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New Statesman
02-07-2025
- Entertainment
- New Statesman
7/7 changed life for British Muslims forever
Photo by Dylan Martinez / AFP via Getty Images In a way, it had to be a train. AJP Taylor conceived of history unfolding as inexorably as a railway timetable, a train that advanced with clockwork certainty towards its terminus. In this point of view, the history of Islamist suicide terrorism was always going to have a scheduled stop in London, with its big Muslim diaspora and contested imperial past. And so, 20 years ago, on 7 July 2005, at 8.49am, it finally arrived. When it did, it turned out to be not just a metaphorical train, signifying the advent in Britain of a certain ineluctable history, but three perilously real Underground carriages sharking through Zone 1 as they were detonated by suicide bombers. Across four bombings that day – there was also a bus whose upper deck was peeled off – 52 innocents were killed. The terror train in London was strangely delayed. Four years had passed since the strike on the World Trade Center, at the heart of the American empire; the UK, too, would become enmeshed in the attack's aftermath, in Afghanistan and Iraq. In London, the period bookended by 9/11 and 7/7 was peaceful, untroubled, and my innocent early teens were trifled away in a city that, compared to now, was a Garden of Eden. Kids like me were no more conscious of being Muslim than Adam and Eve were of their sex. Some say 9/11 had already changed that, but while there were tense times in 2001, London's multicultural innocence wasn't really lost until the 2005 attacks. Even after terror traumatised New York, the narratives that defined early-Noughties London were still Zadie Smith's White Teeth and Monica Ali's Brick Lane, both about Bangladeshi Londoners like my family and broadly optimistic about our presence here. They were among the first contemporary books I read (overrated as literary fiction; near perfect as YA novels). But after 7/7, writers could no longer envision multicultural London in that way. It had become 'Londonistan', an alleged seedbed of terror. Islamophobia soared to the point that a name for it had to be popularised. Suspicion of Muslim immigration, hysteria about Muslim birth rates, the 'Prevent' policy that pre-emptively viewed young Muslims as potential terrorists: so much that is still with us originated in 2005. The cultural mood began morphing as drastically as my pubescent mind and body. I remember wishing away those changes, craving the innocence that possessed me before I was 14, when the bombs went off – an innocence both personal and political. The odour clouding my body was as unwelcome as the spectre of suicide bombings. In Baghdad, there were as many as a dozen a day; I read the news, I knew this related, somehow, to my doomed religion. I prayed that the train of history, and its concomitant trail of destruction, would not reach Britain. Couldn't it just shuttle between America and Afghanistan, but somehow swerve us, leaving us to frolic in our ahistorical Eden? If only British Muslims could be like Mauritian Muslims, say, or Guyanese Muslims, serenely insulated from these momentous episodes. If only we could sit history out. The moment we learned of the bombings, my Muslim classmates and I began concocting our nervous conspiracy theories. It was the French, of course, enraged at losing out to us the day before on their bid to host the Olympics (we were British enough to recognise our true enemies). The bombers couldn't possibly have been Muslim, still less British! Alas, they were both. They were 'homegrown', a word that before 2005 denoted vegetable produce, not terror threats. Subscribe to The New Statesman today from only £8.99 per month Subscribe I was no homegrown radish. Instead, I was a prospective homegrown terrorist: every British Muslim was, after 7/7 – even in the eyes of discerning writers. 'The Muslim community will have to suffer until it gets its house in order,' Martin Amis mused a year after the attacks. 'What sort of suffering? Not letting them travel. Deportation further down the road. Discriminatory stuff, until it hurts the whole community and they start getting tough with their children.' As one of those children, aged all of 16, I was scandalised. The scandal was less Islamophobia than the incoherence of liberalism. In The Second Plane – a now under-appreciated terror-themed work released a few years after 7/7 – Amis criticised Islam, in which, supposedly, 'there is no individual; there is only the ummah – the community of believers'. And yet here he was, a self-proclaimed believer in the individual, proposing collective punishment. The interview was disowned; a 'thought experiment', Amis regretted, but one with a sinister prescience. Reading the newspaper reviews in those years, I found relentless debates no longer about poetry or Proust, but suddenly about myself. This was one of the unintended effects of the train that brought Islamist suicide bombings to Britain: it transported the Muslim to the centre of cultural discourse. Every writer weighed in on the Muslim question. This was disquieting. But, I now appreciate, it also created a point of contact, however abrasive, between myself and literary life. 'If September 11 had to happen,' Amis writes in the The Second Plane, 'then I am not at all sorry that it happened in my lifetime.' I could say the same of the feverish aftermath to 7/7. It made me a journalist. Without it, I would be a suburban GP somewhere. Instead, I'm here at this magazine, privileged to have Martin Amis's old job. Tanjil Rashid will join the New Statesman as culture editor later this month [See also: Cover Story: Just raise tax!] Related
Yahoo
30-05-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Britain is sleepwalking into total state control of our daily lives
Thank God we won the Cold War. For a while there, it was touch and go, the future of the world on a knife-edge. On one side, we had a system permeated top to bottom by an official state ideology. Employment and freedom was made contingent on adherence, an extensive network of censors and informers was established to maintain the illusion that dissenters were a minority, harsh punishments were meted out to political prisoners, and the state took control of vast swathes of the economy. On the other, the promise of freedom: freedom of conscience, freedom of speech, freedom of religion and association, freedom to do as you would with your private property. It was, as I said, close. But in the end, despite Thatcher's brief, doomed fightback, the Socialists won. It's a tongue-in-cheek reading of British history, but it doesn't take a great deal of exaggeration to see how it could be true. As AJP Taylor once wrote, 'until August 1914 a sensible, law-abiding Englishman could pass through life and hardly notice the existence of the state beyond the post office and the policeman'. That is emphatically not the case today. Having won the wars, the advocates of freedom comprehensively lost the peace. They lost to such a degree that those of us born and raised afterwards find it hard to comprehend the scale of the change. It's easiest to start with the size of the state. To be sure, socialism in Britain has receded from its high point. The nationalisation of coal, iron, steel, electricity, gas, roads, aviation, telecommunications, and railways has been mostly undone, although steel and rail are on the way back in. But by comparison to our pre-war starting point, we live in a nearly unrecognisable country. In 1913, taxes and spending took up around 8 per cent of GDP. Today, they account for 35 per cent and 45 per cent respectively. To put it another way, almost half of all economic activity in Britain involves funds allocated at the behest of the government, and over half of British adults rely on the state for major parts of their income. And if anything, this understates the degree of government control. Outcomes which are nominally left to the market are rigged by a state which sees prices as less as a way for markets to clear, and more as a tool for social engineering. Universities charge tuition fees capped by the state to students funded by the state, with the looming threat of lost university status if they veer from approved principles. Energy prices are capped, and in crisis subsidised. Mandates are put in place for the installation of heat pumps and sale of zero-emission vehicles as a share of business. Wherever you look, there is meddling. The judiciary has revived the labour theory of value, awarding tens of millions of pounds in equal pay claims to shop workers who explicitly acknowledge they would never have taken warehouse jobs unless they paid far more than retail. The benefits system has recast the old mantra as 'from each according to their pre-tax labour income, to each according to their needs-based assessment'. The support of the proletariat is purchased, the middle classes are punished. And the Government appears to view its primary task to be finding caches of private wealth or institutions that have slipped state control – private schools, pensions, and the like – and reeling them in. We are so used to state control of our lives that we act as if it is simply a fact of life that we require permission to build on land that we own. But prior to 1947, there was no such requirement. It was taken as granted that having purchased land for a family home, no-one would interfere with your effort to build one. The Town and Country Planning Act put paid to that, handing councils the power to veto any and all construction. Combined with the surge in interest in state provision of housing – social housing went from 1 per cent of the country's stock in 1911 to 16 per cent today – and the result was to strip away our freedom to live where we would, as we would, and replace it with the utopian dreams of central planners. Sometimes these extended to direct sabotage: when Birmingham was among the most prosperous regions in Britain, with services businesses growing faster than anywhere else in the country, London-based planners, having already obstructed the construction of factories, declared its growth to be 'threatening'. The result was a ban on office development, and the crippling of its economy. Those parts which are under state control haven't fared much better. The charitable hospitals and friendly societies that existed prior to the NHS were swept aside in a project that explicitly aimed to replace this 'medley of public and voluntary institutions' with rational, 'planned' healthcare. The results have been catastrophic. We have created one of the largest employers on earth, with some of the longest waiting lists and worst health outcomes in the developed world. Between private and public provision, we spend almost 2 per cent more of our national income on healthcare than our Australian cousins in exchange for massively higher avoidable mortality. This should be a national disgrace. Yet despite the dismal experiences and the constant drip of scandals, it remains popular. The idea of healthcare provided outside the state is simply alien to a people taught that their system is the envy of the world. When Boris Yeltsin visited the United States, it was a trip to a supermarket that convinced him of the futility of the Soviet model. Regrettably, Britain's indoctrination has been far more effective, resembling at times a last-ditch counterinsurgency campaign conducted against our own people. The education system, under the thumb from preschool to grad school, has long abandoned efforts to instill national pride in favour of preaching about the benefits of diversity and nebulous British values that amount to upholding the state. Over 10,000 people a year are arrested for communications offences. Whenever attempts to impose multiculturalism on Britain hit a snag in the form of the latest terrorist outrage, the institutions of the state and its allies sing from a single sheet. The result has been a curious demoralisation. Asked to list the key features of British patriotism in 1914, our representative Englishman might have listed the Empire, the monarchy, the Church of England, the Royal Navy. Ask today, and you'll get something about fairness, diversity, the BBC and the NHS. This is, of course, all in jest. Britain is not a socialist country. And thank God for that, Comrade. Broaden your horizons with award-winning British journalism. Try The Telegraph free for 1 month with unlimited access to our award-winning website, exclusive app, money-saving offers and more.
