Against terror, is London pride enough?

Days before a general election, May announced 'enough is enough' in the war against terrorism

One of the most tweeted pictures from last night’s terror attack on London Bridge shows a group of people running away from the scene of the killings. The runners are led by a man who is carefully balancing a half-full beer glass in his hand, as if even the threat of sudden, savage death isn’t reason enough to part a Brit from the pleasure of his pint.

This picture has been seized upon with relief and delight because it reflects how Britons would like to see themselves in a crisis: cool, calm, priorities unchanged.

“London Pride, in a glass,” said one tweeter, punning on the name of a popular brand of ale. “It’s London Bridge, FFS,” said another, “he’s paid £5.50 for that pint.” (About $7 is considered expensive, these days.) “If beer is left behind, the terrorists win,” said a third.

It’s the James Bond spirit writ large. Many people are defiantly hoping that while they may be shaken by the horror, London hasn’t been stirred.

This is true, up to a point. The radio and television shows today have been full of callers, politicians and priests claiming that the terrorists won’t divide the country, that Britain stands together, that this violence cannot be blamed on mainstream Islam, that nothing will change our way of life. These are now the familiar reassurances repeated as a mantra after every atrocity.

At Paddington Station this morning, in half a dozen conversations, no one admitted to fear. Charlotte Lewis, a tutor whose office is on the high street in Bermondsey where the attacks took place, scoffed at the idea that these events would affect her. She was, she said, annoyed that the disruption had made her train late. But no, she wasn’t scared at all. This was the price of living in a city. She was just back from Rio, where there had been riots; much worse happened elsewhere.

A bearded Hungarian tourist with his Korean girlfriend, pulling their suitcases, shrugged the threat off. No, they were not at all frightened; the chances of terror affecting them were minute. Sam, a young banker, was equally philosophical. Keep police funding up and remember that these people were a tiny minority of Muslims. John, a songwriter, said he was just pissed off. If it happened to you, it was bad luck. You were much more likely to die in a car crash. These people were bastards, but what could you do?

Cultures live by myths. These create their own reality. Britons may not know much history, but they all know about the spirit of the Blitz, and many lived through the bombing campaigns of the Irish Republican Army of the 1970s and ’80s. Many will remember that, in 1984, on the day Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and half her cabinet team were blown out of their beds in the early morning by the Brighton bomb, in which five people died, she insisted that the Conservative Party conference should still start as scheduled at 9.30 a.m.

Terrorism, she said, would never cripple democracy. The country is proud of that stoicism, and on the whole, wishes to live up to it.

And yet. Today, there is a ripple of unease spreading through Britain, after the third brutal and unexpected attack in three months. It is the chilling realization that whatever the antiterror strategy has been so far, it clearly hasn’t worked.

However many plots are being foiled, now that anyone with the access to a car or van, a kitchen knife or the internet can choose to kill, some will succeed.

This is a bleak and, frankly, unbearable prospect, and it’s concentrating minds. My 25-year-old son says that what terrifies him and his friends is their impotence. If this were indeed the Blitz, they could join up. If it was the ’70s they could either fight the I.R.A. or lobby for peace talks. But here, they have no idea how to combat this, whom to talk to, how to do anything other than wait for the next atrocity to happen, and then send sympathy and hashtags in the aftermath.

Others, seeing that good will and candlelit vigils have their limits, are demanding radical action. On social media and phone-ins, and in private conversations, some people are calling for the immediate internment of the 3,000 suspected radicals on the terrorist watch lists, or their deportation, or for mass aerial bombing of the Islamic States abroad.

None of these will be solutions, but everyone is beginning to understand that savagery may become a regular occurrence, rather than an exceptional one — unless whoever is in government can offer a different and more successful approach.

That is why Prime Minister Theresa May, only days away from a general election where she is fighting to keep her parliamentary majority, announced this morning that “enough is enough” in the war against terrorism, and that “things need to change.” There had been too much tolerance of extremism in Britain. The police and security services should have all the powers they needed. The internet giants, Facebook and Google, must be held responsible for radicalizing material that appeared on their sites.

Mrs. May knows just how vulnerable she is on these issues. She is already performing unexpectedly badly in the election campaign, appearing wooden and uneasy in comparison to her Labour challenger. Normally, she and the Tories could count on scoring high for law and order, but Mrs. May is in the uncomfortable position of denouncing counterterror policies for which she herself has been responsible over the past six years (in five years as home secretary and one as prime minister).

If that record is seen as lacking, the electorate may count it against her. An unsettled Britain needs something more substantial than jokes about beer.

©2017 The New York Times News Service