World | UK
Brown faulted for 'too much stress' on anti-terror war
Britain must look beyond the threat of global terrorism and address urgent dangers posed by climate change, disease and the safety of energy supplies, a think tank warned yesterday.
- AP
- Published: 00:45 February 14, 2008
London: Britain must look beyond the threat of global terrorism and address urgent dangers posed by climate change, disease and the safety of energy supplies, a think tank warned yesterday.
The Institute of Public Policy Research said Prime Minister Gordon Brown's government may have placed too much emphasis on counter-terrorism, claiming that flooding, failed states and biosecurity pose equally serious challenges.
The report comes before a newly updated national strategy on homeland security, which government officials said Brown is likely to publish next month.
"Terrorism is a very real threat but we must not allow it to dominate discussion about national security," said the report's author, Ian Kearns. "The front line in the battle for security today is more complex than ever before."
Evidence
Kearns said one likely effect of issues like climate change would be to put the power to protect citizens "beyond the reach of governments acting alone".
Paddy Ashdown, the former UN High Representative to Bosnia, and former Nato Secretary-General George Robertson submitted evidence to the think tank, identifying failed states, climate change, the spread of Islamist ideology, and socio-economic inequalities between developed and developing nations as Britain's most important threats.
"The revelation of 9/11 is that even if you are the most powerful nation on Earth, you cannot assure your security if you ignore what is going on in a lawless country on the other side of the world," Ashdown told British Broadcasting Corp radio yesterday. He said he hoped the new homeland security strategy would look closely at the variety of threats to Britain. "The government understands, in a sort of incoherent way, that there are other threats apart from the terrorism one," Ashdown said.
Kearns, the organisation's deputy director, said Britain was becoming increasingly vulnerable to decisions taken in Russia, Nigeria, Algeria and other energy supplying nations.
The impact of unpredictable - and extreme - weather caused by climate change could also "quickly come to dwarf the issue of terrorism," Kearns said in his report.
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