I commend the article by Patrick Cockburn in the i newspaper today to anyone who wants some understanding of the problems every European government faces with terrorism imported from the Middle East. Cockburn is scathing about the so-called superpowers and their inability or unwillingness to deal in any meaningful way with the situations in Iraq or Syria which directly lead to the appalling acts we have witnessed in France, Belgium and Germany and may yet occur here. He makes the entirely fair point that, short of locking up every immigrant from those and other Middle/Near East country, the security services CANNOT follow every move made by anyone suspected of harbouring terrorist sympathies because they do not have, and never will have, the resources required to do this and, what's more. it's cowardly of any of these governments to pretend to their citizens that they can. The Germans can't be blamed for ending their surveillance of this Tunisian man imo as they had nothing to go on to justify continuing - it's very easy to be critical afterwards with the popular press leading the way, of course.
As regards bollards and pedestrians, the Mayor of London is, I understand, still looking at the possibility of a large part of Oxford Street being pedestrianized which I personally regard as bonkers on all sorts of levels. The number of bollards required to 'protect' pedestrians given all the traffic crossing Oxford Street on a north-south axis, unless these are all to be blocked too, would number in the hundreds and also deprive emergency services of ready access, as well as delivery lorries, buses, taxis, etc.
