Eight years ago today, a white van mounted the pavement in London Bridge. It first struck three people before launching Xavier Thomas into the Thames. Next Chrissy Archibald was trapped under the van, briefly freed then run over. Nearby, tourists mooched about Borough Market admiring glossy chocolate strawberries and Sussex cheeses, craning their necks to look at the Shard. Here, the van crashed; Sara Zelenak and James McMullan were stabbed to death. The attackers ran down the steps leading to Boro Bistro; a waiter there, Alexandre Pigeard, was their next target. Sébastien Bélanger was cornered and knifed; so was Kirsty Boden, a nurse who had rushed to help Pigeard. Ignacio Echeverria swung his skateboard at one attacker; he would be the final victim.
That attack stands out as among the most brutal of the 2010s, a decade which saw Isis reach the height of its powers, and in which terrorism came to seem routine, inevitable and all the more horrifying for it. The perpetrator of that era was reliably one of two archetypes: an Isis jihadist or a white supremacist. The immediate context of London Bridge shows this: less than two weeks before the massacre, 22 people had died in an attack on the Ariana Grande concert in Manchester Arena, stuffed to the gills with excited little girls. Two weeks after it, a far-Right extremist would ram Muslim worshippers in Finsbury Park, killing one. Other attacks that year took place in Westminster, Stockholm, Barcelona and St Petersburg.
My generation — toddlers during 9/11, and tweens as the horrors of the 2010s filled the news, in which we were just beginning to take an interest — was raised in ambient terror. I was 12 when Anders Breivik slaughtered scores of teens on Utoya Island; I remember pictures of him on the TV, dressed as a police officer, picking his way calmly over rocks in the stream with his rifle. He was given free rein of the Norwegian Labour Party summer camp for 90 minutes before police could reach him; by the time they did, he had killed nearly 70. In him a horror-movie figure, the dead-eyed man in the woods, was made flesh; my sister and I watched the news in silence, realising that in the real world, nowhere was safe.
The psychic residue of the low-level dread these attacks instilled has persisted into this decade; the acceptance that a joyful day out can turn, within seconds, into a nightmare, is reflected in the paranoia of crowds in present-day Britain. A video posted shortly after the recent Liverpool car ramming showed a small group of friends leaving Water Street just before the incident unfolded; “we’re leaving because I have a gut feeling”, one told the camera. He had seen snipers, he said, and felt “something’s gonna kick off, like a terrorist attack or something”. Similar stories of foresight haunt all attacks; Xavier Thomas’s fiancée told reporters in 2017 that she had had “premonitions” the day before the London Bridge killings, and that on the bridge itself she had felt something was “not normal”.
Without passing judgement on the coincidental nature of these feelings, it is telling that the apparent ability to foretell doom in this way, like a preapocalyptic seer, has returned in an age of secular rationalism. Because of the continuous uncertainty of the era of Isis attacks, the public is now primed with jumpy superstition. Social media, too, is whipped into delirium as soon as the first details of any apparent attack emerge; immediate speculation about race, asylum status and motive speaks to the desire to sort attackers into familiar categories, to know your enemy. The 2010s made us not only superstitious but less trusting, drawing out the bloodhound hatred of the other from darker periods in British history.
“Because of the continuous uncertainty of the era of Isis attacks, the public is now primed with jumpy superstition.”
Looking back at the 2010s, it strikes me that those attacks marked a rare moment of the best and worst of Western societies colliding; on the one hand there are the attackers, fanatical, furious, broken outcasts, and on the other there are the victims, random bands of normal people often united merely by the desire for a nice day out. Among them would have been all sorts: good people and bad people, angry drunks and talented tennis players, bricklayers and bus drivers and management consultants — but no matter; terror attacks have a habit of flattening a scene, so that to read about it the next morning is to imagine a cataclysm happening to people as generic and benevolent as the cartoon crowds in Lowry’s Fairground at Daisy Nook.
One of the most unexpectedly frightening things about these acts of public murder is that when you imagine being caught up in one, as children of the 2010s constantly did, you perceive yourself being flattened in this way too, reduced to a smiling headshot taken from your uncle’s Facebook page and placed on a gallery spread with a single-line caption. Not only is your life taken away, but the story of your life is never your own; you become, simply, a totem of “us” violated by a despicable, remote, alien “them”.
Since Covid, terror attacks have shifted in form and geography. Islamism has not gone away, but the regularity of Isis “claiming responsibility” for graduates of jihad training camps has waned in favour of lone wolves radicalised online. Often, the motivations of recent attackers have been confused, fragmented, unanchored from specific political objectives and moored more generally to a creed of hate. Brick dust from different ideological monoliths has come to coat dark internet forums; what results is a chaotic bricolage of extremism, the purpose of which is to prop up the personal mythology of a violent loser, rather than that loser having been recruited to an established cause.
Manifestos reflect this shift. The venomous specificity of manifestos like the Unabomber’s or even Breivik’s 1,500-page Islamophobic tract has been replaced by muddled, vengeful wailing akin to an online rant, like the manifesto left behind by the Palm Springs IVF clinic bombing suspect. Meanwhile the motivations of perpetrators are getting weirder, with niche, internet-issued dogmas such as promortalism, 5G conspiracies and even “ecofascism” increasingly peppering suspect profiles. Government agencies began using “mixed, unstable or unclear” as a category of concern in the late 2010s, with the Home Office Channel programme finding in 2023 that it constituted a vast 37% of referrals, compared to 19% for extreme Right-wing and 11% for Islamism.
The figure of the Islamist or white supremacist, so totemic in the 2010s, is not gone — the Isis-inspired rampage in New Orleans on New Year’s Eve shows us as much — but he (and it is almost always he) is now flanked by forum-haunting fundamentalists motivated more by personal grievances than the intoxicating heft of traditional fascism or jihad. The terrorist of 2025 is less likely to be a footsoldier — instead he is a main character; he is not redeeming the world from deviance, but lashing out at it for rejecting him. This makes him harder to spot, his movements trickier to predict; it also makes his fury more difficult to douse with the deradicalisation initiatives of the 2010s, which knew to home in on acolytes of Anjem Choudary or Tommy Robinson for seams of extremism.
Terror in the 2020s is lonelier, murkier, stranger. And so while the legacy of the 2010s is ambient, grinding dread, the source of that dread has become dispersed, undetectable. One consequence is that this leaves us unprepared for the new face of terror; where we once watched for Islamist cells we should now also expect new heads of the hydra. As I write, Liverpool reels from a ramming incident; so too does Leicester. In Boulder, Colorado, an Egyptian national, illegally in the US, is suspected of firebombing people demonstrating on behalf of Israeli hostages. For my generation, these stories are met with a sense of weary inevitability; for our parents, there must be a parallel in the constant vigilance of the Seventies and Eighties over Provisional IRA bombs.
The failures of Prevent — to which, let’s not forget, Axel Rudakubana was referred three times — do not show us the futility of such programmes so much as their toothlessness in the face of more nebulous forms of extremism (his case was closed as no “fixed ideology or motivation” was found). Those susceptible to radicalisation or violent breakdowns will always mill about in our societies; a responsible culture is one which denies them access to content on the internet which will push them over the edge, stops them buying knives and guns, and is quick to stopper the pipelines of hatred which run from social outcast to woman-hater to murderer, from devout to extremist to killer.
Eight years after the London Bridge attack, Britain is still on a hair-trigger; the fundamental objective of terrorism, to create fear, is being met. Each time an attack happens, agencies and government departments own “failings” and promise to learn from them; costly inquiries stretch into years, inquests reveal minute-by-minute the events which, we tell ourselves, must “never happen again”. But can we really say those horror-filled final moments of the eight victims of June 3, 2017 won’t be repeated? Being on the back foot, as we always seem to be, is something we can all sorely afford.
