THE BEST THING about this week’s memorial service for the victims of the London bombings was that so few people outside St Paul’s took any notice of such a hollow state-sponsored ritual. The big screen set up in Trafalgar Square to relay pictures to the masses was watched only by a few bemused tourists. It is not that Londoners have forgotten those who died on July 7. It is only that most are too busy getting on with life to be dragooned into yet another display of stage-managed grief by order of the Government.

One group that might have paid close attention to the memorial service, however, were any potential British suicide bombers. It was an advertisement for the disproportionate impact that four losers with rucksacks and a grudge can apparently have on our society, getting half the Cabinet and Opposition leaders into the cathedral for a mourning television show fronted by the Queen. What an invitation to any other wannabe celebrity suicide bombers who fancy becoming famous through the X-plosive Factor.

The Home Office is asking what it means to be British today. To judge from this service, it means being a nation of fearful victims. The memorial was not so much about sympathy and solidarity with the dead, injured or bereaved as about portraying all of us as vulnerable members of a community of suffering, in the hope that the nation that weeps together will keep together.

What on earth was the Archbishop of Canterbury on about, preaching that grief and pain is a powerful weapon against terrorism, as if being a victim was a virtue? And there was Sir Ian Blair, Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, declaring that our one universal language is “the language of tears” — less a battle cry than an invitation to have a good cry. The whole affair smacked of helplessness and defeatism.

These people need reminding that it was the contemporary cult of the victim that helped to breed the self-righteous sense of grievance in those suicide bombers in the first place. Of course we should treat real victims with respect and compassion, but not with reverence. Politicians should also stop using them as human shields, trying to exploit their grief to bolster the case for the Government’s anti-terror laws or the argument against the Iraq war.

Many victims and their relatives expressed a hope that events such as the memorial service would help to bring “closure”, but our ceaseless harping on the horrors of July 7 may keep them psychologically trapped down those tunnels. The rest of us should leave them to come to terms with things privately, while we carry on ignoring the “Were you affected by the bombings?” helpline posters on the Tube. As the psychiatrist Simon Wessely said at the time: the bombs made more than enough victims, let’s not make any more.

Mick.Hume@spiked-online.com

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