SAY what you like about Tony Blair, but he is good in a crisis.

When events turn apocalyptic, the Prime Minister combines statesmanship and humanity in impressive manner. It's a few days later you have to watch him.

At the time of the London bombings Mr Blair looked shaken to his very core, and then he steadied himself to speak with eloquence and force.

After the heartfelt emoting - truly felt, honest and un-spun - comes the gesture politics. Mr Blair's over-heated announcement last week of a draconian 12-point plan to tackle terrorism was followed up on Tuesday by a 13th front of attack: the revival of ancient treason laws (an idea seemingly dropped as soon as it was proposed).

His suggestions include the closure of certain mosques and radical bookshops, making it an offence for people to justify terrorism, and the denial of asylum to terrorists.

On the face of it, these appear sensible enough, and certainly the refusal to admit terrorists is fairly uncontroversial - until you get to the tricky business of defining exactly what constitutes terrorism.

As has been pointed out widely, Nelson Mandela was once considered a terrorist in many eyes (including Margaret Thatcher's), yet now he is regarded as a great statesman.

So what sounds sensible enough stumbles once you seek a definition.

One important concern about such measures is that they can infringe human rights. Whenever anyone is moved by liberal sentiment to say such a thing, a great noise falls upon their head as those more to the right object that terrorists and their sympathisers don't deserve human rights.

That may well be so - but it's more the case that all our rights could be infringed in the name of tackling terrorism. As Jeffrey Jowell QC, a professor of Public Law, points out: "In the heat of battle, we must... be careful not to compromise the cornerstones of our liberties. For it is they that ultimately distinguish the values of a constitutional democracy from those of the merchants of terror".

So it is that Tony Blair, who introduced a rights-based model of democracy via the Human Rights Act of 1998, now appears willing to undo that Act in the name of being seen to be doing something about terrorism.

The big question here is whether or not these measures will make much, if any, difference. It's all too easy to come up with headline-grabbing suggestions that sound tough and tickle the "throw-them-out" tendency. But some of what Mr Blair wants to do could well make matters worse by inflaming unstable passions.

Many of Mr Blair's proposals, delivered in a dash before he rushed off on his hols, could apparently be dealt with under current legislation. So the suspicion remains that his main desire is merely to appear to be acting tough - whether or not what he suggests will make any difference.

One problem remains that Mr Blair seems stubbornly unwilling to acknowledge that the way we act can change how we are seen in the world. Joining the American invasion of Iraq clearly pushed Britain up the target list of Muslim extremists. Yet he cannot accept this, and usually wheels out the old line about the 9/11 atrocities happening before the Iraq War, which neither proves nor disproves anything much.

Perhaps the greatest need is for Britain to look for new Islamic allies - both inside and outside of our country - as a way of understanding and uprooting the extremism that would destroy us.

At such times, we all have to be willing to change our views. For instance, once I was totally against CCTV, believing it treated everyone as if they were a criminal. Now I accept such prying cameras have proved to be an invaluable tool in tracing the terrorists.

So, some infringements to our liberty are worth putting up with - but we should still feel free to question whether or not a government is acting robustly in our interests, or merely getting tough for appearances sake.

Updated: 10:58 Thursday, August 11, 2005