LONDON: Shortly after the Second World War, a new poster appeared in tube stations around the capital. It declared simply: “London Underground carried on.” It was a bald statement of fact — amazing as it seems, tube trains had indeed run throughout the war — but it was also a powerful statement of the ‘Blitz spirit’, that now-cliched shorthand for the values London — and Britain — most admires about itself.
Those four simple words expressed, in quiet and modest fashion, a pride in the capital’s quiet, reserved stoicism, in the dogged determination to keep going — without making too much of a fuss.
These days, it is fashionable to say such values have vanished. And yet the response to the attacks of July 7, 2005 tells a different story. One year on, it seems an event that many thought would mark a collective watershed has barely changed us. From our habits of leisure and transport, to our attitudes to politics, to the way we live with each other, the bombings have not had the impact many expected. We could mark today’s anniversary with another poster: London carried on.
Of course that’s not how it was for those most intimately affected. Survivors of the bombings, injured visibly and invisibly, along with those who lost daughters and sons, lovers and brothers, friends and fiances, were altered irrevocably by the events of that warm summer morning.
But, in the immediate aftermath of the killings, it seemed as if not just those directly involved, but London, even Britain itself, would be transformed.
But appearances were deceptive. Close examination revealed that the 15 per cent drop in daily tube use matched the loss of capacity due to line closures, forced by the attacks. Once the lines were back open in September, the underground reported a return to regular business, with a six per cent rise in the months since. As for bus use, it went up almost immediately.
What explains this rapid return to normality? The first answer is sensitive, but important. Despite the instant naming of the day as 7/7, this was hardly a British 9/11. Every death is a tragedy for those affected, but the scale of July 7 does not compare with the 2001 attacks on New York and Washington. There the final death toll stood at 2,975; here, the four bombers left 52 people dead, besides themselves. It is a safe assumption that if Britain had come anywhere close to the carnage of September 11 a year ago today, our scars would have taken longer to heal.
Not only was July 7 on a smaller scale, it was also a one-off. It was not, as many feared the instant the news channels began speaking of unexplained explosions on the underground, the opening of a campaign, one that would persist and change the rhythm of London life. In this context, the crucial date of last summer might actually have been July 21. If the bombings that were attempted that day had succeeded, then we might now view July 7 entirely differently — not as a horrific, exceptional episode but as the opening shot in a new war. Out and about in the city on July 21, I remember speaking to Londoners anxious that their lives were about to change for ever. Some said that they would never again take the bus or Tube on Thursdays (July 7 and July 21 were Thursdays). And in a way the tension was greater that day. July 7 had come as a shock, numbing the reactions. But a fortnight later, there was the instant fear of a lethal rerun. That led to panic in some places. One man at Warren Street station showed the television cameras a pile of sandals and flip-flops he had collected — abandoned by their owners as they ‘ran for their lives’.
But once the alarm lifted, and Londoners realised that July 7 was a singular event, the shock began to be absorbed. According to Tony Travers, who lovingly studies the capital from his perch at the London School of Economics, last summer’s bombings fitted into a mental frame the city has long had in place. “There is a dogged acceptance that this is just part of life here,” he says. “After all, we’ve lived through 30 years of this.” He means not only the IRA assaults on Harrods or Regent’s Park — which led Londoners to speak of a ‘Christmas bombing campaign as if it were a regular, seasonal activity’ — but animal rights activists letting off bombs on Oxford Street, a shoot-out at Libya’s embassy, a siege at Iran’s and a bomb at Israel’s. None of those events was as bloody as July 7, but they probably thickened the capital’s hide. There is, says Travers, a sense that, in a big international city, ‘this is just the kind of thing that happens’. It meant that, one year ago today, few Londoners felt genuine surprise. New York in 2001 and Madrid in 2004 had served as a kind of warning: many assumed London would be next. Once it came, some, privately and guiltily, whispered that they were relieved: they had dreaded something much bigger.
This jaded, world-weary tone in London’s voice is a crucial component of the famous Blitz spirit, not so much courage, as a stoic fatalism born of grim experience. After July 7, it was combined with a new message, one aimed at those who had no inherited memory of 1940, the 30 to 40 per cent of today’s Londoners who were born outside Britain. The Metropolitan police commissioner, Sir Ian Blair, urged ‘this wonderful great diverse city’ to be ‘one united community against atrocity’.
That call, echoed again in the mass vigil staged by Ken Livingstone at Trafalgar Square a week after the bombings, where the mayor hailed London as ‘the world in one city’, was heeded — more or less. There was, it’s true, a surge in anti-Muslim attacks immediately after the bombings. Police recorded 300 hate crime incidents in less than a week, including the killing of a man in Nottingham after anti-Muslim abuse was shouted at him.
But by August the feared backlash had receded; anti-Muslim attacks returned to their 2004 levels. The British National Party tried to capitalise on 7/7 in local elections earlier this year, but few believe it had much effect.
This phlegmatism in the face of July 7 seemed to catch the government by surprise; it was not the reaction it was expecting. Tony Blair, who had to break off from chairing a G8 summit in Gleneagles that morning, instantly connected the London bombings with the wider, international ‘war on terror’. Indeed, naming the day as 7/7 meshed with the effort to cast the London bombings as Britain’s 9/11. In the US, September 11 had led to a strong urge to hit back, an impulse that made both the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq possible. But there was little of that sentiment in Britain after July 7. There were, for example, few signs that the attacks boosted public support for the conflict that Blair still insists is the frontline in the ‘war on terror’, namely Iraq.
Similarly, the government seemed to presume a wave of post-9/11-style collective fury that it could ride in order to pass ever tougher anti-terror legislation. In August, Blair proposed a raft of measures, from the banning of radical groups to a prohibition on the ‘glorification’ of terrorism. But if the PM was betting on a smooth passage for these moves, their path cleared by the trauma of July 7, he miscalculated. Parliament, picking up on the public mood, forced a dilution of the glorification ban and refused the government’s demand to extend the legal period of detention without trial for suspects from 14 days to 90 days. Reluctantly, MPs voted to raise it to 28 days instead — one of the few tangible policy changes directly traceable to July 7.
In this sense, the politics of 7/7 has played strangely. It has not led to a new hawkishness in the British public. When detectives killed the Brazilian electrician Jean Charles de Menezes at Stockwell station on July 22, believing him to be a suicide bomber, there was some initial sympathy for the police’s insistence that they had acted on the principle that, when confronted with a possible terrorist, the risk of inaction is too great. But that sympathy did not last long. The De Menezes case has continued to be toxic, imperilling Sir Ian Blair’s position as commissioner. When 250 officers raided the home of two Muslim brothers in London’s Forest Gate last month, there was at least as much criticism of the police as understanding. In the post 9/11 atmosphere, the American public were ready to forgive any excesses in the name of combating terror. July 7 did not have a similar effect here.
Nor did fears of a dramatic change in non-Muslim attitudes to Muslims materialise. A recent survey by the Pew Global Attitudes Project found that 63 per cent of non-Muslim Britons have a favourable opinion of Muslims, barely down on the 2004 figure. Those attitudes were more positive than in the US, Germany or Spain.
That may not be how it feels. British Muslims, indeed British Asians generally, speak of extra tension in their lives, to add to the anxiety caused after September 11. Many say they are eyed suspiciously, especially on trains and buses.
In that sense, 7/7 has had a direct effect on British Muslims. But both politicians and press anticipated a rather different reaction. The government hoped there would be a round of soul-searching, as British Muslims asked themselves how a minority had been allowed to distort their faith. Tony Blair set up a commission and a roadshow of Muslim scholars to encourage the process. He wanted them, as he repeated again this week, to root out the extremists in their midst and repudiate what he called ‘the false sense of grievance against the west’.
But many believe the sense of grievance invoked by Blair is in fact far from false, and that British involvement in Afghanistan and Iraq has played a big part in radicalising young Muslims. Little wonder, then, that the commission and roadshow have not come to much, condemned as a sham or stunt by their harshest critics or, at best, a PR initiative, useful at the time and quietly allowed to fade away.—Dawn/The Guardian News Service
