Popular trust in government is a necessary foundation of a society’s defences against terrorism. We need to believe we are being told the truth and our government is acting in good faith. Unfortunately in the UK there is sufficient reason to be sceptical about who we should entrust our security to.

The alleged plot to attack aircraft announced by Scotland Yard on August 10 concerns us all. There have been some modest successes by the security services in bringing terrorists to trial. But the British government’s actions have also been marked by misinformation. The supposed ricin poison plot, the raid in Forest Gate, east London, in which two brothers, one of whom was shot, were arrested and then later released without charge and the “padded jacket’’ Brazilian Jean Charles de Menezes never wore when he was shot dead by police in London last year come to mind.

More important are the false government claims made after last summer’s London bombings that the attacks were made by unknown people. We badly need effective counterterrorist strategy. The threat is real. But the problem is not that the critics “don’t get’’ the terrorist threat, as the UK home secretary John Reid has put it, but that the government has, with the US, abandoned all the principles of counterterrorism. The British against countless insurgencies practised these. Whether or not you agree with the historian Niall Ferguson about empire, it is instructive to review the five key principles that allowed imperial rule with minimum force.

First, ensure good coordination between security services and police. Karen DeYoung’s indictment of the failure of the US security services to talk to each other in this week’s Washington Post is truly damning. By refusing to communicate, the US services render their, and by extension the UK’s, services less effective. We now know that US officials have a routine seat at Brit-ain’s joint intelligence committee, a fact that one of its former chairmen told me makes it hard for the British state to think independently. Do US officials also sit in on the UK’s counterterror organisations, and if so how do they relate to the myriad, non-communicating services detailed by the Washington Post?

In the UK our leaders say there are no grievances to be addressed, despite the fact that the London bombers said they were motivated by the Iraq war. Our moral high ground is preserved by a US attorney general who was promoted to this office after sanctioning the Guantanamo detention camp and the practices used at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.

By shifting attention to Iraq after 9/11, we gave Al Qaeda and the Taliban a respite for which British troops are now paying the price.

Our own base is now less secure than before 9/11, based on the number of threats, while our continued unnecessary dependence on oil makes our home base hostage to adverse regime change abroad. There are indeed those who do not get the terrorist threat. Principal among them are the British PM and his supporters. — The Guardian