Security Policy or damp squid?

Too little too late seems the verdict on Gordon Brown's National Security Strategy,which was launched yesterday in the Commons.

The Prime Minister described a future scenario where the country could be under attack fro cyber terrorists,disease flooding,climate change and poverty.

It is no coincidence that Gordon Brown should choose the fifth anniversary of the Iraq invasion to publish his much delayed National Security Strategy. The Prime Minister used his first Commons statement last July to signal that it was coming; the repeated postponements encouraged the assumption that some serious thought was being put into a fundamental re-assessment of Britain's role in a troubled world that has changed beyond measure since the attacks of September 11.

says the Telegraph's leader adding

In the event, the new strategy is a disappointing damp squib. Short on vision, managerial rather than thought-provoking, it simply pulls together many existing policy strands.

The Independent is also rather scathing describing

an old-fashioned mishmash of an agenda, thrown down in a rather take-it or leave-it fashion, in the apparent hope that MPs would appreciate its nutritional value

adding

To have a 1,000-strong civilian task force on standby, made up of emergency services, judges and others, is no bad thing. But we also have to ask what sort of crisis it is likely to be where police and judges – rather than troops and rescue workers – are needed at a moment's notice. Is a whole national security strategy required before the Government compiles a national register of people qualified and willing to become engaged?

The Times decsribes it as

More of a framework to cope with uncertainty than a strategy

adding

There is precious little “strategy” in the national security strategy, and no indication of how priorities will be decided or what money will be available to implement the new co-ordination. The statement is more of an assessment of what the threats are than an overview of how they will be tackled.

Crispin Black writing in the Guardian decribes

a bland and oddly romantic document, strong on what we would like the world to be but weak on what we are actually going to do. It is a long, tedious statement of the obvious written in a hybrid style - half government speak and half over-written menu. Worst of all, it sidesteps the big questions.

which are according to Crispin Iraq,Afghanisatn and our relationship with America