Mick Hartley

Power Surges

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Mick Hartley

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I’m hearing stories of people stuck in the tube at Aldgate believing that it was a power surge / collision / some other piece of typical stupidity on the part of London Underground, who were as a result more annoyed than frightened. Was the talk of a power surge, I wonder, a deliberate ploy to stop people panicking? The way the whole operation was run by the emergency services had the effect of playing down the scale of the disaster. No wild estimates of the number of casualties: till mid-afternoon only two fatalities were confirmed. Now we’re hearing about some of the horrors – limbs blown off and all the rest of it – but at the time the feeling was that this was nothing like as bad as, say, the Madrid bombing. That’s still the case, but, really, it’s not far off – and could have been much worse.

Andrew Sullivan is getting overcome with patriotism at us plucky stoical Brits – an easy emotion when you’re away from home. Well fair enough: at this stage you have to say that the performance of the emergency services has been superb. Meanwhile, out on the streets, London life goes on.

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  1. Eamonn Avatar
    Eamonn

    In less than 24 hours, the inevitable conclusions have been drawn by the usual suspects including Galloway, the SWP, Tony Benn. The letters page of the Independent is astounding in the naivety of the writers (“Sir: The blasts in London would not have happened had our Prime Minister not decided to join George W Bush’s ill-advised invasion of Iraq. It is now clear that Mr Blair’s actions have made our country a more dangerous place. We can only hope that he resigns to leave the country and our safety in the hands of a more sensible leader” and “Sir: Will it occur to the politicians who went to war in Iraq that they created far more terrorists than they destroyed, and that we are now reaping the consequences?”). And in the Guardian we have the vapid nonsense of Tariq Ali (“The price of occupation”) and Galloway-lite from Robin Cook (“The breeding grounds of terrorism are to be found in the poverty of back streets, where fundamentalism offers a false, easy sense of pride and identity to young men who feel denied of any hope or any economic opportunity for themselves”). And this is only 24 hours later. What will they be saying next week or next month?

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