More than at any time since the 11 September 2001 attacks, the devastating attack on Madrid's rail network earlier this month have brought into sharp focus the very real possibility that the UK will eventually be the target for a similar atrocity. Police, security experts and government officials are agreed that Britain, and the capital in particular, would be obvious targets. Metropolitan Police commissioner Sir John Stevens called the sceptre of an attack "inevitable"; Mayor of London Ken Livingstone said it would be "miraculous" if the capital escaped attack; and cabinet minister Peter Hain admitted the UK was a "frontline target".

'Eyes and ears': But security and defence expert Colonel Michael Dewar told BBC News Online the UK was "as prepared as we can be" and "more prepared than most", thanks, in part, to our long-standing experience of terrorism in this country. "But that does not prevent bombs going off - you can never prevent that", he added. "Terrorists will succeed in exploding something eventually." The UK has been on a high state of alert ever since the World Trade Center attacks in New YorkSince Madrid, the police and the government in the UK have reminded the public thay need to become officers' eyes and ears, reporting suspicious behaviour and packages to the authorities, although they stress this is not a knee-jerk reaction to the bombings.

'Ill-prepared': The sheer scale of the devastation in Spain has brought to the fore another question - how would we handle an attack of such magnitude? Top emergency planners have warned say that Britain is ill-prepared to cope. Patrick Cunningham, chairman of the Emergency Planning Society, told BBC News: "Staff who would be vital to help in the response to an emergency haven't got the equipment that they require, they haven't had sufficient training and generally there is a lacking of an emergency planning culture in the United Kingdom." Home Secretary David Blunkett has insisted that everything possible is being done to protect the security of the UK and also said he had previously been unaware of the emergency planners' concerns. He urged them to let the government know of their concerns rather than "just telling the newspapers". Another issue dominating the agenda is the question of whether the UK and its European colleagues have been sharing intelligence and communicating as effectively as possible to help prevent incidents like Madrid. Some see this as a key indicator of how prepared we are in the UK to combat the terrorist threat.

Intelligence reluctance: An EU action plan to fight terrorism was agreed at an extraordinary summit held just after the 11 September attacks which drew up five main areas in which action has since been taken. They include judicial, police and intelligence service co-operation, border controls and investigating the findings of terrorism. But in a confidential report, published a few days before the Madrid bombings, the EU's foreign and security policy unit concluded that mechanisms for co-operation were seldom used and that slow progress had been made in blocking the financing of terrorist groups. It also said member states were reluctant to exchange intelligence. BBC defence correspondent Frank Gardner says that the more countries are involved in intelligence-sharing initiatives, "the less willing people are to share the original information". He also said the UK government would be more worried about the quality of intelligence rather than the sharing of it. He said: "Perhaps the most worrying feature of the Madrid bombings was that there was no warning, there was no spike in electronic chatter. In other words, the cell that carried that out was able to do it right under the noses of the Spanish authorities.

'Bureaucratic clap-trap': Col Dewar, meanwhile, says that many sources of intelligence simply cannot be shared because they may not be relevant to all countries and because "sources cannot be compromised". He says "too much can be made" of working together with other European countries in the fight against terrorism and that talk of "European terror tsars" is "bureaucratic clap-trap". As he sees it, it is "up to us to defend our own territories".