LONDON WILL be a city of painful memories this week. The anniversary of the bombings last July 7 will be marked on Friday. It will be a time of silence and services.
The nation will stop for two minutes at noon in remembrance. Prayers will be said in Regent’s Park, St Paul’s Cathedral and St Pancras Church, close to Tavistock Square, the site of the bloody bus blast. There will be 6,000 extra policemen, mostly armed, on the streets and in Tube trains to “provide reassurance”. It will be an agonising occasion for the families of the dead, but there will also be astonishing stories of recovery and resilience. Some of these will be of individual spirit, such as that of Martine Wells, a woman who lost both legs that morning, yet who aspires to obtain a pilot’s licence. Londoners will be congratulated for the speed at which they have returned to life “as normal”.
It is that last aspect that is worrying. If life has returned “to normal”, it is not due to courage but to complacency. Newspaper reports, comment pieces and leading articles in the days after the attacks consistently emphasised how much security arrangements would have to change now that domestic Islamist terrorism had had moved from being a theoretical threat to a dreadful reality. But ask yourself whether, despite superficial controversies over new laws and the supposed drive against terrorism, anything is really so different? Anyone who had disappeared to the Amazon rainforest on July 6, 2005, and came back this morning probably wouldn’t realise that the bombings had ever happened.
That is because we still do not take terror seriously. The most striking symbol of this was Mr Justice Sullivan’s decision last week to overturn control orders placed on six Iraqis to prevent them travelling to Iraq to participate in the so-called insurgency there. I am not claiming that Mr Justice Sullivan is a reckless man or that there might not have been flaws in the case for control orders. I simply note that this a widely respected judge in his specialist field — the adjudication of planning disputes — and that a country that took terrorism seriously would have established specialist courts overseen by specialist judges whose area of expertise was not the route of proposed motorways or housing development on the green belt. We had, after all, no problem about doing that in Northern Ireland during the Troubles.
A wider comparison between Ulster and the IRA then and Britain and terror today is instructive. Not only were dedicated courts created in the province but, after the ill-judged experiment of internment, various other weighty measures were also put in place to restrict the liberties of those suspected of having links with terrorism.
By contrast, a year after the London attacks, the authorities live in a surreal world in which they often cannot bring suspects to trial without compromising either their sources or eavesdropping techniques, and they cannot suggest prosecutions “in camera” for fear that details would pass from defence lawyers to The Guardian faster than you can say civil liberties. Yet at the same time detention at Belmarsh has been thrown out, control orders may be devalued to the point where they are essentially voluntary for the suspect and deportation is out of the question if there is the slightest chance that those who endorse violence might themselves be maltreated when they get back home.
It is bizarre. In a country serious about terrorism there would be outrage. Yet most commentary recently has been on the lines of “three cheers for the lawyers”. That is because too many of the political class remain convinced that domestic terrorism is not a menace, or, if it is, then we have created the monster ourselves via deeds in Afghanistan, Iraq, Israel, Palestine, Bradford, wherever, and once we have altered course and said sorry sufficiently sincerely, it will be back to regular business in Blighty.
Meanwhile, it is hinted, the authoritarian danger we should be worried about is a sinister group by the name of al-newlabour, headed by a spooky figure called Osama bin Blairen, aided in broadcasts by his bloodcurdling sidekick, Abdullah Reidi.
Let us be blunt, much of our so-called effort at counter-terrorism since 7/7 has been farcical. The intelligence aspect has involved “triumphs” such as the shooting of an innocent man at Stockwell Tube station on the basis of a misidentification by an agent who was relieving himself against a tree at the time he fingered him, and the fiasco last month at Forest Gate when the Metropolitan Police sent hundreds of officers in vain pursuit of a chemical weapons suit and as a result will doubtless end up paying for lavish home improvements at several properties.
Twelve months on and we have little idea of what links there might have been between Mohammad Sidique Khan, the 7/7 ringleader, and others involved in terrorism in Europe, America or Pakistan. We can (sort of) infiltrate a few mosques, but radical preachers have long realised that these are no longer the places to engage in overt recruitment. And when those committed to mayhem at home or abroad make mistakes, there appears to be no institutional means to place them where they cannot cause mischief.
The silence and the services on Friday are, of course, appropriate. The best way to honour the dead, nevertheless, would be to ensure that their sacrifice is not repeated. There is no basis to conclude that such atrocities could not take place again on August 8, 2006, or September 9, 2007, or October 10, 2008. The extra police around the Underground this week are, alas, merely the armed branch of the counselling industry, not a deterrent to anybody who made it that far with a bomb in a backpack.
Yes, life has indeed returned “to normal” after 7/7. How long before abnormal death returns again as a consequence?
