Bunker Bunkum

David Blunkett gives a characteristically illuminating statement on the government's new 22-page anti-terrorism booklet: "It is all about helping you to do what you need to do and know what you need to know." Not much changes in the world of the scary leaflet - the key piece of advice is "go indoors and stay there". You will be told to turn the television or radio on, and keep it on. This should give us all a frisson of the very great severity of this threat, since in the general scheme of modern expectation, authority should be telling you to turn the television off, and go and do something less boring instead.

Otherwise, the nature of the threat (well, there are these people, right, and they might want to do something really horrid to us) is such that it would be foolish to get specific. A gas mask might be good, but only if the terrorists had developed evil time travel, and teleported us all into a first world war trench. Some protection against nuclear fall-out is always handy, except that it doesn't exist.

All people really agree on is that you'll need some bottled water and a torch. This gives these communiques a nice, homely feel. As paranoid as you might be, it's hard to get the heebie-jeebies off a torch. And bottled water was a recommended stockpile for an emergency as anodyne and unthreatening as the Y2K "chaos" (my mother still has her Y2K emergency water, in fact - it's now out of date. In the event of terrorist attack, she's going to use her new stockpile for drinking, her year 2000 stockpile for pets and strangers, and her Bay of Pigs water for washing).

So it's all a lot less frightening than the Protect and Survive videos of 1980, which you can still see at the Kelvedon Hatch, one-time nuclear bunker now an idiosyncratic kind of family fun day. Their core message was the same - go back to your house. Stay there. Don't, whatever you do, attempt to escape the cities into the countryside. We don't care that that's what they always do in John Wyndham novels. The difference two decades ago was that the threat was exclusively nuclear, so there was a more detailed game-plan-fashion yourself a fall-out zone with the use of a table and two doors. Then make a lavatory out of a chair. Protect the windows by covering them with carpet. Deal with the carcasses of your less fortunate family members in a sensible manner.

It is now an accepted truth that none of these measures would make any difference to one's long-term chances of survival. And that the central purpose of the advice was to make sure that, in the event of imminent nuclear attack, people wouldn't be able to riot and cause havoc, since they'd be too busy turning their houses upside down. The motivation behind all government instructions is the maintenance of order and prevention of panic. Never mind that order would be meaningless in a post-nuclear landscape. Never mind that panic is a pretty reasonable response to the end of life as you know it. An over-excited and lawless population is far worse for the rebuilding of civilisation, than a lot of dead people.

And wishing no ill-will in the world to the incumbent government, that remains the case - the idea that there are certain things we "need to know" and "need to do", that will be of equal benefit to the preservation of all our lives, is a nonsense. People living in the shadow of an exploded nuclear plant would probably not be best served by staying indoors. A carefully orchestrated evacuation would be inconvenienced, for sure, by a bunch of individuals heading for the hills, but the real thrust of any measures taken in a national emergency is not making sure the roads are clear for properly organised vehicles. It is maintaining the existing relationship between authority and public. And perhaps that's exactly as it should be - perhaps the spectre of an individualist, atavistic scramble for safety is far worse, and in the end far more dangerous, than an organised response to disaster that might let the odd family down, but will preserve a recognisable structure.

Still, I think in this postmodern age we could take a bit of straight-talking. I'd like to see a booklet called How to Preserve the Fabric of Society in the Event of Terrorist Attack. "Don't blame us, or wonder whether we're all in a special bunker, making merry; this will sap valuable energy which you could be using to wind up your torch"; "Don't go looting, or in any other way dispense with the principles of private property - we'll need them again when the fall-out dissipates, and we had a devil of a job setting them up in the first place." If it meant preserving the world order, I think I could see the value of staying at home. It's only if we're talking about safety that the very last place I'll be is under my table, in a built-up area, awaiting instructions from the telly.