[From the diaries -- Hunter]Apologies for the stream of consciousness posting earlier. It was a hell of a commute this morning! It's now about 1 am here and this is sort of how I read the situation.
Central London is very quiet but not empty. A lot of people from the burbs obviously didn't come in to play tonight... even if they could, given that transport is a bit disrupted. It's not empty, though, I took a little scout around on the bike, having repaired my puncture, and there are some people about, I suppose people who live close in like me. On the other hand, the pubs in the area I live in, one of the closest residential districts to the West End, were hiving tonight. Lots of people needed to be with people, I suppose, and a few needed a little nerve settler after a pretty awful day.
[NB: Somehow I have contrived to have two dkos accounts. One is GerryInLondon, which I used from work today. One is this one. I forgot to send the details through to home when I left work this evening]
There are lots of political conversations, and lots of forced levity. Jimi Hendrix on the jukebox? Not sure it quite fits, but it was good anyway. People are calm and trying to get on with life, but there's a lot of nervousness under the surface.
Speaking of transport, the people manning the public transport system deserve medals. They were polite, courteous, and more or less managed to keep a city of 8 million moving in the direst of circumstances. People always say to defeat terrorism you have to keep living normally. The boys and girls of Transport for London and the private train companies - and believe me, I can criticise them at times - are helping us do that here. The bus drivers were fantastic - ferrying the injured, transporting emergency service people, even blocking roads for the police when they didn't have the equipment to do it themselves.
I don't detect a huge anti-Muslim backlash here, but this is Central London. There have been lots of stupid comments about the internet and the talk radio stations about nuking Mecca and deporting 1.5 million people because they happen to be Muslim. I'm sure you can guess. It would also be wrong to give the wrong impression, there's lots of level headed common sense, even on talk radio. And the presenters on the biggest talk radio station have been pumping out an anti-racist, anti-backlash line all day.
Sadly, there are some very vitriolic and prejudiced anti-American views out there as well.
The one thing the bombings won't do is change people's attitudes to Iraq. The people who think it was wrong still think it was wrong, and that it left us with less resources to defend ourselves than we would have had otherwise.
The people who think invading Iraq was a good idea think they have been vindicated. No, I can't follow the logic either.
The worrying thing is that with the possible exception of the bus bomb, these weren't suicide bombs. There is still an Al-Qa'eda cell out there, ready and able to kill dozens of people. Don't draw too many parallels from Madrid or Casablanca. In Istanbul they were able to strike twice in one week. I don't plan on panicking, but I don't plan on getting too complacent either.
You might think this was an attack on "White People". If so, you don't know this city. There were Bengali chefs on their way from Camden to the West End when that bus blew up. There were Turkish bankers on their way from Stoke Newington to the City when one tube went up, Pakistani civil servants with a nasty commute from Tooting to King's Cross when another went up, Ghanaian shop assistants heading from East Ham to Bayswater when the Liverpool Street train went.
We are the central front, those of us in the big cities in the West with our multi-national multi-class populations and our dodgily liberal politics, and our counterparts in the developing world megacities like Casablanca and Jakarta, not to mention Baghdad and Basra. Al-Qa'eda don't check that their going to kill Bush-Blair supporting racists before they set off a bomb. Al-Qa'eda don't put bombs in Tewkesbury, and they don't put bombs in Topeka, Kansas either.
I've been a bit worried about our Mayor, Ken Livingstone, about some local issues and his ever more vaulting ego. But he was a star today and spoke brilliantly for this city. Let's think macro, not micro, at the moment.
I'm not worried about much of a backlash in London, but I do worry about what might happen in other parts of the country. I wouldn't be surprised if a few mosques were burned out over the next few days, especially in some of the Pennines towns where racial segregation runs deep and relations between the White and South Asian Muslim communities were poor to begin with. Tomorrow night, when the pubs get out, there might be some very vicious racial attacks.
How will this affect the political climate:
BLAIR: Is now safe for a while. I don't detect any warming to him, however, either within the Labour Party or the country at large. If there is a bounce, it will be temporary, and I'm not sure that it won't go the other way. Iraq is not popular. Remember Spain. I've heard plenty of internet rants along the lines of "Nuke Iran and deport all the Muslims but they wouldn't have done it if we weren't trying to take over their countries for oil." Not very logical, but people aren't when they're pumped up. The cards could fall either way over the coming months.
COMPULSORY ID CARDS: These looked likely to go through anyway, but that looks even more likely now. A lot of people have noted that they didn't do much to stop the bombings in Madrid, but even so it shifts the political winds a little more behind Blair's back.
DETENTION WITHOUT TRIAL: Expect our delightfully authoritarian Home Secretary to seek an extension of his powers in this area.
IMMIGRATION: Nasty. If you want to complain about Muslim immigration, you will find plenty of ammo to do it. The two main parties already indulged in a bit of a race for the bottom on this issue in the general election campaign. That will get worse now, especially as the endless supply of young Eastern Europeans wanting to live here (legally, without work permits, as EU citizens) meets a lot of the economic demand. Expect a clamp down on non-EU immigration.
The people who did this want to divide people against one another. I have this to say: Riyadh - New York - Casablanca - Jakarta - Jeddah - Nairobi - Tikrit - Madrid - Istanbul - Dar es Salaam - Bali - Washington - Baghdad - Mobasa - Mosul - London. We have all been through this together and we are stronger than you despite the idiocy of our leaders.
The final thing I want to say is that I'm an Irishman. More than that, I'm a Northern Ireland Catholic. If this was one of those many awful days in the '70s, '80s and '90s, I would be hiding at home and trying desperately not to let anyone hear my accent and hoping I wasn't going to be locked up for 25 years for something I didn't do. I'm not, but I know what it feels like. Thousands of Muslims are going through that now. Any other people reading this in the UK, stand by your Muslim friends and neighbours. They need you.
That's about all I can think of now. Spare a thought for those who died, their families, and those still waiting for news of loved ones.
Gerry