My own opinion is that, so far, road blocks and similar restrictions on the mobility of Palestinians have been unsuccessful in preventing terrorist attacks, and have a disproportionate and unjustified effect on non-terrorist Palestinians. The individuals involved in the Glasgow Airport attacker were, if I remember correctly, in the UK quite legally and working as doctors, so a road block to check their IDs would have beeen totally useless in preventing the attack. Arguably we could prevent any foreign person from entering the UK (the people were Iraqi, I think), but given that in the past some terrorist attacks have been committed or attempted by British people, I doubt that would entirely prevent terrorism in the UK either, and I fail to see how it would prevent attacks in other parts of the world.

Yes, it is absolutely a problem that terrorists are able to attack people, but it simply doesn’t seem to me that road blocks are an effective way of preventing those attacks. Nor does it seem to me that it is fair or useful to cast all Palestinians as terrorists and therefore people who should not be free to travel; by the same logic we might say that no Basque person should not be allowed to travel within or outside of Spain because of the actions of the few Basque separatists who are members of ETA. However, Spain does not have any such policy.

I just think we need different methods for preventing terrorism, starting with communication and policy changes. I really do think that preventing people from moving freely, and effectively imprisoning them, makes people more likely to turn to extremist action; as well as having unacceptable effects on the humanitarian situation of those people.

Just my 2p. But as I say, I can’t speak for David Mumford.

However on the issue of limited mobility, I’d be curious to know what he thinks of mobile suicide bombers, and whether he’s in favour of unrestricted access for these individuals to the London Bus and Underground and Glasgow Airport.