THE Remembrance Sunday ceremony held at the Cenotaph in Whitehall yesterday was particularly poignant as 2014 also marks the centenary of the start of the First World War.

Sadly, yesterday's commemoration was held amid heightened fears of a terrorist attack prompting a visibly tighter security presence than has been the case on previous occasions.

Naturally, the threat of an attack did not prevent the Queen and other senior members of the royal family paying their respects to Britain's war dead and the event passed off peacefully.

We praise Her Majesty for her courage and we also praise the efforts of the police and security services.

When things go wrong the security services are in the firing line (sometimes quite literally) and critics are quick to condemn intelligence failures.

According to Sir Malcolm Rifkind, chairman of the parliamentary intelligence and security committee, the UK's security agencies have foiled at least one terror 'spectacular' every year since 2005.

The plots we know about included bringing down planes, attaching bombs to remote-control model cars, poisoning the food supply and bombing the London Stock Exchange - but there were many more than remain secret.

In some cases luck played a part but in the vast majority arrests were made after months of undercover surveillance involving eavesdropping, undercover agents and the interception of emails and mobile phone conversations.

Of course, we do not know what the security agencies get up to all the time. Post-Snowden this has prompted a debate about how far state surveillance should go in the war on terror.

We agreed there is a need for robust oversight of the security services, but it is to their great credit that we have not had more terror attacks.