Results and analysis from the latest British Social Attitudes survey have just been published by the National Centre for Social Research. Each year, the BSA asks about 3300 random people for their thoughts on various topics, in order to see changes over time or pinpoint new matters of great interest.

This year, it seems the terrorists are winning.

The Guardian reports that a "Huge majority say civil liberty curbs a 'price worth paying' to fight terror", and they're not kidding. The facts and figures, mostly extracted from page 13 of the NCSR's press release on the subject appear to back this assertion up, and we're not just talking insignificant or ephemeral rights here.

The Guardian starts by reporting that 7 out of ever 10 people think compulsory identity cards for all adults would be a "price worth paying" - a slogan permeating the terrorism bit of the survey - to reduce the threat of terrorism. Fair enough, on the face of it, carrying an innocent bit of electro-card around with you to stop getting blown up seems a sensible enough compromise…except of course not only are there potentially menacing sides to the ID card system, but there is no reason at all to suspect a compulsory identity card would actually do anything to reduce the threat of terrorism, any more than carrying a pink handkerchief in your top pocket would.

The Poorhouse imagines that was the question to be "Is carrying a pink handkerchief in your top pocket a price worth paying to reduce terrorism?", you would get even more than 70% in favour of such a policy. Even UK (ex) home secretaries trying to push ID card legislation through such as David Blunkett and Charles Clarke have publicly stated that identity cards are not a solution to the threat of terrorism. And seeing how countries that already have them such as Spain are hardly a stranger to being attacked the empirical evidence doesn't seem to stack up either.

The question is therefore pretty meaningless (or less charitably, misleading - a most amusing commenter on chickyog points towards Sir Humphrey's guide to making a balanced survey) and just shows if anything how mentioning the word "terrorism" gets people into a illiberal mad frenzy. Or, as the study's joint author Conor Gearty puts it slightly more literately:

The very mention of something being a counter-terrorism measure makes people more willing to contemplate the giving up of their freedoms. It is as though society is in the process of forgetting why past generations thought these freedoms to be so very important.

ID cards are nonetheless perhaps one of the least of our worries here. 25% of people polled thought it was OK to let police question suspects for a week without even seeing a solicitor at all. Furthermore, despite the Guardian playing it down with words like "less" and "only", we find out that a good 35% of the British randoms were happy enough to see peaceful protest banned. Half of you would be fine with denying people charged with terror-related crimes a jury at their trial.

Perhaps worst of all is that famous crime-against-humanity, torture. It may be banned in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, various Geneva Conventions and the UN Convention Against Torture, but, inconceivably appallingly, fully 22% of the UK population sample thought that torturing suspects in British jails was acceptable. This despite - ethics aside - torture's exceptional and obvious history of getting either a dead suspect or the answers you want whether or not they bear a remote resemblance to the actual truth. Forced out false confessions are really not going to save you from anything.

The Poorhouse spitefully has to hope then that should this survey actually reflect the reality of beliefs and such inane policies ever come into everyday usage then it's those 22% who do - as will inevitably happen from time to time due to the nature of the job - get falsely suspected of something and then torn to pieces physically and mentally rather than any of the rest of us.