Until Thursday morning this weekend’s events seemed to be well choreographed. There would be discussion of whether Tony Blair had successfully corralled the G8 summit into agreements on Africa and climate change. There would be yet more euphoria over the successful Olympic bid. And there would be a mood of quiet pride and commemoration to mark the 60th anniversary of the end of the second world war and yesterday’s unveiling by the Queen of the Whitehall statue to recognise the role of women in that war.
The terrorist attacks put paid to that. The juxtaposition of the Gleneagles G8 summit and the attacks underlined the “extraordinary interdependence” of today’s world, according to the prime minister. “We now know . . . that where there is extremism, fanaticism or acute and appalling forms of poverty in one continent, the consequences of it no longer stay fixed in that continent,” he said yesterday. “They spread to the rest of the world, which is why it is so important the leaders of the world come together and with all the imperfections of any process like a summit, do their level best to send a signal out to people that politics can make a difference.” While the G8 was trying to do good, the bombers set about their grisly task of doing evil by claiming up to 70 innocent lives.
It is coincidental that the celebrations this weekend of fortitude in war are echoed by the stoicism shown by Londoners last week. After the Madrid bombings in March last year, which killed 191 people, 2m Spaniards took to the streets of their capital to express their revulsion and condemnation of the terrorists. London’s response, so far, has been more phlegmatic but no less impressive. It is not disrespectful to the dead and injured to say that the best way of defying the terrorists is to say that life should carry on as normal.
Maybe this phlegmatic reaction reflected a belief that a terrorist attack on London was inevitable, as Lord Stevens, the former Metropolitan police commissioner, had warned and which had been downplayed by Sir Ian Blair, his successor. And perhaps it was because much of the destruction was below ground and out of sight. To this the emergency services, especially the medical workers and fire brigade, responded magnificently.
Yet there are tough questions to be asked. For years we have grown complacent about the idea that we could tolerate the presence of extremists in our midst, even those urging the destruction of our way of life, because of our liberal values and love of free speech. Others have seen it differently. Not for nothing is Britain’s capital known as “Londonistan” by overseas intelligence services; a haven for Islamic violence and discontent, a home for radical imams preaching their messages of hate to impressionable young Muslims and spreading their views worldwide via the internet.
One insurgent commander in Iraq claimed last month to have 70 volunteers from Britain fighting alongside him against American forces. Richard Reid, the “shoe bomber”, Saajid Badat, who confessed to a similar plot, and Omar Sheikh, who moved from a privileged educational background in London to become the murderer of Daniel Pearl, the Wall Street Journal reporter. There are countless other examples of British-based terrorists wreaking havoc across the globe.
Last week’s bombs shattered the comfortable and always implausible view that such people would never attack on their own doorstep. Whether the bombers were home-grown or outsiders, they clearly had no respect for Britain’s tolerance of dissent. As Alain Marsaud, a member of the French National Assembly, put it yesterday: “Britain has paid the price for its tolerance in the past with regard to fundamentalists. Britain has long welcomed radical Islamists from the Indian sub-continent with whom the intelligence services found a sort of empathy. The arrival of an Algerian and Moroccan diaspora, attracted by the English tradition of tolerance, has upset things.”
Britain’s porous borders have made London a more dangerous place than it should be. The responsibility for that has to rest with our political leaders. Mr Blair said recently that one of the central aims of his government’s legislative programme was to “protect our citizens from terrorism and crime”.
The prime minister responded well to last week’s events but his government has to take its share of the blame for eight years of incompetence when it comes to managing the flow of people into Britain.
It has been forced, under the human rights legislation to which it has signed up, to release potentially dangerous men from prison. Many governments, admitting to an official estimate that there could be more than half a million illegal immigrants in Britain, would have launched a programme of action for rooting them out and repatriating them. This one saw it as simply bolstering its case for identity cards which, as the home secretary acknowledged, would not have stopped last week’s atrocities.
Serious questions should also be asked on a more practical level. Ninety minutes before the bombs went off on Thursday, Sir Ian was assuring Radio 4 listeners that security would not be a problem for the 2012 Olympics because his force was on top of the terrorist threat. It was, indeed, “the envy of the policing world”. So sure were the authorities of their ground that the security level had been lowered in the weeks before the attacks. In the context of the G8 summit, that decision looks dangerously complacent. Sir Ian had dispatched many of the Met’s finest to help to police the summit in Gleneagles. When Brian Paddick, the deputy commissioner, says that he would not link the words ‘Islamic’ and ‘terrorism’, you have to wonder from what planet he was beaming his message.
Sir Ian’s complacency arose in part from yet another failing by our intelligence services. We are repeatedly told of the many plots that have been averted since the September 11 attacks on America. We are assured that the nature of intelligence has changed and that surveillance by the security services of potential terrorists is better than ever. But they knew nothing about these attacks. Forewarned is forearmed. London was not forewarned and this weekend many grieving families are suffering the consequences.
