He said: "There are a lot of people whose primary concern is 'how am I going to protect myself and my family?'. This is a perfectly legitimate concern."

Mr Rai said the government's message was "you want to protect your family and your community - we have the answer." This was to invade Aghanistan and Iraq abroad and to rip up civil liberties at home.

"I think that the message affects people in this country," he said. He stressed this did not mean that most people supported the whole agenda, however it seemed that most were prepared to go along with the government approach to some extent. "Even if if doesn't convince people, it confuses and paralalyses them from opposing what's going on."

Mr Rai said the government's message was that the "enemy" hates democracy and freedom and is going to keep on attacking until everyone converts to fundamentalist Islam.

The question anti-war activists should be putting to the public was "If you really want to stop these people doing this, are the methods the government's using actually going to reduce the risk?"

It was in fact clear that the methods were increasing the risk, thus bringing us on to a second question for the public: "If we want to reduce the risk, what is it that's motivating people to do these attacks?"

Mr Rai said it was clear, even from Bin Laden's statements, that US and UK foreign policies were the reason for his war, not "hatred of freedom and democracy". So it was plain to see that following Blair and Bush's agenda was making the situation worse, regardless of the the rights and wrongs of the situation.

Concluded Mr Rai: "The safer thing is the morally justifiable thing. I think that's a message people can be won over to."