Why our distorted fears cost more lives than terrorism

Horror that summons millions of citizens and a host of national leaders on to the streets of France stirs us all. Seventeen people are dead, some random, most deliberately targeted. When such atrocities happen a natural human response is to check your bases: how dangerous is that? How close to me and mine? If/when the next outrage hits Britain, what are the odds it could be my family next time?

Just as at funerals, gazing on the coffin, unbidden thoughts about one’s own death mingle with sorrow for the dear dead friend, so it was that, at the Guardian editorial meeting’s minute of silence the next day, I doubt I was the only one imagining for a fleeting second masked gunmen bursting in with Kalashnikovs and mowing us all down – unworthy but human.

How do we think about risk of death? Not rationally, for the good reason that we are not robots, but imbued with a powerful sense of moral justice, and easily shaken by irrational nightmares. The 1,760 deaths on the road in 2013 seem an acceptable price to pay for the convenience of cars and bikes. But the latest figures show a steep rise, 9%, in road casualties in the first half of last year, after years of steady decline, which is considerably less tolerable. The director of the parliamentary advisory committee on transport safety says local authority budget cuts have had a substantial impact – after cuts in everything from lollipop people, to street lighting and road repairs. That’s not fate but government cuts to blame.

Someone to blame is a key ingredient in accepting risk. Deaths carefully planned in the name of some abominable cause are the least tolerable. Ten years ago the 7/7 London bombs took 52 lives, last year the soldier Lee Rigby was slaughtered in the street, and a Ukrainian student tried to start a “race war” by killing Mohammed Saleem in Birmingham and plotting to cause explosions, but failed. All these were monstrous – but terror has caused few deaths over a decade.

We lived calmly with the relatively small risk from IRA bombs, laughing at macho American stars such as Sylvester Stallone who refused to fly to London for fear of them. As my colleague James Ball has written, in the year after New York’s 9/11 horror, Americans fearing to fly took to the roads – and that caused 1,595 extra road deaths.

Europe is inured to intermittent attack, the UK now thinking “when, not if”. The fear is of much worse – a dirty nuclear bomb? But despite frequent swoops and arrests, and rumours of planned atrocities against Queen or Cenotaph leaked to the tabloids, none have emerged. The only three cases due for trial are minor horrors: one group is accused of planning drive-by police shootings, but had no Kalashnikov and only six rounds of ammunition. Two more are accused of planning a Lee Rigby-type knife murder. And in a third case a man is accused of having an Isis flag, knife and hammer in his backpack, and talking of paradise on the internet.

So far, terrorists have been on security services’ radar – the watchlist of 2,000 known extremists. The reason they often slip through is that once observed they seem so, well, hopeless, unconnected to masterminds, ignorant even of their own faith and politics, pathetic fantasists with miserable histories in search of meaning. That’s the unsatisfactory banality of evil. How unlike the TV thrillers.

In everyday life, Britain has become remarkably safe – relatively crime-free, children rarely die, most people live to a ripe old age. Life is so dull we invent fears. Crimewatch serves the purpose. Ebola fits the bill too. Bird flu panic causedmassive stockpiling of Tamiflu, which probably didn’t work. Remember themillennium bug? Last time an irresponsible report on the dangers of the pill caused some women to abandon it, many more became pregnant: the actual risk of death from the pill was 30 times lower than the risk of death in pregnancy. Rare ecstasy deaths get huge coverage: imagine the hysteria if it caused the same 100 deaths a day caused by alcohol. Fear of flying wildly outstrips its minimal dangers, and so on.Security services, MI5, MI6 and GCHQ, cost £2bn a year and they have been well protected from cuts in the great austerity: anti-terror costs are far higher when including police and court time. Is that value for money? There is no way of knowing: they want more funds to watch the 600 fighters returning from Syria and Iraq – and what government dare refuse and take the blame if or when there is another attack?

Deaths at work are avoidable – waste, construction, agriculture and recycling are the highest. With 42 construction deaths a year and thousands more serious injuries, planners can estimate how many will be hurt in any major project - a price worth paying for some worker? What of the 13,000 who die every year of lung diseases caused by exposure to dust and chemicals at work? Imagine if that were crime or terror. Most serious accidents in the home are caused by shoes. Cotton wool buds cause nearly 9,000 injuries, tights and stockings more than 12,000. Be afraid.

No one would suggest abandoning security, but the £2bn spent would cover at least this winter’s NHS crisis. But does NHS spending minimise preventable death? Not necessarily. The admirable National Institute for Health and Care Excellence is overruled by political whim: following a Daily Mail campaign, David Cameron in opposition promised wildly expensive cancer drugs to the dying, some at £90,000, that Nice had judged bad value for lives saved. The Institute of Cancer Policy says the £280m a year could be spent saving many more. But voters fear cancer most, refusing to accept the inevitability of rationing.

Politicians have to pretend they can deliver zero risk. If a child is killed by a parent, someone must be to blame – bring on the pillory for social workers with impossible caseloads. Extremely few children are murdered, yet everywhere they are locked indoors due to parental nightmares. Meanwhile, climate change, the greatest danger mankind has known, sits on the political backburner.

In all this hazard, unreason rules – and probably always will. Not just fear but anger motivates us. Terror works because it does exactly what its name suggests: just a few murders perpetrated by misfits looking for God are seared into our hearts and minds far beyond the real risk. Fear itself is what terror does, and that’s what we should fear.