HAS rural Britain responded differently to the London bombings than urban Britain? Is the country another country?

With the sirens wailing and King’s Cross still cordoned off on Thursday evening, I rode an almost empty train from St Pancras to Derby. Out and about in the Peak District at the weekend, I wanted to get a sense of attitudes here to that dreadful day down in the Smoke. The Cross of St George was at half mast at Youlgreave parish church yesterday. There is sympathy and horror, but not the numb, bleak feeling I encountered on the streets of the city on Thursday.

London is another place, where other folk live. Cities are cities. New York was, too, and so was Madrid. People think that it is awful, shocking what has happened in London, but there is not quite — nearly, butnot quite — the impression that it happened to us. If such things started happening in (say) Tiverton or Morpeth then people in Bakewell or Matlock, though both are more distant than London, might feel that the shells were landing closer to our trench. But besides this sense of distance, a simple and patriotic response shows through too. The thought that our British way of life and the security of our whole country is under threat is often voiced. There is huge support for the police and the counter-terrorist effort, and impatience with anyone who worries about civil liberties.

I must make no bones, however, about an accompanying sentiment you often hear expressed in the countryside. It was Asians who did this. Not everyone I speak to bothers to mark the distinction between a handful of crazed fanatics and a huge, peace-loving, British Muslim population. Many country dwellers do not care for the burgeoning non-white urban communities not far away — Derby, Barnsley, Bradford — and feel vaguely threatened by the growth of an alien culture just over the other side of Sheffield Moor.

On a cloudy night we can see the reflected glow of the street lights there, and people have the sense that “our” grip on the governance of such places has been lost, and “our” writ no longer runs there. Paradoxically, that it is fairly unusual to see Asian faces among the hordes of day and weekend trippers who visit the Peak District does not seem to lessen rural fears.

If any of the culprits in Thursday’s atrocities turn out to have been British Muslims, or to have been sheltered by British Muslims, one should not underestimate the likely reverberations among the rural English. “They’d better not turn out to be local,” one friend said to me.

The argument is confused. Alongside rampantly right-wing views on race, culture and immigration, you encounter — and among deeply conservative folk — a knee-jerk sympathy for the views of George Galloway. You will be very far from being thrown out of a Derbyshire pub for suggesting that “Tony Blair asked for this”.

That is right-wing isolationism, not left-wing pro-Arabism, speaking, and its voice is persistent in the countryside. It takes the view that the world is full of murderous fanatics with darker skins than ours, and we should leave them where they are. “We shouldn’t have touched it; just asking for trouble,” summarises the view.

Make no mistake: such opinion indicates not a scintilla of sympathy for al-Qaeda, Saddam Hussein or Iraqi insurgents. But the early Blair-Bush strategy of conflating them may be coming back to haunt Mr Blair because all three are now well and truly tangled up in the public mind too, so that al-Qaeda is seen as a response to our occupation of Iraq.

One elderly man, in other ways about as ideologically distant from Mr Galloway as it is possible to get, put it like this: “We should never have got mixed up in this business. That George Galloway was right. Who is he, anyway? Do you know anything about him?”

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