Venusberg | That's not your heart, it's a piece of helicopter casing

Friday, July 08, 2005

The sirens haven't stopped, but they are at least a little more infrequent than yesterday. where a constant threnody for police car, ambulance and fire engine drifted up from the streets.
It's strange to think how our reference points for insane situations are mediated. Yesterday, as I walked through the silence, no cars, only the sound of sirens, I was thinking of 28 Days Later. Today, with the sound of helicopters over my head, it was more like a very orderly Apocalypse Now.

The way the city changes under these impacts is freakish. Unable to see the areas themselves, all you have to go on is the circles of exclusion, the difficulties in movement. When the Admiral Duncan was bombed, I saw it only as an inconvenience when I was already late - having arrived in London post-IRA, it just didn't occur to me that something as eternal and unchanging as Old Compton Street could be the scene of such violence. It was only when I finally arrived in Oval to find my hostess desperately concerned for my welfare that I discovered that it had not been a burst water main but a crime scene. Strangely, a group of people who would later become close friends were on the other side of the ribbon.

Of course, there was no such ignorance this time - instead frantic flurries of email as we all tried to work out how bad it was. The first person I got hold of (London Bridge, 8:45) learnt what had happened (or rather, what hadn't - the story was still a power surge) from me, but that changed quickly.

Meanwhile, as the engines start to turn on campaigns to restrict our freedoms in the name of the war on tairrr (ID cards being, as far as one can tell, made out of Qaedanite; I'm not sure whether to admire or revile Charles Clarke for getting in a pitch for them in the middle of the crisis. Talk about presence of mind...), it might be worth recalling Lord Hoffman's comments on the threat to the British way of life:

The Attorney General's submissions and the judgment of the Special Immigration Appeals Commission treated a threat of serious physical damage and loss of life as necessarily involving a threat to the life of the nation. But in my opinion this shows a misunderstanding of what is meant by 'threatening the life of the nation'. Of course the government has a duty to protect the lives and property of its citizens. But that is a duty which it owes all the time and which it must discharge without destroying our constitutional freedoms. There may be some nations too fragile or fissiparous to withstand a serious act of violence. But that is not the case in the United Kingdom...

This is a nation which has been tested in adversity, which has survived physical destruction and catastrophic loss of life. I do not underestimate the ability of fanatical groups of terrorists to kill and destroy, but they do not threaten the life of the nation. Whether we would survive Hitler hung in the balance, but there is no doubt that we shall survive Al-Qaeda. The Spanish people have not said that what happened in Madrid, hideous crime as it was, threatened the life of their nation. Their legendary pride would not allow it. Terrorist violence, serious as it is, does not threaten our institutions of government or our existence as a civil community...

The real threat to the life of the nation, in the sense of a people living in accordance with its traditional laws and political values, comes not from terrorism but from laws such as these. That is the true measure of what terrorism may achieve. It is for Parliament to decide whether to give the terrorists such a victory

We are as a nation neither fragile nor fissiparous. Best of all, refusing to give in to fear will really annoy Melanie Phillips, who is more likely to be fissiparous than vivipaorous if the bloodwork from the lab is anything to go by. Watch her all but accuse Lord Hoffman of being a stooge of both Hitler and Stalin here.

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