sands were a great recruiting sergeant for the IRA. With the indispensable benefit of hindsight, we can now see that Mrs Thatcher's victory in that brutal stand-off was the moment when the more intelligent political figures associated with the IRA began to accept that they would need to act within the civil law to achieve their ultimate objectives.

In one sense, our military struggle in Afghanistan is intimately connected to crime in Britain, but it seems, bizarrely in some respects, to be making matters worse rather than better. I refer, of course, to opium. About 92 per cent of the heroin arriving in this country now comes from Afghanistan - its highest ever figure. Within that, the greatest increase in exports is from Helmand province - where our boys are - which now exports more heroin than the rest of Afghanistan put together. The Americans are gung-ho for destructive aerial spraying of the poppy crop, but the British are concerned that this would alienate the indigenous population still further. The Economist reported last week that US officials are outraged that British troops at military checkpoints often turn a blind eye when they find opium, apparently as a matter of policy.

So here we are: we take part in the occupation of Afghanistan, apparently to safeguard the British people against the export of terror to our shores. Yet in order not to alienate the Afghans still more by our military presence, we encourage them in the export - heroin - which truly has the capacity to destroy lives in this country, on a vast scale.

Thus it was that on his first day as Prime Minister, Gordon Brown presided over the early release of 1,000 prisoners - many of them drug-dealers - purely in order to make room for the next wave of heroin tradesmen. If you believe what recent Home Secretaries have said in private, it was impossible to persuade Gordon Brown to release the money necessary to build enough new prison places. I couldn't help laughing when I heard Jack Straw on the radio furiously defending the Government's decision to give each of the early-release prisoners £200 from the taxpayer, on the grounds that not to do so would inevitably result in many more robberies and burglaries.

Mr Brown has not so far been willing to comment, nobly or otherwise, on this threat to our everyday lives - even though to the vast majority it is a more immediate anxiety than being blown up by al-Qa'ida. Perhaps it's because he's got a guilty conscience.

d.lawson@independent.co.uk

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