Ordinary anarchists, serial murderers and radical pacifists have all the means at their disposal. They don’t need highly specified delivery systems and complicated, biologically engineered poisons.Everything necessary for total societal collapse is available from high street shops.Sixteen-year-old girls can mail out letters full of talcum powder to every public building in Britain and bring the machinery of government to a halt. Those who incline to medium levels of activity will know that it isn’t difficult to put concrete blocks on railway lines at night, especially as the days are still getting shorter. It isn’t hard to buy a sniper’s rifle and shoot out half a dozen insulators round the national grid. It doesn’t take much planning and engineering ability to pack a kilogram of Semtex into those remote-controlled aircraft you see sad middle-aged men flying round in circles.

Heaven only knows why the State Opening of Parliament wasn’t interrupted with half a dozen of them flying through the roof into the House of Lords.I was driving to Birmingham working out how to paralyse the motorway system. It’s the only thing that cheers you up on that route, I find. You’d buy a rear-engined car and make a compartment under the bonnet for a Washington-style sniper’s position. During rush hour you’d shoot the driver of an oncoming truck every five miles The opportunities for chaos have never been higher. The modern world is so highly calibrated that any small disturbance to routine activity causes enormous repercussion, endless knock-on. In the days after 11 September, anthrax hoaxes could have stopped America in a way they couldn’t now we are more, how shall we say, battle-hardened? Numbed? Dulled?It is very interesting why this ragbag of religious maniacs hasn’t done better than it has. A churlish swipe at ministerial meanderingsIt seems churlish to criticise Charles Clarke’s article in The Independent on Sunday yesterday But that’s no reason to refrain from doing so.

Lack of money has had a bad effect on the teaching profession, he observes. “Morale is thus lower than it needs to be.” It’s an odd idea, isn’t it, that morale in education needs to be low? That it’s even lower than it needs to be is a triumph of government policy.Ninety per cent of British universities are offering post-graduate degrees, he says. “This can only thin the clusters upon which most analysis suggests world-class research flourishes.” We can see what he means, I suppose, but it’s depressing that education secretaries write like this.Sternly he tells us: “It is hopeless to pretend that all institutions are the same, or even similar.” It’s not a mistake readers of The Independent – or anything else, come to that – are likely to make.Finally, he quotes the report that says British graduates earn £400,000 more over a lifetime than the national average. He uses this as a justification for making students pay more for their degrees.A lot of politicians sing from the same sheet But the figure is not quite as convincing as it might look You have to take the tax off it first, say at 30 per cent. The graduate advantage is reduced to £280,000 over a working life That is, £7,000 a year. You’d also need to deduct the repayments on the £45,000 that some universities are proposing to charge for a three-year course.