And yet, despite all this the brutal truth is that in many respects this country has simply not taken the terrorist threat seriously enough. Flinching from the tough-minded measures that cried out to be taken, it failed to take action commensurate with the threat that faced us and which culminated in the 7/7 carnage. Indeed, considering how much was known and anticipated, our failure to act can only be considered the height of incompetence or recklessness, or both. Clearly, we do not know whether the people who carried out these bomb attacks were foreign nationals or home grown terrorists. But in the light of the clear and present danger from terrorists slipping into this country from abroad, the government's failure to secure our borders defies belief.

Because of the shambles of our immigration and asylum system and the chronic inability by successive governments to police it properly, the astonishing fact is that faced with an unprecedented threat to our security the government simply lost control of our borders. As a result, no-one could know who was coming in or going out. As the head of MI5, Eliza Manningham-Buller, observed, this made the job of countering the terrorist threat infinitely more difficult. Indeed, one might go further and say it made it impossible.

People who were not supposed to be here because they were illegal immigrants posing as asylum seekers have simply been allowed to disappear into the country in their thousands. Clearly, the vast majority of such people pose no security threat; but it is equally obvious that it is not possible to make a country safe if its borders are so permeable and administrative chaos allows people simply to vanish below the official radar.

This has been allowed to occur because, at a time of unprecedented danger, this country's ruling elite has self-indulgently postured on human rights and the 'diversity' agenda with reckless disregard of the paramount need to give priority to the need to defend and preserve public safety.

The courts have undermined all attempts to police our borders, making it impossible to deport illegal immigrants or lock up those who are considered to be too dangerous to be at large. Faced with this irresponsible judicial moral grandstanding, the government failed to repeal the Human Rights Act and thus remove the principal weapon being wielded by the judges to undermine public safety.

Instead, when the Law Lords produced their intellectually flawed ruling that it was unlawful to detain without trial foreign nationals suspected of terrorist involvement, the government promptly caved in to the 'human rights' industry and released them. Although it placed various restrictions on their movements, the fact remains that it released people who it had previously said posed such an unconscionable danger to this country that normal procedures had to be suspended to put them behind bars.

Instead of robust action to deal with people acknowledged to be a danger to the state, all the Home Secretary can come up with is the deeply flawed proposal for ID cards — which will not even apply to many people coming into this country.

This move will destroy ancient liberties while adding precious little of practical assistance to the fight against terrorism. All it will do is enable ministers to give the impression that it is doing something — while at the same time they do little to stop extremist Islamist ideologues from using what has come to be known as 'Londonistan' (because the capital has become a centre of Islamic extremism) to promulgate their inflammatory diatribes against the west and thus swell the ideological sea in which terrorism swims.

It was nauseating to witness the Mayor of London, Ken Livingstone, deliver his ringing condemnation of terrorism — the same Ken Livingstone who invited the terrorism supporter and Islamic extremist Sheikh Yusuf Qaradawi to speak in the capital last summer and physically embraced him on the platform.

Even more alarmingly, the country's principal police force involved in counter-terrorism is now under the control of an officer whose obsession with the 'diversity' agenda is thought to be undermining the fight against terror.

The oppressive side of this philosophy surfaced recently when Sir Ian Blair, the Metropolitan Police Commissioner, was rebuked by an employment tribunal for 'hanging his own officers out to dry' to prove his anti-racist credentials. This was after his force was found to have racially discriminated against three white officers who were disciplined after alleged racist remarks at a training day, in which one of them had referred to Muslim headwear as 'tea cosies', mispronounced Shi'ites as 'shitties' and said he felt sorry for Muslims who fasted during Ramadan. Yet Sir Ian responded to this finding against himself of institutional bullying by declaring he was 'unrepentant', repeating that the remarks were 'Islamophobic' and declaring that the Met had to 'embrace diversity'.

Yet following this institutional bullying over Islamophobia, Deputy Assistant Commissioner Brian Paddick made the astonishing comment: 'As far as I am concerned, Islam and terrorists are two words that do not go together'. So what, then, does he think al Qaeda is?

While few would disagree that the Met has to be sensitive to the needs of ethnic minorities, Sir Ian's obsession with attacking 'Islamophobia' is now raising serious concerns among certain police officers and security sources. It is getting in the way of the job the police are called upon to do. Officers who try to address the delicate issue of terrorism and its supporters within the Muslim community now find themselves in danger of being accused within their own force of Islamophobia.

The situation has become so grave that some members of the security services no longer trust the Met with sensitive counter-terrorist information. Law-abiding and patriotic Muslims - and the great majority are just that --who try to give the police vital information about extremists sometimes find to their dismay and disbelief that it is not acted upon. And throughout, there is a woeful dearth of Islamic experts and a disastrous paucity of insightful and informed analysis.

Also, Sir Ian seems remarkably preoccupied with promoting himself and was all over the broadcast media immediately after the attacks. But earlier in the day, his timing was, to put it mildly, unfortunate. For at 7.20 am, he boasted on BBC Radio Four's Today programme that the Met was seen as the 'envy of the policing world in relation to counter-terrorism'.

Along with the other emergency services, the Met did a great job. But counter-terrorism is all about preventing such catastrophes from occurring in the first place. Compared to what the American Department of Homeland Security has done, for example, the pusillanimity of the British effort makes you weep.

America now has draconian border controls, including racial and religious profiling which enables officials to stop people if they correspond to certain suspect characteristics. More people have to have visas to enter the country, and every entrant is now routinely photographed and fingerprinted. And this most diverse and multicultural of nations has no qualms about going into mosques to interview and interrogate Muslims.

Britain, by contrast, has pussy-footed around. Terrified of being accused of Islamophobia and wrapping itself in the mantle of the diversity agenda, it has allowed the human rights culture and a lethal political correctness to frustrate elementary and common sense measures to protect the people of this country. It has been sleepwalking to disaster. On 7/7 it paid the ultimate and terrible price.