Thank you for an excellent column. I lived in London, Birmingham and the Midlands during the IRA bombings in the seventies and early eighties. I vividly remember moving bags to the kerb that were left in my pub. There was no panic, no hysteria - quite different from these days really.

And as you so correctly observed, there were over ten times more deaths due to terrorism at that time.

Yet nobody called for closing the Irish border, or spewed hate at Catholics and the Irish, for example. No massive security nets, monitoring of the public, strip searches at airports etc. I remember when they took out the lockers and litter bins from the Tube - an annoying inconvenience, as I used the Tube many times a day, seven days a week.  But there was no rabid fearfulness and bigotry like there is today.

I wonder why it's so different ....