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England, whose England?
Jon Beasley-Murray
By their fear you shall know them. The USA responded to al-Qaeda’s September
2001 attacks with a proliferation of flags reaffirming national pride and
widespread support for the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, confirmed by
George W. Bush’s 2004 re-election. Spain reacted to the Madrid train explosions
of March 2003 with silent vigils that shut down the country, and by replacing
José María Aznar’s Partido Popular government with a Socialist Party that would
withdraw Spanish troops from Iraq. By July 2005, the UK had already given Tony
Blair a third term, albeit with a reduced majority and despite general anti-war
sentiment. Rather than patriotism or protest, London’s tube and bus bombings
inspired anguish and self-mockery: anguished analyses of British-born ‘bombers
from suburbia’; self-mocking websites such as www.iamfuckingterrified.com.
Others, however, were less anguished and only accidentally self-parodic:
‘Bombers Are All Spongeing Asylum Seekers’ declared the Daily Express.
Meanwhile, arsonists attacked a mosque on the Wirral, and hate crimes rose
sixfold in the weeks following the 7 July bombings.
Whereas the US and Spanish responses to terror were fairly coherent, their
alchemy of affect into politics more or less straightforward, the effect of the
London attacks has been more confused. An overhyped stoicism, bolstered by
folk-memory narratives of the Blitz or IRA mainland campaigns but leavened by
understandable twitchiness, has combined with various forms of hysteria, whether
liberal hand-wringing, illiberal violence or libertarian excess (‘beer not
afraid’), and it has been distanced through irony. The bombs did not
particularly play into New Labour’s rhetoric of security at home and
belligerence abroad, but at the same time Blair is riding higher in the polls
than ever before, apparently on the principle that the person who caused the
mess is best placed to clear it up.
For Paul Gilroy, the mess that is Britain’s overseas entanglement and the
messiness of its reactions to terror on the tube are both best referred to
deeper, post-imperial roots.* British attitudes to race and to geopolitics alike
are conditioned by the ambivalence of ‘postcolonial melancholia’, on the
one hand, and an emergent ‘unruly and unplanned multiculture’, on the other. The
country’s melancholic mood derives from its refusal to face up to the loss of an
empire which had structured its political institutions and given a sense of
coherence to its culture. Rather than working through this loss, Britain acts it
out in the ‘racist violence [that] provides an easy means to ‘purify’ and
rehomogenize the nation’, which is then followed by ‘shame-faced tides of
self-scrutiny and self-loathing’ and interspersed with ‘outbursts of manic
euphoria’. But Gilroy also detects a ‘spontaneous tolerance and openness evident
in the underworld of Britain’s convivial culture’. He argued in a recent
dialogue in the Guardian that ‘wounded London’s response’ to the July attacks,
such as ‘the shrine at King’s Cross and the crowd at Stockwell station’, showed
‘vividly’ that British history ‘offers valuable lessons about how to get along
convivially in a multicultural polity’.
The country’s predicament offers opportunities as well as pitfalls. If we
could only identify and analyse the central role that colonialism and race
thinking played in the constitution of the modern state, and then also defend
and explain the countervailing trend towards conviviality, Britain might stand
firm against ‘US models that are identified with an inevitable future of racial
conflict’. Indeed, the ‘rebirth of English tolerance and generosity’ might even
‘one day teach the rest of Europe something about what will have to be done in
order to live peacefully with difference’.
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