This is Peter Hitchens’s Mail on Sunday column

As we squeak and gibber about the distant danger of terrorism, this country stands on the brink of a real threat to its economy, its daily life and its order.

It is a threat we have brought on ourselves by embracing an obsessive, pseudo-scientific dogma, a dogma that is also destroying irreplaceable industries and jobs week by week.

Last week we came within inches of major power blackouts, though official spokesmen claim unconvincingly that all was well.

Experts on the grid have for some time predicted a crisis of this sort, but had not expected it anything like so soon, or in such warm weather conditions. It is the fact that they were taken by surprise that warns us there may be worse to come.

Though Wednesday was mild for the time of year, the National Grid had to resort to emergency measures to keep Britain’s lights on. These included paying industries to reduce their power consumption and giving electricity generators up to 50 times the normal wholesale price to produce additional supplies – plainly emergency measures.

Forests of hideous, useless, vastly subsidised windmills predictably failed to help – because there was no wind. Acres of hideous, useless, vastly subsidised solar panels predictably failed to help, because it was dark.

Several perfectly good coal-fired power stations failed to help because we recently shut them down and blew them up. We did this in obedience to European Union regulations that prevent Britain from generating power from coal.

Meanwhile, China builds a new coal-fired power station every few weeks and fills the atmosphere with soot and carbon dioxide. If man-made CO2 really does cause global warming, then this policy of destroying Britain’s coal-fired power stations is not affecting that.

Even on its own terms, the action is mad.

Craziest fact of all: if things get really desperate, the Grid will resort to banks of back-up diesel generators, perhaps the least green form of energy there is. And if they can’t cope, a country almost wholly dependent on electrically powered computers will go dark and silent, as our competitors laugh.

You will not be comforted to know that two more perfectly good coal-fired British power stations are already doomed by Euro-decree. They will be shut and irrevocably destroyed in the next six months.

And our last deep coal mine, at Kellingley, sitting on a huge reserve of high-quality coal, is to be shut for ever.

The UK’s exceptionally high electricity prices, forced up by green taxes to pay for useless windmills and solar panels, are destroying manufacturing industry. Having closed much of what remains of our steel industry, high power charges last week claimed their latest victim, the Michelin tyre plant in Ballymena, Northern Ireland.

As I have pointed out here in the past, the world has seen this sort of madness before, when dogma has been allowed to veto common sense.

This is what happened to the Soviet Union, which destroyed its economy and its society by trying to create Utopia. As usual, the result was hell.

The inflexible, intolerant cause of Warmism is not as bad as Leninism. There is no Gulag, only a lot of self-righteous spite for any who dare to dissent. And who cannot sympathise with those who genuinely think they are saving the planet? But they aren’t.

Do they really think, once the free Western countries sink into decay thanks to their policies, that a mighty China will pay any attention to their cries of protest?

They are just hustling us into the Third World, while saving nothing at all.

The State shouldn't poke its nose into my emails - or yours

Actually, I don’t at all see that terrorism gives the Government an excuse to sift through all our private activities.

Most of the cases of so-called terrorists picked up as a result of such surveillance involve groups of loopy fantasists and/or dope-smokers who talk about committing various dreadful crimes but haven’t really got very far.

The evidence against one such group included the devastating information that they had spent some time looking at the Houses of Parliament and Big Ben.

Maybe they would have done something terrible. Maybe they wouldn’t. Experience suggests that our huge, expensive ‘security’ services aren’t actually that good at detecting or preventing serious outrages, despite their boasts. This is mainly because, however much power we give them, they’re not clairvoyant.

Terror works by surprise. It learns to go off the grid, and can afford to do so, unlike most of us.

It also works by driving societies mad, like a wasp at a picnic. Terrorists are overjoyed when we shut down our freedoms and turn ourselves into a police state, and when we retaliate, swatting the Middle East with useless bombs, or rounding up the wrong suspects and locking them up without charge.

This is what they want us to do, because in the end we will make ourselves so miserable that we end up by giving in to them – as we always do. As we did in Cyprus, in Kenya and in Northern Ireland.

Mrs Theresa May’s most interesting revelation last week was that, thanks to hidden provisions in a 1984 law, her officials had for years been trawling through our phone and email records without our knowledge. What similar provisions are hidden in her vast new Bill, or will be by the time it becomes law? Call me old-fashioned. I am old-fashioned. But I still think the presumption of innocence is vital, and that the police and MI5 should stay out of my business unless they have a good reason, which they can explain to an independent judge, to do otherwise.

If all coppers looked like this, maybe they'd get more respect

The funeral of PC Dave Phillips in Liverpool’s majestic Anglican cathedral was a very moving occasion in many ways, the dignity, eloquence and bearing of his family in particular, and one just hopes that all those who witnessed it will now understand just how much grief a single, callous action can cause.

But one unexpectedly affecting part of it was the sight of so many police officers in the dignified and very British uniform of helmet and tunic, which used to be so familiar and has now almost vanished, replaced by high-viz yellow, baseball caps, stomping boots, tasers and belts hung with menacing equipment.

Did any of us ask for this change, or approve of it? Wouldn’t most of the police, as well as most of the public, prefer to return to the times – not long ago – when we respected each other, rather than (as is so often the case now) mistrusting each other? And wouldn’t a return to the old uniform be a major step towards this?

I’ll regret this, I know I will. I always do when I try optimism. But I do feel something approaching joy that my home town, Oxford, has just acquired a new railway station and a new route to London.

For decades I’ve watched the thoughtless building of new roads, and the ripping up of perfectly good railway lines, a grave policy mistake that has messed up our landscape and wrecked a great British industry. Could this serial blunder at last be over? I doubt it. But for a few weeks, I’ll hope so.

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