THE LONDON ATTACKS convey a sense of two crises intertwined: a crisis of policing and a crisis of pride. The first is, notwithstanding the awful death of Jean Charles de Menezes, the simpler. We have to adapt to the knowledge that, living and working among us, there are a few mild-looking young men with a taste for primary school work and white-water rafting who also nurse an ambition to die violent deaths while murdering strangers. It is a lot to take in. We have reason for dismay.

To find them, stop them and deter others will be hard, and involve intrusive security that we must all put up with (especially Muslims). But basically it is a police job, like the search for anarchists in the 1890s or IRA bombers in the Eighties. There will be tragic miscarriages, but I cannot join the armchair critics of the police. There are baffling elements in the Menezes story (why let him get on a bus if his jacket was so suspicious?) but if the policeman who shot him had been right, he would have saved dozens of lives while risking his own. It is not helpful for the Brazilian Government, the Muslim Council or Joe Hack to pass judgment. Not yet.

The other crisis is a longer-burning, vaguer deficit of pride and confidence. In the past couple of weeks London has had some success in evoking its virtues to weigh against the hatred. Everything has been used, from the Blitz spirit to the modern arts scene. It is helped by the way the roll-call of victims showed names from the Domesday book and from the distant desert, Asian islands and Afghan mountains.

Icons of modern London emerge, such as the gentle young Zimbabwe-born commuter who leaned over the madman spreadeagled on his explosive rucksack saying concernedly: “You all right, mate?” London’s visible history also fosters a sense that it is bigger than any attacker: in the week between the two bombings I watched the opera Anna Bolena in the moat of the Tower. Police cars raced by above, and a group of giggling Asian teenagers leaned over the railings to catch free glimpses of a baritone dressed as Henry VIII singing his resolve to kill his wife. London has a steadying sense of its own long greatness.

Yet Britain in general is losing that sense. Cynical reactions to the shooting illustrate how ready we are to proclaim our defects, calling our police trigger-happy just as we dismiss our soldiers as thugs to be turned over to civil lawyers rather than be court-martialled by people who understand war. We are swift in defeatism and expect humiliation (getting the Olympics was a shock). We neurotically shoulder guilt for colonial crimes of long ago. Dutch, Portuguese, Spanish and French colonies were treated with equal or greater brutality, but you do not catch those nations beating themselves up as we do.

Our public institutions are too shy of our religious heritage to defend Christmas and Easter, the Cross and the Bible, even as cultural symbols. Our media would rather torment the monarchy than enjoy it. Cleverdicks mock anything traditional; new Labour crazily proclaimed us a “young country”. Anything that connects us to the past is sneered at as sentimental, naff or cruel, whereas the traditions of incoming communities must be respected (how many of the MPs who ended fox-hunting will condemn halal slaughter? How long has it taken us to condemn forced marriage?). Every hero is hauled down, every poet dismissed as a dead white male. Even sitcoms that glean amusement from humdrum majority life are belittled, while the nasty little boys of Little Britain get awards for implying that any woman judging a country jam competition is a racist homophobe.

These attitudes are not universal, but they are fashionable. And there is a more visible enemy of confidence: the chaos permitted in community spaces. Police absence, craven fear of children and stupid economies on wardens and park-keepers mean that parks, squares and estates in the towns that need them most are littered with condoms and needles and obscene graffiti, and made impassable for quiet women, small children and the elderly. We have grown used to stepping unseeing over the homeless. Historic city centres, which in Europe would see an amiable evening passeggiata, are hideous with lewd and aggressive drunkards, while ambulances stand by for routine casualties. So do lawyers: I have still not got over the giggling solicitor on a television documentary who thought it funny that his drunken client wrenched the wing mirror off a taxi. So between the visible roughness and rubbish, and a pointless generalised guilt about being British at all, we plunge into consumerism like an alcoholic drinking to forget his failures. Emasculated local government, nasty streets, trollopy television and the state-assisted breakdown of the family bolster a self-hating self-indulgence. And this, I honestly and sadly think, contributes to a climate in which young men in Leeds or Luton convert religious neurosis into a death-wish.

For what Muslims want and respect is not so very unlike what the despised “Middle Britain” wants. Islam — like Christianity — sets great store on family, self-control, support of the weak and respect for tradition. And in many parts of Britain they do not see those things. In a YouGov poll at the weekend a third of Muslims agreed that “Western society is decadent and immoral, and Muslims should seek to bring it to an end”. Only 1 per cent approved of violence, but all the same the figure betrays a failure of integration in them, and a failure of proper pride in us.

Ziauddin Sardar wrote yesterday that “the moral values that guide (Muslims) do have a place in Britain”. Up to a point: on homosexuality and women’s place we will always differ. But many Muslim values are eerily similar to the lost social consensus that made Britain the open, generous, free country that it basically is. Bombast is not the answer. But neither is shrugging self-disgust. Muslims and Middle Britain could fight some good fights, hand in hand.

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