There are more threats than ever but you’ve never been so safe. That is the complicated message of the Government’s new security strategy, which has not gained in simplicity during its repeatedly postponed publication.

It is an entirely proper exercise for a government to try to judge the threats facing a country and to prepare for them. Some would say that it is its main duty to its citizens – a task that can never be contracted out to others. Gordon Brown’s new report launches itself at the right target: the threats that have emerged in the past 20 years, particularly those that stem from globalisation.

But its answers would seem perversely distant to many people. Pandemics (the worst threat, it says), climate change and terrorism top the list.

Crime, immigration and the fraying of social harmony are not within the remit. The greatest weakness, however, is that it offers no context by which we can judge how afraid the Government thinks we should be. There is a strong case that, even if the new threats are more diffuse than the old ones – the Soviet Union and the IRA – they are also smaller in scale.

The tone of the report is not overtly alarmist; indeed, it has gone to such lengths to include so many departments that the result is a maypole dance of warnings woven together with none dominant. But the Prime Minister’s presentation of it did contain the exhortation to be afraid of dangers that have “changed beyond recognition”, calling on the country to “mobilise all resources available to us”.

There is also a hint of indulgent alarmism on the Government’s favourite themes of climate change and African poverty. It asserts without elaboration that these are going to be the cause of future conflict, but it will need to do more than that to make them seem close to home. It talks a lot about severe weather, for example, and yet an official explaining the report yesterday acknowledged that it was impossible to pin any single event, such as last summer’s floods, on climate change.

But perhaps inadvertently, the catalogue of threats in the report is reassuring because it reminds us of how old security threats have fallen away. In 1972, for example, there was a shocking spike in deaths within Britain, with 467 in Northern Ireland attributable to the security situation, two thirds of them civilian, compared with 25 two years earlier. At the same time the Soviet Union was a looming threat over Europe; nuclear strikes were conceivable and Soviet disintegration unimaginable.

That is not to make light of the threat of Islamic terrorism, which makes people feel personally vulnerable even though the individual risk of being hit is small. But Britain is no longer, as an official pointed out yesterday, “facing a state that is going to challenge the very existence of the UK”. It is hard not to consider that a big change for the better.

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