“Britain is vulnerable to terrorist attack from the sea because no single body is responsible for protecting the UK’s coast, MPs have warned. Just nine Royal Navy ships along with a ‘motley collection’ of police and coastguard boats guard a shoreline more than 7,000 miles long”.

If there’s a point being made about having so few ships on patrol to guard 7000 miles of coast that we’re under serious threat, how many ships do they think are necessary?

And more to the point, what kind of sea-borne threat are they thinking of anyway? A bunch of terrorists turning up in a fishing trawler equipped with mortars, firing shells on to Brighton Beach?

Like most government / military responses to the supposed increased terrorist threat over the last 10 years, most of the scenarios they have come up with have been largely fanciful, whilst ignoring the basic scenarios of a bunch of loons climbing on to a train with a rucksack full of fertiliser.

And there’s the rub.

For all the bravado of the security services and the military, the simple sad fact is any terrorist attack is a simple matter – even for somebody to simply load up a bomb with petrol, sail up the Thames, & light a match outside the Houses of Parliament. Such a simple improvised device would almost certainly cause no damage to the building itself, but the publicity generated would be no less intense.

No plotting with others would be needed, the probability of spooks discovering the plan would be zero, and even the Thames River Police would be unlikely to see anything amiss until it was too late, let alone the Ark Royal.

So basically we have – in a time of a severe squeeze on public spending, resulting in thousands of public sector workers at risk of being made redundant, with a consequent shifted strain on to a different part of the public purse – the military wanting more shiny toys.

I wonder how many doctors, teachers, dole office workers, transport planners etc one more ship to jolly round the coast would cost?