I have recently spent time talking with senior Pentagon officials and others involved in counter-terrorism. Their intellectual seriousness, and the global scope of their concerns, are strikingly different from those of their British counterparts, who are obsessed with “community cohesion” and the “radicalisation” of young Muslims. On these issues, the views of the non-Muslim majority population are largely ignored — except as potential “Islamophobes” with little or no say in the matter.

In the United States, by contrast, the Senate committee on homeland security heard evidence in April about the likely effects of a terrorist nuclear attack on Washington DC. The chairman, Senator Joe Lieberman, said, “The scenarios we discuss today are very hard for us to contemplate, and so emotionally traumatic and unsettling that it is tempting to push them aside.”

Few things make the bien pensants more uneasy than talk of right and wrong. They flinched when Ronald Reagan called the Soviet bloc, rightly, the “evil empire”. Sometimes that fastidiousness was simply based on wilful ignorance. Reports of Stalin’s terror, the Gulag, persecution of dissidents or the bullying of the captive nations were dismissed as tendentious or inaccurate. More often it was based on a feeling that the West’s own shortcomings were so appalling that we were in no position to judge anyone else. Amid the ruins of communism in Czechoslovakia in late 1989, I sat through an excruciating dinner with my then foreign editor where I explained that the Czechs wanted to become a “normal country”. He couldn’t share my enthusiasm.

In a few weeks, after much delay, one of the most extraordinary machines ever built by humankind will be switched on. In a scene probably analogous to the inauguration of Stonehenge (which this device superficially resembles, in its circular form as well as probable function), assembled dignitaries and high-priests of science will witness the throwing of a (no doubt wholly symbolic) switch and a new era of particle physics will begin.

Then, about 300 feet beneath the Swiss-French border, in the shadow of the Alps near Geneva, in a tunnel roughly the length and diameter of the London Circle Line, small packets of atoms will be whirled around at unimaginable velocities by magnets of unfathomable power, to be smashed into each other in a series of miniature, ­titanic cataclysms that will mimic, for just an iota of time, the flashes of Creation itself.

The rapid fragmentation of society, the emergence of isolated communities with only tenuous links to their wider context, and the impact of home-grown terrorism have all led even hard-bitten, pragmatist politicians to ask questions about “Britishness”: what is at the core of British identity; how can it be reclaimed, passed on and owned by more and more people?

Every year more than 50,000 children in England and Wales have their fates decided by the family courts. When divorcing parents cannot agree on how the children they produced together should be looked after, a judge from the family courts will adjudicate and enforce a particular way of dividing those children’s time between their two parents. Equally, when officers of the state (usually social workers) believe that children’s interests would be better served by being taken away from their biological parents and given either to a new couple to adopt, or handed over to the care of a state-run institution, it again requires a decision from a judge from the family courts, a decision which will be irrevocable.