JAMES DELINGPOLE
Accept this as the new normal? Never
of that presumably staged but iconic sec-
ond world war photo of the jolly milkman
doing his rounds in the rubble of the Blitz —
as part of its now familiar, life-goes-on-as-
normal response to every terror event.
‘No, we’re not bovvered,’ the doughty
commuters all insisted — those the BBC
felt worthy of quoting, at any rate. But
frankly, what other option do they have?
We can’t all be like Marco Pierre White Jr,
the son of the celebrity chef, who tweeted:
‘Parsons Green Tube station this morning
was targeted by terrorists, this is why I don’t
take the tube #theRichDontDie.’ Tasteless
it may have been, which is why he apolo-gised and withdrew it, but it contained more
than a grain of truth.
Of course we’re going to go on tak-
ing public transport, because how else are
we going to get to work? But that doesn’t
mean we’re not going to squirm involuntar-
ily every time someone of Middle Eastern
appearance gets on with a rucksack or a coat
that looks a bit too bulgy. Nor that we’re not
going to spend our whole journey feeling
like cattle on the way to the slaughterhouse.
In private, people admit this. Rarely
in public, though, as it contradicts an offi-
cial narrative that seeks to brand those
who express such qualms as letting theside down, apparently because it’s not how
British people should behave. It goes: ‘We
stood up to the Nazis during the Blitz. We
stood up to the IRA. Now we’re responding
with the same sangfroid and stiff upper lip to
all this bothersome, but perfectly manage-
able nonsense from Johnny Muslim.’
What’s odd is that the people who most
commonly express this point of view are the
kind of people — BBC journalists, celebri-
ties, Guardian columnists, lefty students —
who would hitherto have felt embarrassed
by such jingoism. There has been a weird
inversion where robust, right-wing Church-
illian types who think something must be
done have been cast as lily-livered surrender
monkeys, while the progressive appeasers
portray themselves as indomitable heroes.
It’s canny politics and an excellent way
for open-borders, SJW types to goad Katie
Hopkins and Tommy Robinson on Twitter.
But I don’t think this Keep Calm and Carry
On nonsense — which reached peak stupid
when breakfast TV presenter Phillip Schof-
ield filmed himself walking fearlessly over
Westminster Bridge the day after the attack
there — is doing anyone much good. In fact
it’s only putting us more gravely at risk.
The longer this ‘Keep buggering on and
it will all eventually go away’ narrative per-
sists, the longer our MPs will be able to delay
doing anything to address the problem.
Barely four months ago, 22 children and
adults were blown to pieces, and 250 injured,
for the crime of going to an Ariana Grande
pop concert. In any other era, so appalling
an incident would be as seared into the pub-
lic consciousness as, say, the sinking of the
Titanic or the immolation of the R101, with
concerted action from politicians of all par-
ties to make sure such a terrible thing never
happened again.
And what has our generation of poli-
ticians done? Called a few Cobra meet-
ings. Declared the occasional Level 5
security threat. Claimed emptily that ‘enough
is enough’. Meanwhile, there are an estimated
32,000 Muslims eager to commit the next ter-
ror atrocity — with another 100,000 prepared
to give them moral support. When did any of
us ever vote for this to be our new normal?
Isn’t it about time something was done?N
ot long after the Parsons Green
Tube bombing, another of those
viral, defiant-in-the-face-of-ter-
ror cartoons started doing the rounds. It
was quite witty — a section of Tube map,
redrawn in the shape of a hand giving those
pesky terrorists the middle finger. But it
wasn’t remotely funny. In order for humour
to work it has to spark a feeling of amused
recognition. This did the opposite. It said
something that all but the most deluded
among us know to be a complete lie.
The lie is that when a terrorist bomb
fails to detonate properly and injures ‘only’
a dozen or so people, rather than killing
scores, this constitutes some kind of moral
victory; that Londoners — indeed Britons
generally — now accept such incidents as
‘part and parcel of living in the big city’; that
our mood is not one of fear, helplessness
and apprehension but of cheery optimism
and determination not to have our lifestyles
altered in the face of terror.
Really? Perhaps someone should have
explained this to the passengers on the Lon-
don to Birmingham train a couple of days
after the Parsons Green bomb. The teenage
daughter of some friends was in one car-
riage and told me what happened. ‘There
was a weird beeping noise which no one
could explain. Then a funny smell. Everyone
was looking at each other, like: “What are
we going to do? This is horrible! We’re not
going to make it home. We’re going to die
here now!” Then this man next to me pulled
the emergency cord and the train stopped.’
It turned out to be a false alarm. With
impressive speed, a railway employee
appeared and assessed that it was safe to
resume the journey. So: not a drama you’re
going to read about it in the papers. But my
point is, look at how all those passengers
reacted; see how quickly their terrified imag-
inations were triggered by sounds and smells
(brake fluid, probably) that, not so long ago,
they would have accepted as part of the rou-
tine rattle, whistle and pong of a typical rail-
way journey. This is the new normal. Yet our
political class remains in a state of denial.
As does the BBC. Just this morning, I heard
it vox-popping sundry unflappable District
Line commuters — the modern equivalent
The longer this ‘Keep buggering on
and it’ll go away’ narrative persists, the
longer MPs can delay doing anything‘Who’s going to kick off?’