Which is a rare piece of good news in the War on Terror. Having pledged to stop using violence, the next natural step would seem to be disbanding. Though I suppose the IRA could continue in existence as a social club. They could hold cake sales and charity auctions. Like the WI, only with balaclavas.
Apparently he was Brazilian and unconnected to the bombings. I appreciate the difficult position of the police, but this is why we didn’t have armed police in the first place. I don’t know what to say.
The police shooting dead a suspected suicide bomber (who, as it turns out, wasn’t a bomber, even if he turns out to be linked) on the Underground. Now that’s unnerving. It’s so un-British.
Prince Charles has been commenting on “the duty of every true Muslim” in the aftermath of the bombings.
I get very uncomfortable when people who are clearly not Muslims themselves make pronouncements about Islamic theology. Tony Blair has done it before as well. Now we all know that Blair is high Anglican bordering on Catholic, so presumably he doesn’t believe that Mohammad was God’s last and pre-eminent prophet. He hardly seems to be in position to make judgements about who is and isn’t a true Muslim.
There’s nothing to stop him commenting on morality, or civic duty, or whatever.
It sounds like some kind of bad-taste joke – ‘What do you call a Yorkshire suicide bomber?’ but, of course, it’s not.
Oddly enough, the thing which creeped me out most wasn’t that the bombers were British, or even that they were second generation, but that they were Pakistani. It’s invidious to talk about one ethnic minority as being more British than another, but the Asian community seems much more in the mainstream of British life than, for example, the Arab community. Probably just because there’s more of them and they’ve been here for longer than some other ethnicities. And besides, they play cricket, eat curry and drink lots of tea. However uncomfortable the relationships sometimes are between countries and their ex-colonies, there is a shared history there.
BTW, I do appreciate that lumping Indians, Pakistanis and Bengalis together as ‘Asians’ is missing the point in this context – there’s no likelihood of any Hindu suicide bombers on the tube any time soon – but I still find it depressing that whereas a few years ago the papers would have referred to the large Asian communities in Bradford and Leeds, now they are ‘Muslim’ communities. Not only have we changed one lazy label for another, but the new one is, in the circumstances, more alienating rather than less.
I feel desperately sorry for the bombers’ families.
Having not been in central London since this whole thing started, I felt the need to go up to town today. I don’t know why – solidarity? a need to touch base? a feeling I was missing all the action?
Anyway, I went up to Borough Market and had a nice lunch – grilled scallops and bacon then some falafel.
I’ve been slightly embarrassed by all the references to the Blitz this week (most of which, interestingly, come from the States). The Blitz was over 60 years ago now – most of the people going to work on Thursday would have been too young to remember the London of Carnaby Street and Mary Quant, let alone the war. And the Blitz killed 40,000 people; this just isn’t the same.
I’m actually unsure whether Londoners have really been exhibiting an unflappable bulldog spirit, and not just a large scale version of the normal city anonymity. You could walk down Oxford Street in a state of obvous emotional distress and most people would studiously ignore you. Perhaps this is the same thing – once people have established that no one they know is involved, they just go back to minding their own business. Rather like the vibrant, multicultural, tolerant aspect of London that the Olympic bid was so keen to stress. It’s not born out of thoughtful libertarianism, but pragmatism and indifference. I’m not suggesting that’s a bad thing.
I have found it interesting, though, how quickly the mood was established that stoicism and resilience were the things to stress. The matter-of-fact coverage of the TV news, both ITV and BBC, probably helped, and Blair set the tone well with his initial statement; but generally everyone seems to have decided very quickly to take that attitude. For the past few years, if the stiff upper lip got any media time, it was usually to suggest that it was thing of the past – particularly since the reaction to Diana’s death. Whether or not that was a good thing was a matter of taste, but there was something of a consensus that we were becoming a more volatile, emotionally open people. But the reaction to the bombings was to rummage through the myth-kitty and pull out the bottle marked “Ol’ Blitz Spirit”.