I don’t even know if kids today are taught these stories any more; I suspect they may not.

The moral of the story is that you can end up shouting ‘wolf’ once too often, such that people won’t believe you when there actually is a wolf around.

A man stabbed a couple of people at a London Tube station – and this wouldn’t be 2015 if there wasn’t already cellphone footage circulating on the internet. This very aggressive man apparently shouted ‘this is for Syria’, prompting headlines that this was being treated by the police as a terrorist attack.

Of course I am not in possession of all the facts, but even the police spokesman said on camera that although they weren’t ruling that out, they were not specifically ruling it in either.

In the good old days, an attack was only officially classified as such once an organisation had claimed credit for it – often authenticating the claim by using previously agreed codewords. We didn’t have the internet then, and the so-called Islamic State seem to choose their moments for claiming credit for an attack. Quite possibly they are happy to see us running around chasing our tails while we try and work it out.

Back to the guy in the underground station. The footage we have seen showed a guy that was not cool and calculating, but very wound up. By now the police will know if that was due to alcohol, drugs or some long-standing mental problem. Muslim eye witnesses got the impression they guy was not a Muslim himself. To put it as diplomatically as I can, it sure looked as if the guy was at the very least unbalanced.

Which brings us to the next point: when is a terrorist attack not a terrorist attack? I honestly didn’t think world leaders were simply using the definition of anything that strikes terror into the rest of us. If that were true, many would ask for spiders to be included in that list!

Countries maintain lists of groups that are proscribed. Hell’s Angels might strike the fear of God in you but they are not defined as terrorists. The so-called Islamic State however is. But even then, it used to be that such a group needed to have orchestrated an attack in order for it to be called as such. I’m sure during the Troubles that local attacks took place by sympathisers who were not members of, or instructed by, the IRA. That would not have warranted the headline ‘Terror attack’ back then, probably something more like ‘Partisan attack’.

In short, are we in Britain so keen to climb on the bandwagon of terrorist attacks (again) that we need to headline this deranged chap’s violence as a terrorist attack? Would that mitigate his actions actually? No!

At the end of the day, it is the person that pulls the trigger, detonates a bomb, or forces a pilot to crash a plane who is personally responsible for his or her actions. Motivation or orchestration by others does not absolve them. I have no difficulty in also trying to eradicate the organisations that order terrorism on a mass scale, and stifle or counteract their ‘teaching’. Unfortunately ‘we’ sometimes have more scruples than is good for our rhetoric. Some former IRA ‘leaders’ are now welcomed as elected representatives, and are even greeted politely by members of the Royal Family. The callous murder of Lord Mountbatten, for example, is all but forgotten outside his family, and on camera at least, the Prince of Wales recently shook hands with one of those probably involved in some way at the time in ordering the assassination.

Whilst ‘terrorism’ is up there at the top of the list of things we condemn, my vote goes to ‘political expediency’ as a qualifying candidate.