King Charles sends unity message on 7/7 attacks anniversary
Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer also said that 'those who tried to divide us failed," adding: 'We stood together then, and we stand together now'.
The King has called on the country to continue its spirit of unity (Image: PA/Aaron Chown) The King said: 'Today, as we mark 20 years since the tragic events of 7th July 2005, my heartfelt thoughts and special prayers remain with all those whose lives were forever changed on that terrible summer's day.
'We remember with profound sadness the 52 innocent people who were killed in senseless acts of evil – and the enduring grief of their loved ones.
'We recall, too, the hundreds more who carry physical and psychological scars, and pray that their suffering may ease as the years pass.
'In doing so, we should also remember the countless stories of extraordinary courage and compassion that emerged from the darkness of that day.
'The selfless bravery of our emergency services, transport workers, and fellow citizens who rushed towards danger to help strangers reminds us of the very best of humanity in the face of the very worst.'
Other members of the Royal Family are taking part in memorials today, including The Duke and Duchess of Edinburgh, who will appear at the National Service of Commemoration at St Paul's Cathedral from 11.30am on Monday.
Sir Keir Starmer said that 'those who tried to divide us failed' (Image: PA) The King also stressed the importance of communities coming together in times of adversity.
He said: 'While the horrors will never be forgotten, we may take comfort from the way such events rally communities together in solidarity, solace and determination.
'It is this spirit of unity that has helped London, and our nation, to heal.
'As we remember those we lost, let us therefore use this 20th anniversary to reaffirm our commitment to building a society where people of all faiths and backgrounds can live together with mutual respect and understanding, always standing firm against those who would seek to divide us.'
The Duke and Duchess of Edinburgh are to attend a memorial today (Image: PA)
The 7/7 attacks were a series of attacks across London's transport network on July 7, 2005.
The attacks saw bombs detonated on three underground trains and a double-decker bus.
This caused severe casualties during rush hour, seeing 52 people killed and more than 700 injured.
These were carried out by Islamist terrorists using improvised explosive devices made from concentrated hydrogen peroxide and pepper, packed into backpacks.
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The Guardian
an hour ago
- The Guardian
7/7 London terror attack victims remembered at 20th anniversary service
The prime minister and the Duke and Duchess of Edinburgh joined survivors and emergency workers at St Paul's Cathedral to mark the 20th anniversary of the 7 July London bombings. Four coordinated attacks on three tube trains and a double-decker bus killed 52 people and left several hundred injured in the worst single terrorist atrocity on British soil. Alongside Keir Starmer and the royals at the commemorative ceremony were Sadiq Khan, the mayor of London; the home secretary, Yvette Cooper; survivors, emergency responders and bereaved relatives. Starmer and Khan laid wreaths at the 7 July memorial in Hyde Park at 8.50am on Monday, to coincide with the time that the first bomb went off. They were joined by officials including the Metropolitan police commissioner, Mark Rowley, and the chief constable of the British Transport Police, Lucy D'Orsi, who also laid floral tributes. Survivors and relatives of those killed in the 7 July bombings spoke during the memorial service about how the areas involved in the attacks have changed in the past 20 years. They bowed at the altar after four candles – signifying the four sites of the bombings – Russell Square, Aldgate, Edgware Road and Tavistock Square – were carried through the cathedral by emergency services representatives. Ellie Patsalos, the wife of Prof Philip Patsalos, who lost a leg in the blast between King's Cross and Russell Square stations, spoke about Russell Square's history. She said: 'Here, men and women seek understanding and their search for truth challenges the ignorance which casts so much darkness over our world.' Tony Silvestro of the British Transport Police, who was at Aldgate station on 7 July helping survivors, talked about different immigrant communities who had worked and settled in the area, saying: 'Now, it is a busy crossroads of business and commerce with people of all faiths and none, trading and dealing with the rest of the world.' Rev Julie Nicholson, the mother of Jennifer Vanda Ann Nicholson, who died aged 24, said Edgware Road had been a refuge for Huguenot migrants and had a diverse ethnic history. She said it was 'cosmopolitan and proud of its ethnic mix and diverse resources'. George Psaradakis, the driver of the number 30 bus that was blown apart in the 2005 attacks, spoke about Tavistock Square and its memorials dedicated to victims and campaigners including Gandhi. Sign up to First Edition Our morning email breaks down the key stories of the day, telling you what's happening and why it matters after newsletter promotion In between each reflection, the choir sang a short piece. Graham Foulkes, the father of David Foulkes, who was killed in the 7 July attack at Edgware Road Station, said London has remained a place of hope through the people that live and visit the city. He said: 'These four pieces of London epitomise what is great about this city: an international crossroads of diversity and ingenuity, tolerance and respect, challenge and opportunity. 'When four bombs exploded on 7 July 2005, lives were destroyed and the flame of hope faltered for what seemed like an eternal moment. 'For many people, nothing was the same again and yet everything was the same because the good which is in Londoners and the countless visitors whom they host at any given moment is not erased by hatred or threat but, rather, is fostered to produce a harvest of hope for each generation.'
Spectator
an hour ago
- Spectator
What was missing from the 7/7 commemorations
Something was scarce, if not absent, in the commemorations of the 7/7 Islamist attacks yesterday, and that is the fact that these were Islamist attacks. The word did not appear in the Prime Minister's official statement to mark the anniversary. Keir Starmer commended 'the unity of Londoners in the face of terror', but what kind of terror? Far-right? Far-left? The IRA? Eco-warriors? The trouble is that if you specify the nature of the attacks, you specify the nature of the perpetrators. They were: Mohammad Sidique Khan (born in Leeds, parents from Pakistan); Shehzad Tanweer (born in Bradford, parents from Pakistan); Hasib Hussain (born in Leeds, parents from Pakistan); and Germaine Lindsay (born in Jamaica, family converted to Islam after settling in Yorkshire). That all were Muslims and all here as a result of immigration is purely coincidental and definitely not something we should learn any lessons from. To recognise Islamism as the cause of 7/7 is to say that four British Muslims blew up people who were supposed to be their fellow citizens, and did so in the name of 'protecting and avenging my Muslim brothers and sisters', as Khan put it in a video statement. That to Khan, Tanweer, Hussain, and Lindsay, and those who think like them, a Muslim's kinship and loyalty is with co-religionists the world over and not with the country that welcomed their families and extended them the benefits of citizenship. The obvious follow-up question is: how many Muslims in Britain feel the same way? In the wake of 7/7, 'Islamism' was never off the tongues of policymakers and pundits as the merits of various counter strategies were debated. Should ministers co-opt 'community leaders' to fashion a moderate British Islam that rejected extremism? Tried that. Should they root out extremist, foreign-born imams from UK mosques? Talked about it a lot but did very little. Should more money be directed to Prevent and anti-radicalisation outfits? That was popular for a while; what it achieved is anyone's guess. Twenty years on from 7/7, Islamism is no longer on quite so many tongues but it is no less of a threat. In 2010, Labour MP Stephen Timms was stabbed at his constituency surgery by Roshonara Choudhry, who was motivated by the Iraq war. In 2013, fusilier Lee Rigby was butchered in Woolwich by Michael Adebolajo and Michael Adebowale in 'retaliation for deaths in Muslim lands'. In March 2017, Khalid Masood murdered PC Keith Palmer and four others in an attack at Westminster. Two months later, Salman and Hashem Abedi killed 22 people at an Ariana Grande concert in Manchester. One month after that, Khuram Butt, Rachid Redouane and Youssef Zaghba massacred eight people on London Bridge while shouting 'this is for Allah'. In 2019, Usman Khan killed two people on London Bridge after being released from prison for his role in a conspiracy to blow up the London Stock Exchange. In 2020, asylum seeker Khairi Saadallah, seeking refuge in the UK after fighting for the Ansar al-Sharia terror group in Libya, stabbed three people to death in a park in Reading. In 2021, Ali Harbi Ali murdered Sir David Amess over his vote for air strikes against the Islamic State and his membership of Conservative Friends of Israel. One in four UK Muslims say Palestine is the most important issue for them, compared to just 3 per cent of the overall population. Asked their views on Hamas, 29 per cent say 'positive' while 24 per cent say 'negative'. Fifty-seven per cent want halal food to be compulsory in schools and hospitals, 52 per cent want to make it illegal to show a picture of Mohammed, and one-third think it would be desirable to see sharia introduced in the UK. One in four British Muslims wants to outlaw homosexuality while one in five wants to legalise polygamy. Meanwhile, a Kurdish man, Hamit Coskun, was prosecuted for setting fire to his own copy of the Qur'an in public. A teacher in Batley is still in hiding four years after Muslim mobs descended on his school because a religious studies lesson featured a depiction of Mohammed. A mother had to plead for her autistic son down the local mosque in Wakefield after the boy dropped a copy of the Qur'an in school. A historical drama, The Lady of Heaven, was pulled from UK cinemas after mosques and mobs put pressure on exhibitors to stop showing a movie they deemed blasphemous. The government is consulting on a broad and sweeping definition of 'Islamophobia'. To bring all this up is divisive. Divisiveness is one of the great evils of liberal modernity because it reveals the presence of divisions, divisions that do not officially exist, whose acknowledgement is heretical in the civic religion of liberalism, not least because their growth tracks unhelpfully with Britain's embrace of multiculturalism, an infallible doctrine in the church of progress. The Prime Minister gives the game away in his statement when he says: 'Those who tried to divide us failed. We stood together then, and we stand together now – against hate and for the values that define us of freedom, democracy and the rule of law.' Every last word of that is wrong. Islamists do not want to divide us, they want to dominate us. Their goal isn't us at each others' throats, it's their boots on our throats. They want, they demand, and, if we allow them, they will enforce our submission. Progressives like Starmer have no frame for Islamism. As the DPP, he could understand it as a series of offences to be prosecuted, and as Prime Minister he recognises it as a national security threat, but he shows no indication of grasping its civilisational import. Islamism aims at the destruction of a civilisation, our civilisation. The closest frame that a secular liberal might understand is colonisation, but the western centre-left mind cannot conceive of a colonial project in which white westerners are the victims, and so the progressive retreats into comforting bromides about prejudice and standing together. To reduce Islamism to 'hate' is to mischaracterise the ideology. Yes, Islamists hate us for our way of life, as the deathless cliché goes, but it is a holy hate, the conviction of the dogmatist meets the zeal of the converter. Their mission is to conquer this land and all lands for a caliphate, where power is in the hands of the Muslims and all submission is to Allah. Islamists don't care that the Prime Minister won't utter their name. It matters not to them whether we look back in anger or look forward in denial. The Norm Macdonald joke ('What terrifies me is if Isis were to detonate a nuclear device and kill 50 million Americans. Imagine the backlash against peaceful Muslims?') might be government policy in Britain but the backlash fixation does not extend beyond our elites, and certainly not to Islamists themselves. If innocent Muslims are mistreated because of their outrages, Islamists will exploit it to further their cause. If an attacked nation rallies around its Muslims, Islamists will find other ways to further their cause. You can try to anticipate and deny them every grievance but it will not change the original grievance, the one that drives them above all others, and that is the existence of peoples and nations which are not subject to Allah. That guarding against the victimisation of patriotic, law-abiding British Muslims will do nothing to dissuade Islamists from their murderous path is not a reason to lower our defences against bigotry. There is nothing that prevents a Muslim from being a good British citizen while living with devotion to Allah. We know that because Muslims do it every day. They raise families, start businesses, doctor to the sick, do charitable works, pray down the mosque, and do so with love for Britain, commitment to its customs and institutions, and sharing in its people's traditional orientation towards individual liberty, pluralism, fairness, and the rule of law. If the last 60 years of immigration had involved only these Muslims, Britain today would be a less multicultural but a far happier, safer, more prosperous country. Unfortunately, it is impossible to operate an immigration system that delivers only good future citizens while weeding out extremists, tribalists and those who place ethnic and religious solidarity above the proper character and duties of citizenship. The threat of Islamism must be addressed at three levels: immigration, integration and enforcement. To begin that urgent work requires circumstances which simply do not pertain in Britain. You need a civic establishment that believes unwaveringly that your country and your civilisation are good things that must survive. You need to educate succeeding generations to celebrate rather than demean their country, to lionise rather than demonise its heroes, and to regard its enemies as villains rather than victims. You need the strictest possible border policy, one in which legal migration is controlled, illegal migration prevented, and social and cultural impacts given primacy over economic considerations. You need to tell immigrants that they are lucky to be here, are expected to integrate fully, and that failure to do so will result in their removal. You need to tell their children and grandchildren that Britain owes them nothing but they owe it unending gratitude. The UK is nowhere near achieving these circumstances. If anything, it is less willing now than it was after 7/7 to confront the Islamist threat. We have an elite educated in civilisational shame and primed for performative oikophobia, a state that does not believe in itself and prefers to pander to internal foes, or avert its eyes from them entirely, rather than assert its legitimacy and exercise its power. Keir Starmer belongs to that elite, which explains his statement and the drift in which Britain finds itself. A nation that lacks the courage to name its enemies lacks the confidence to confront them and, in the end, it will lack the guts to overcome them.
Telegraph
an hour ago
- Telegraph
Victorious Macron arrives at summit to accept Starmer's Brexit surrender
In Emmanuel Macron's Brexit war with Britain, there could only ever be one winner. Peace had to be bought with 12 years of British fish; a tribute surrendered by a Prime Minister who began reversing Brexit as soon as he got into office. Now a satisfied 'Jupiter', as Mr Macron styles himself, will descend to the UK for a three-day state visit to reward Sir Keir Starmer. He will find the time to meet Kemi Badenoch and Sir Ed Davey but has no plans to meet Nigel Farage, the architect of Brexit and leader of poll-topping Reform UK. It would be a 'very pragmatic rapprochement', an Elysée official said of the first visit to Britain by an EU head of state since Brexit. 'Shared interests and re-convergence are the elements that most characterise the symbolism of the visit and the issues at stake at this Franco-British summit,' the official added. Mr Macron was the bad cop of the Brexit negotiations. He never missed a chance to skewer the British for daring to quit the EU, which he declared a project led by 'liars'. As relations plunged to sub-zero temperatures, French and British ships shadowed each other off the coast of Jersey in what became known as 'fish wars'. Mr Macron's acolytes would later threaten to cut off energy supplies to the island, as reports emerged that the president called Boris Johnson a 'clown' and a 'knucklehead'. There will be no such friction when Mr Macron meets the King, or when he addresses MPs and peers in Westminster later on Tuesday. Why would there be? Mr Macron has got exactly what he wanted. He became president two months after Britain triggered the Article 50 process to leave the EU, defeating Marine Le Pen in May 2017. Ms Le Pen had gloried in Brexit and had promised a similar referendum if she won the race to the Elysée. Mr Macron was determined to turn Brexit into a stick with which to beat his rival, in the five years before the 2022 presidential election. For that to work, Brexit had to be a failure. Mr Macron set about making sure that happened and duly won his second battle against Ms Le Pen, who he warned was pursuing 'Frexit by stealth'. Mr Macron sees his visit as the final piece of the UK's Reset with the EU. The first step was Sir Keir's hosting of the European Political Community (EPC) summit in July last year. The EPC, a six-monthly meeting of EU and non-EU European leaders, was Mr Macron's brainchild. Sir Keir used it to call for a Reset deal with Brussels. Paris describes London as having been a 'major partner' in the EPCs held since Sir Keir's election. The EPC is part of Mr Macron's vision of a 'multi-speed Europe'. In it, non-EU countries to varying degrees orbit the core EU members, which are of course dominated by France. In May this year, Sir Keir reached an agreement in principle on the reset with Brussels, which cements the UK's place in that orbit. It included a defence pact, which formalised foreign policy and security co-operation and allowed for British involvement in EU defence spending programmes. The UK has agreed to align with EU plant and animal health rules, becoming a rule-taker from Brussels, and signed away access to UK fishing waters for an astonishing 12 years. The Reset agreement will 'resynchronise the relationship between the European Union and the United Kingdom', the Elysée said before his visit. Fishermen matter in France. Mr Macron is so pleased with the coup he has finally agreed to do a deal allowing Channel migrants to be returned to France for the first time since Brexit. For each migrant returned, Britain would take in an asylum seeker from France in the 'one in, one out' deal. Hopes of announcing the agreement this week now look in doubt after other EU member states raised objections about the pact, fearing it meant they would have to take back more migrants from France. The world is now a different place from the height of Brexit. A real war has made the Brexit wars appear insignificant. Britain and France, Europe's two nuclear powers and members of the UN Security Council, can no longer afford to be at daggers drawn. The war in Ukraine, and questions over Donald Trump's commitment to the security of Europe, have forced France and Britain back together again. A lame duck at home with a minority government, Mr Macron can now only spread his wings in foreign policy and defence – two major themes of the Anglo-French summit. Mr Macron and Sir Keir have spearheaded the coalition of willing nations to support Kyiv and have been interceding in Volodymyr Zelensky's favour with the US president. Mr Macron will lay a wreath at the statue of Sir Winston Churchill before doing the same at the statue of General Charles de Gaulle at Carlton Gardens, which was his wartime headquarters during the occupation of France. The choreography of the first day of the state visit recognises the shadow of war looming over Europe by paying tribute to each country's greatest leaders. But Paris still insists on conditions and restrictions on British involvement in EU defence schemes, or insisting that EU arms companies get preferential treatment in the initiatives. Mr Macron may not like Brexiteers like Mr Farage or the 'clown' Mr Johnson. But he is every bit as intent on having his cake and eating it.
