Daily Mail indulges in a bit of gratuitous scaremongering

Going by the headline of a Daily Mail story - Westminster on Mumbai-style terror attack alert after Al Qaeda threat - you'd be forgiven for thinking that it concerned some specific threat against Westminster (1).

In fact, for all its frothing, the 'news' content of the story amounts tot he shocking revelation that the British parliament has a contingency plan for responding to an armed assault.

There has been no specific threat, or suspicion of such an event happening, as the Mail grudgingly admits in the final lines:

A House of Commons spokesman said: ‘We have contingency plans to cover a range of emergencies, of which this [an armed raid] is one. It does not relate to a specific threat.’

In other words, not really a news story at all, just a typical bit of Daily Mail tub thump to encourage us to feel scared and suspicious.

We have ALWAYS been at war with Oceania.

1 - "Westminster on Mumbai-style terror attack alert after Al Qaeda threat," by Gerri Peev. Published in the Daily Mail, 16th of November, 2010. (http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1330066/Westminster-Mumbai-style-terror-attack-alert-Al-Qaeda-threat.html#ixzz15TVIJ1hP)