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I do not believe that we have a “No shit Sherlock” category for blog postings here, but maybe we should. Here is the explanation that the Evening Standard was offering today of what made those who committed the atrocities of last Thursday in London decide to become suicide bombers:
This photograph was taken outside Waterloo Station, at about 3pm this afternoon.
To be fair to the Evening Standard, their actual reportage was somewhat more informative, and more up-to-the-minute billboards revealed that one of the bombers was a primary school teacher. That was news, to me anyway.
Now that we know what everyone except Tony Blair suspected (that the suicide bombers were probably British born or at least legal residents), perhaps it is worth noting that had mandatory ID cards been in force, they would have been perfectly entitled to avail themselves of one each.
Yes, I can see how this will help stamp out terrorism. Right? Right?
Here is a project I certainly welcome called We are not afraid. The message is simple, worth repeating and lets you do strange things with a camera.
Harry Hutton and his commenters very quickly became fed up with people going on about the British Stiff Upper Lip, and the Spirit of the Blitz. I know the feeling, and I am sure they speak for many. A lot of this talk is indeed rather self-conscious and theatrical, by which I mean not arm waving and emoting, but just a case of us all deliberately summoning up our inner David Nivens so that the bits of us just above our mouths will look suitably stiff in TV close-up.
Plus, I wonder how stiff our upper lips would now be if three thousand people had died and London had lost two of its most striking buildings.
On the other hand, the father and mother of Philip Russell, the second person on this melancholy list, were briefly on the telly this afternoon. She was silent. He was a model of considered sorrow. There was no out-of-control display of rage, no “why us?” wailing, just calm grief, and quiet words of appreciation for the character of their departed son. If Mr Russell senior is shedding tears he was not showing it to the cameras, and we were spared those hideous, triumphant close-ups of a person showing more feelings to the camera-persons than he intended. To dismiss Mr Russell’s reaction as mere theatricality would be very tasteless, and I would say, mistaken.
But whether you think all this talk of stiff upper lips is a media led posture or the real thing or, as I think, a bit of both, the good news is that it all makes a most refreshing change from the emotional incontinence that greeted the death of Diana Princess of Wales. This, we all immediately realised, is the real thing. Quite enough real people have lost real loved ones whom they actually knew and really liked, without lots of other people piling in with self-indulgent displays of bogus misery concerning people they never knew.
There is also the fact that, whereas the message that all those silly public mourners were sending out when Princess Di died was all about what the Horrid Paparazzi had done, and of What She Meant To Us, blah blah blah, we now all understand that the more we emote about these bombings, the more pleased will the people be who did them, and who helped them, and who are now cheering that they did them. We do not want to give those people any further satisfaction. So yes, it is all a bit theatrical, in the sense that the tone is deliberate. But, good.
Tony Blair, instinctive politician that he is, tuned in to both moods. When Di died, he was on the verge of tears. When these bombs went off, he had already practised a much calmer display, to suit the new, far more serious – far more real – state of affairs.
Emotional continence is not the same as intellectual excellence. A stiff upper lip is no excuse for refusing to use the brain a few inches above it in an intelligent manner. I am not saying that everything Tony Blair and his supporting caste of cabinet ministers and coppers has been correct, just that the tone of voice has mostly been good. What we ought to think – and what we ought to do – is a quite distinct matter from how we should merely feel about all this. (I strongly agree with Johnathan Pearce that last Sunday’s Telegraph leader is an excellent place to start. And if you liked that, you will also like this by Mark Steyn.)
But, with all those caveats duly caveated (or whatever it is you do with caveats), emotional continence is entirely the right emotional atmosphere within which to get stuck into the process of sharpening up our thinking about all these matters, and then acting upon those thoughts. It is, in short, an excellent start.
Sky News and its sister television channel Fox is reporting, along with Channel 4 News, that the bombers last Thursday may heve been killed in the act of detonation. I am watching a police press conference as I write. A number of police raids are going on in Yorkshire, northern England.
I don’t believe in the existence of Hell, but if there is such a place, may the mass murderers of last Thursday spend much time in it.
USAF personnel in the UK have been told to stay out of London because of the bombings. Sorry but this is not just a propaganda gift to the enemy, it is just plain daft.
Firstly, the US was not the target of these bombs, Londoners were. Secondly, London is always full of American visitors and US military folk do not really stand out from the crowd all that much. In fact Americans are probably more likely to form identifiable ‘target clusters’ in the rural communities around the US bases in the UK.
It was a terrible atrocity but we have seen it all before in London at the hands of the IRA, so please, telling US service personnel to avoid London is foolish and plays to the often held stereotype of Americans as easily scared by such incidents. Methinks USAF people are made of sterner stuff and more than capable of assessing the risks for themselves.
I am taking the scenic route home at the moment. I know readers will think I am a wimp, but I still cannot quite summon up the courage to go down the Tube again – which is unpleasantly hot in the summer, anway – and have been getting plenty of exercise. My route takes me from Holborn, down Chancery Lane, down to the Embankment and then a long walk up to Parliament on the side of the River, then through Millbank, past the lovely Tate Gallery and then back to my home in Pimlico. (Brian of this parish also lives in the area).
The atmosphere is rather odd. There is the constant racket from helicopters hovering about, over Buckingham Palace much of the time. There are hundreds of police, some armed, outside prominent buildings including Parliament and the big Whitehall offices, of course. There are thousands of tourists, although quite a few appear unwilling to use their cameras for fears of appearing insensitive or possibly even suspicious. A lot of the tourists look even more dazed than is often the case. Most people seem pretty cheerful, though, which is good.
As I walked past Parliament Square opposite the rather scruffy anti-war posters, a young black guy in a posh shirt was shouting out loudly his evangelical Christian message. No offence to Christians but it struck a jarring note. I wish folk like this fellow, no doubt a decent person, could realise that hectoring religion is not quite what London, or anywhere else, needs right now.
A final thought for tonight: I cannot help notice how many stunning women there are walking about the moment. They may not realise it or care less, but in their ravishing way, these suntanned goddesses are sticking one in the eye to the women-hating jihadis.
Hot British crumpet – FUCK YEAH!
Burning in fear??!!? Ha!! Not this Brit. With my upper lip fixed stiff, I hoot and mock these jihadis. Wankers one and all. I’d like to see ’em on Celebrity Terrorist Island, the IRA’d make mincemeat of them.
– comment number 9 of these ones at Crooked Timber, spotted there by Tim Worstall yesterday
Next time London mayor Ken Livingston professes to speak for London’s outrage at the 7/7 attack, perhaps his long standing support for Islamic extremists (not to mention Irish terrorists) needs to be thrown back at him. Moreover those who continue to support him must not be allowed to avoid these issues either and if the Labour party wants Red Ken ‘back in the fold’, they must be made to pay a suitable political price.
I was on my way to hear a talk by Tim Evans in Putney about his work as the boss of CNE. Presumably it was going to be similar to the talk flagged up here.
Anyway, I walked to St James’s Park tube station, which was open and functioning but with not many people using it. A train was standing at the platform and I ran down the steps in the hope of getting into it before the doors closed. I need not have bothered. It waited, and waited.
Until eventually, an announcement materialised saying: security alert at Victoria (the next station along the line). Damn. There I was, eager to do my bit to face down those moronofascist terrorists by going about my business as usual, as per the Spirit of the Blitz etc., which in my case meant a sweaty tube journey out to Putney to an evening meeting, but unable to make my journey. Very annoying. I would really have liked to have heard that talk of Tim’s, but there was now no way I was going to get to Putney in time.
All those Londoners who would have had to share my inconvenience had they got caught by the same delay, but who had instead decided to give their work a miss today, turned out to have made a wise decision.
I asked the bloke at the ticket barrier I went back through if I could get my money back. He pointed at the ticket window where I had bought my ticket, but said he did not fancy my chances, on account of my ticket being usable to get to my destination by other means, namely two interminable bus journeys or one bus journey and an annoyingly long walk. (Which, by the way, I was not sure about and would have to find out about. Ugh!) So when I nevertheless asked for my refund I emphasised that there was no other way I could get where I wanted to in time. And guess what, he gave me my money back. However, I got the definite impression from all of this that under normal circumstances – no bombs yesterday, the usual crazy rush hour crowds – I would not have been so lucky. They are not usually this reasonable. Has the word gone out to these guys to be nice to the passengers, until we return in sufficient numbers to clog everything up again, and they can resume their normal level of small-print-based nastiness, in circumstances like these?
I can find no reference on the internet to this particular little flap, as of 10pm, which is when I am writing this. The only relevant thing I could find was a reference to “Minor delays are occurring on the rest of the line”, i.e. the District Line, which is what it says around now at this Transport for London page.
My guess: jumpy people, chasing shadows, preferring the soft cushion of being safe to the faintest possibility of being sorry. Which is understandable. I am afraid London will be like this for quite a few more days yet.
So London was attacked and hundreds were killed or wounded by Islamic fanatics (showing incidently why we are utterly right to be fighting these vermin wherever they are to be found)… and having ID cards would have made not one damn bit of difference.
Next time some pontificating dissembling jackass holds up ‘terrorism’ as why Britain need these odious things, I am likely to spit in their face.
Despite the byline, this is being posted from London
The train and tube that I caught in to work this morning were significantly less crowded today than is usual – carrying maybe two thirds to three quarters the normal number of passengers. The atmosphere on the trains was pretty serious. People were sitting pretty still on the train with pretty serious faces and eyes even more than normally fixed on newspapers. The British air of “We are going about our business, damn it” stoicism came through pretty strongly. There were more police in London Bridge station than is usual. Advertising placards for the Evening Standard were rather incongrously still proclaiming “London’s Victory: How We Did It” or some such. These had been advertising the Wednesday edition of the paper (or perhaps the earliest Thursday edition) and rather unsurprisingly nobody had been selling the Thursday edition inside the station. They have probably been replaced by now with placards advertising the first Friday edition of the paper.
While standing on the Jubilee Line platform, the announcements were fairly normal, except that the standard, very mechanical sounding “Please make sure that you keep all packages and other personal possessions with you at all times” was replaced by a slightly more human announcement of “Obviously I don’t need to tell you that you should keep all packages and other personal possessions with you at all times”.
The large international bank I work for instituted very tight and very visible security for getting into the building after September 11. It was only two or three months ago that this was relaxed, but I found that the tight and visible security regime had returned this morning. I was required to show my company ID card several times before being able to reach my desk. Upon getting there, I found that about half of the people in the team I work for had come to work – several of the rest have logged into their work computers from home and are working remotely.
However, I hadn’t been at my desk long when an important piece of information flashed around – there was free food in the cafeteria. Management were making a friendly gesture to the employees who had made it in today, or something. I went down to the cafeteria and discovered that the number of people queueing for food and eating in the cafeteria was at least twice as long as it would be on a normal day, despite the number of people at work being much smaller than normal. Many of the people in the queue were no doubt millionaire investment bankers, but the opportunity to have free bacon and eggs was clearly not one to be sneezed at. The queue was long, but people remained in it patiently and good-humouredly. And I didn’t sneeze at it, having a helping of free bacon and eggs myself.
So, the British people have survived this terrorist attack in good shape. They are still stoic, very angry about the people who attacked their city (although it would be bad manners to show it directly), determined to go on with their lives, are still the great queueing culture they always were, and are still also profoundly cheap. I’m not British, but it makes me proud to be a Londoner.
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