And mindful of my new status as public enemy number one (I have been variously described as obscene, inhumane, disgusting and sickening for my post-atrocity editorial in the New Statesman which criticised America and particularly its foreign policy), I do not wish to attract further accusations of insensitivity and poor taste. So I will start by saying that wars are bad things.

But wars are good for state-run services such as education. True, there are short-term risks: the combined costs of increased defence spending, anti-terrorist security measures and a world recession may put the planned increases in education spending at risk.

True, too, neither the Falklands War nor the Gulf War did much for state schools - especially as the decisive victories helped to confirm Tory governments in power.

But those wars were fought overseas and involved only professional members of the armed forces.

This war, if the forecasts of further terrorist attacks are correct, will have a home front. And the effect will be to boost the arguments for a strong state and well-funded public services.

This is already apparent from New York. The heroes of the hour were the police and the firefighters. The private sector, in the form of Wall Street, had to close down for nearly a week in the aftermath of the hijackings; the public sector did not and could not. The focus of national admiration was not a private entrepreneur, but a publicly-elected local official - the mayor of New York.

Nobody has suggested that the firefighters or the police would have done better jobs if they had been put out to private tender or if their services had been subject to competitive pressures.

On the contrary, it is now the private sector that looks helpless, running to the skirts of the previously derided nanny state. The airlines and the insurance companies are the first to demand state assistance. Expect others to follow.

War, with its sense that “we’re all in this together”, favours collectivism and community. It brings down class barriers and makes taxation respectable. In 1945, the British elected their most collectivist government of the century. Almost immediately, it set up the NHS.

Nobody questioned the need for universal secondary education. The basic rate of income tax, 50p in the pound during the war, remained as high as 40p in the pound until 1956.

I admit to some scepticism about talk of war. The hijackings are different only in scale and technique from the bomb that caused Lockerbie 15 years ago. The latter was not followed by more atrocities, but by more Thatcherism (though that was atrocious enough).

But if there is something resembling a war, I think we shall hear little more about the privatisation of schools and hospitals, performance-related pay, public-sector competition and all the other nonsenses that politicians have inflicted on us recently. They will have other things to preoccupy them, and silly policies like setting up more sectarian schools (“faith schools” as they are outrageously known) will be quietly dropped.

In any case, I suspect there will be a change in the atmosphere. The fortress of market liberalism and devil-take-the-hindmost capitalism has been shaken. All of a sudden, money-making looks heartless, private consumption frivolous. In this climate, selfless public service could be back in fashion.

Peter Wilby is editor of the New Statesman