Government incompetence stops people in Britain being able to assess the real risks around them

At least when I lived in – or reported – from Belfast and Beirut, people had the information necessary for them to live with constant danger, writes Patrick Cockburn

Those in Belfast in the 1970s adjusted to the reality around them (Getty)

In the early 1970s I showed a visiting American around Belfast at the height of the Troubles. I had lived there for several years writing my PhD at Queen’s University and knew the city well.

I told him about its religious/political divides and which places were considered particularly dangerous. We were walking near the hard-Protestant Sandy Row district in south Belfast, when my friend asked me nervously: “Didn’t you say that this street was dangerous?” Pointing across the street, I replied, speaking as if this was common knowledge, “I said that that side of the street was dangerous, but this side is perfectly safe.”

I completely forgot the incident, until I accidentally ran into the same American in the US twenty years later and he reminded me about it. He said that my words had impressed him because they showed the precision with which front lines between unionist and nationalist territory were defined in Belfast. During the Troubles, the risks posed by moving anywhere in the city had become hardwired into the minds of all its residents as a common-sense survival mechanism. Like everybody else in the city, I became used to carrying out an automatic risk assessment wherever I went.