Don’t treat us like fools
It’s all very well to boast that London can take it, says Rod Liddle, but there is no excuse for the patronising evasions of the authorities According to all the newspapers and the news television programmes, Londoners have ‘defied’ the evil bombers who struck in the capital on Thursday last week.
I’m not entirely sure what this means, because the precise nature of this popularly perceived mass defiance is never properly explained. It seems to boil down to the simple act of going to work as normal, having maybe taken Friday off. If that’s the case, then what exactly did people expect Londoners to do? What was our alternative? Never to go to work again? Take an immediate three-week holiday in the Med? Dissolve?
We have become horribly familiar with the cant ladled out by the media to innocent people who have been afflicted with grave misfortune — the parade of sickly platitudes, the stating of the bleedin’ obvious, the insistence that the victims conform to a certain expected pattern of behaviour exemplified by the hazy and ever shifting notion of ‘courage’. People with cancer always fight their illness bravely, no matter how quickly they die or how much they cried. And cities which have been bombed by mediaeval absolutist nutters always defy their attackers, somehow.
London, apparently, defied the bombers through recourse to the good ol’ Blitz spirit. Oh dear, oh dear. Law, luvvaduck, let’s all avva cuppa char, me old mucker, etc. etc. The overwhelming majority of Londoners are too young to remember the Blitz, and those who are not remember it all too well. Thursday morning was appalling, but it was no Blitz. Even the Blitz itself has been subjected to some dubious mythologising: some of the complaining and the cowardice and the anti-Semitism has been expunged from the national consciousness. But London suffered, long and hard. For the vast majority of us, Thursday morning’s events meant nothing more than a day or two of inconvenience, a strangely atomised sense of grief for the people who had died and the mildly thrilling intimation of danger and mortality, of something sinister shimmering just beyond the edge of our eyesight. And frankly many of us have had that intimation on any number of counts for quite some time.
Of course, these incessant eulogies to the indefatigable London Spirit are not, by themselves, necessarily harmful. Inaccurate and stupid, perhaps, but they may just serve to give comfort and succour to those few of us not directly involved who have been, for one reason or another, truly traumatised. For the rest of us, we’re left with a vague sense of irritation and the suspicion that we are taken for fools who can be cheerfully patronised. This suspicion manifested itself shortly after the first bombs detonated on the Underground and the authorities informed us, on the radio and television, that the trouble had come from a ‘power surge’. ‘They’re having a laugh,’ my minicab driver said as we made our way across a deserted Waterloo Bridge at ten o’clock in the morning, the drizzle slowly falling over the city, police helicopters buzzing hither and thither. ‘It’s them fuckin’ Mozzies again, innit?’ Yes, of course — or three or four of them, at least.
You may flinch at the nonce abbreviation ‘Mozzies’ and indeed it is probably not the sort of term which the Archbishop of Canterbury would choose to deploy in one of his multifaith workshops. But it was an accurate assessment of the situation, and one made by the overwhelming majority of Londoners, I would guess, at round about 9.45. The authorities told us it was a power surge in order to allay possible panic, because we couldn’t quite be trusted to behave with the requisite calmness if we knew the truth: God knows, we might run amok in our fright. But when that bus was blown up near Russell Square, we all knew for certain it was terrorism and there was absolutely no panic; people behaved with quiet equanimity, consideration for others and obeyed the strictures from the police. You see, we can be trusted. So please don’t lie to us — otherwise we won’t believe you next time. And there will be a next time, I suppose.
Later, on BBC News 24, we were told once every 35 seconds — I counted — that the Muslim Council of Britain had condemned the attack. Fine: it’s nice to know that, cheers, guys. But the continual repetition carried with it the whiff of social control rather than news reporting, as if we Londoners, consumed by a senseless rage, were poised to set fire to a passing imam or torch a mosque. But in London we didn’t do any of that stuff; we understand the difference between fanatical extremists and ordinary Muslims, my cab driver’s awkward generalisation notwithstanding: we’re not stupid. We can be trusted. We don’t need all those features telling us what a peaceable and wellintegrated religion Islam is, either, BBC. Truth is, Islam is not remotely a peaceable religion compared with, say, paganism, Zoroastrianism or Buddhism, or modern Christianity for that matter, and still less humanism. Nor is it particularly well integrated compared with, say, Hinduism or Sikhism or Judaism. But that does not mean we therefore hold all Muslims responsible for the outrage of Thursday morning, or wish to exact revenge on the Muslim community: as I say, we are not stupid.
By and large, our politicians and quasidemocratically elected leaders acquitted themselves rather well in the aftermath, without the rather repugnant grief by proxy which has become so familiar to us from the various calamities and wickednesses that have occurred abroad. In the Bloomsbury pub in which I took refuge when it was impossible to move anywhere, Tony Blair received a spontaneous cheer for what was a dignified and temperate address on television; that hasn’t happened for a long time. Our mayor, Ken Livingstone, berated the terrorists for having victimised ‘workingclass’ Londoners, as if they had used a new type of selective bomb which somehow, cunningly, exempted the ghastly bourgeoisie from annihilation. And Dr Zaki Badawi, the elderly ‘moderate’ Islamic scholar, spent most of his time implying that the perpetrators were not Muslim at all. I don’t know who Zaki thought had blown us up — the Methodists? Plaid Cymru? But it was more of the people-can’t-be-trusted stuff, at a time when a heartfelt statement ‘this was an appalling crime; we will help the police to track down the bombers’ would have served rather better.
But these are minor quibbles, nitpicking almost. I would not dispute for a moment that the emergency services performed magnificently and that Londoners responded with a marked absence of melodrama. There was no wailing and no gnashing of teeth, no demands for immediate and extremely punitive revenge. And that’s my point, really: people deserve to be treated as sentient, rational adults by both the authorities and the media. Tell us what is going on without caveat and without the bloody flannel and the loaded reporting. And next time, please spare us all that stuff about the Blitz; it devalues what happened to our parents in 1940 and it cheapens our response to what happened on that Thursday morning.
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