The grandiose Makkah Masjid Mosque in Leeds marked an impressive contrast with the surrounding terraced properties, as I walked through the tightly packed red-brick Victorian streets leading onto Royal Park Road. While the austere, graffitied houses still bore signs of poverty and neglect, their metal security gates indicating a grim sense of insecurity, the mosque stood as an oasis of calm and tranquillity.
This down-at-heel cosmopolitan community, home to immigrants, artists and students, had always been poor but peaceful. Yet on that afternoon 20 years ago, something had changed. The atmosphere was tense: the familiar sounds of Asian music, reverberating from youthful sound systems, had been replaced by a chorus of police sirens, and the colourful aura of the storefronts was lit up by flashing blue lights.
It was 12 July, and earlier that morning residents had been forced to evacuate their homes following the discovery of a bomb factory in a nearby flat at Alexandra Grove. The unkept hovel in question could have been any student digs. But instead of alcohol and pizza boxes, the rooms contained enough explosive material to devastate this entire neighbourhood. The rudimentary devices which had brutally torn through the lives of 52 victims in London the week before had been made here.
The strong police presence was met with mixed emotions. You could sense the hostility as both Makkah Masjid and the local Leeds Grand Mosque were ransacked by investigators seeking to understand the teachings and instruction which had radicalised four men from this city. This, in turn, was met by the fear of reprisals against local Muslims.
Like many of my generation, I had watched the televised violence of 9/11 in horror. Yet while that act of terrorism marked all our lives, it was still a tragedy that had played out over there. What was taking place in Leeds on that summer morning for years later, was the “War on Terror” coming home. As Zygmunt Bauman put it, that which was global, was truly local — especially the new forms of violence it was creating.
Acts of terror have always been about communication. The images of destruction carry a powerful message, and the acts rely heavily on symbolism. If the abiding image of 9/11 was that of the planes striking the Twin Towers, in London, it was the pictures of the ripped-apart bus which left an indelible scar on Britain’s collective consciousness.
Terrorism, as 7/7 showed us, wasn’t just about a fear of the unknown. It was about weaponising the familiar and intimate — turning the everyday into the source of nightmares.
Even though this played out all those years ago, it’s hard to shake the feeling that it could all happen again. Similar forces and dynamics are still at work amid our communities, and are arguably more dangerous still. The processes required to prevent such violence are being lost within our divisive political landscape. The Prevent Strategy, for example, launched by Labour in response to the 9/11 attacks, has been met with criticism from all sides for failing to stop radicalisation, instead alienating minority communities. And governments, from Tony Blair onward, have struggled to get to grips with community alienation and failure to integrate.
Blair, who was PM on 7/7, left office tainted by his entanglements in the Middle East. Today, the United Kingdom risks being ineluctably drawn into an even more fraught conflict with Iran, even as events in the region remain our most divisive political concern. We only have to look at the continuing protests in London to see how explosive the issue has become, with Keir Starmer struggling to deal in a constructive way the debate on Palestine.
Things were quite different at the turn of the 21st century. We were only just realising we had entered into an age marked by the catastrophic actions of individuals, to say nothing of the worrying limits of liberal multiculturalism. It no longer took an army of millions to bring about a global security crisis, just a handful of radicalised individuals. Their ability to disrupt was amplified by the power of the media and the attention it permitted.
In some ways, we have learned how to address these acts of violence, seen again at Manchester Arena in 2017, and not treat it as a threat to our entire way of life, as Tony Blair did. In an article for Foreign Affairs, the then PM explicitly linked the “War on Terror” to a battle for global values. Today, we more readily see these as the acts of deranged individuals.
But is the focus on lone wolves naive? The radicalisation of potentially dangerous individuals is arguably a deeper problem than ever before across the political spectrum. Back in 2006, don’t forget, mobile phones were still primitive, and Facebook had only just carried out its first pilot roll-out. Twitter was yet to be launched. Yet if the early years of the War on Terror fostered a “with-us-or-against-us” mentality, part of the official doctrine, the tribalism of our social media-enabled politics today is far more divisive, dogmatic and assured.
“The tribalism of our social media-enabled politics today is far more divisive, dogmatic and assured.”
The subsequent penetration of smartphones and social media into our every day has enabled a politics of immediacy that exacerbates divisions and amplifies calls for violence, even as it further hampers social solidarity. The first decade of the War on Terror placed too much importance on simplistic “Clash of Civilisations” narratives — which ended up in the widespread demonisation of Islam. But the calamitous corrective to this has been to insist there is no correlation between Islamic teachings and violence and oppression.
We have only to look at the disastrous response to the Southport attacks, and the catastrophic mishandling of the investigation into grooming gangs, to see how the politics of correctness fuels the rise of counter-parasitical movements feeding off similar feelings of anger and resentment. If it is ridiculous to claim, for instance, that all followers of any belief system fully advocate violence, it is equally absurd to claim it has no relation whatsoever to acts of slaughter and the quashing of basic rights. No political or religious project or identity should be immune from criticism: they can all become violent and oppressive.
The problem here is that when it comes to Islam, the Labour Party still doesn’t know how to deal with it, happily promoting social liberalism while also making criticism of the more violent strands of Islam still harder. All the while, cities such as Bradford and Leeds are becoming increasingly segregated, in terms of lives, religion and politics. All across Britain, meanwhile, identity politics is more divisive than ever. Battlelines have been drawn and are fought over by those who insist they are on the right side of history.
Twenty years on, then, we have far less confidence in our leaders and a feeling of despair surrounds the idea of multiculturalism — a feeling that politicians on both sides of the political divide will be inclined to weaponise. Indeed, while the War on Terror simply withered away, we are none the wiser as to why youngsters are radicalised. This was spelt out in the Government’s official report into the attack. It stated: “What we know of previous extremists in the UK shows that there is not a consistent profile to help identify who may be vulnerable to radicalisation”. This, too, has been borne out in Prevent’s continued failure to target and defuse potential suspects.
Today, then, political positions are hardening. We have a far more organised far-Right movement, and on the Left, we see the new divisions forming, as with the rise of the Independent Alliance, which will once again place identity and the question of foreign policy front and centre. Meanwhile, the possibility of further terrorist attacks can’t be ruled out. It is amid such moments of political febrility that the idea of civil war doesn’t seem so fantastic. We should remember that, as we remember those who perished 20 years ago.
A few days ago, I found myself on Tavistock Square in London. There is no sense that such a horrific event took place on these sun baked streets. Nor, as I travelled through Edgware Road Station, did I suspect that others on the train would be remembering those images from within the blown out carriage, as the smoke billowed from a smouldering blackness. It is all too easy to forget such appalling horrors: the victims, their families, the rescue workers who had to confront the unimaginable.
If we are to do justice to the memory of 7/7, then, it is not only to follow a ritual of remembrance. It is to remember that the forces that led to the detonation of those bombs 20 years ago aren’t extinguished. And that Britain today is contending with rising disenchantment. We need political leaders who will defuse this dangerous moment, not light the touchpaper. We don’t want to become the unwitting authors of another catastrophe.
