Did 7/7 really change us?

Published in the Evening Standard, 15 September 2005

When is the last day of summer? When the thin-strapped vests and floaty skirts finally get put away and no man dares wear a cream suit? When a cricket contest that gripped the nation at last reaches its climax in a drunken procession through the capital city?

Perhaps it’s when the experiences that defined the summer lose their urgency and slide into memory. Something like that seems to be happening with the event that shook London ten weeks ago today. The 7/7 bombings are not the immediate matter, at the forefront of the city’s collective mind, that they were. The passing of the summer months has pushed them back.

So Tuesday could see hearings into the July attacks – with MPs grilling the Home Secretary, police commissioner and mayor – and we barely noticed. London’s eye was elsewhere, trained not on a Westminster committee room but on Trafalgar Square, Freddie Flintoff and a tiny, precious urn.

That’s how it should be. A city that can work itself up over the state of cloud cover at the Oval is not the city on the verge of a nervous breakdown the terrorists hoped London would become. The late summer outbreak of Ashes fever stands as a kind of rebuff to the bombers and their plans for us.

And yet, the angst has not vanished completely. Take the Tube, and you’ll see the sideways glances that greet anyone who fits the mental photofit most Londoners now carry. On the Piccadilly line on Monday, a bearded, Asian man slumbered in his seat: each snore, each breath in and out, was monitored by his fellow passengers - closely.

Something of that mood was detectable in a less expected place the other night – at a cinema, showing what the promoters are doubtless calling the “most talked-about movie of the year”: Crash.

Set in Los Angeles, it weaves together a series of stories and characters, brought together when cars collide on the LA freeways. Crash’s theme is the relationship of the races in one of the world’s most diverse cities. We see a black cop and his female, Salvadoran partner (and lover); a white District Attorney and his pampered wife; two black carjackers; a Kurdish store owner; a Chinese people smuggler; a black TV executive humiliated when his car is pulled over by an overtly racist cop, a Hispanic locksmith and more.

What makes the film compelling is its refusal to allow anyone to be a complete hero or complete villain. Instead, the characters are studies in ambiguity, No one is without prejudice; no one is irredeemably bad. In a story about black and white, the moral palette is grey. For all that, LA’s different communities are shown in a state of constant tension, suspicious of each other, with the threat of murderous violence never far away.

LA may be 5000 miles from London, but the story felt unsettlingly near. Crash is playing to audiences here every bit as diverse as those on the screen. Each one of the characters there has a counterpart here. The result is that when the credits roll, a question hangs in the air: could that be us?

Most Londoners would want to answer with an instinctive No. On the day before the bombings, we beat off some of the world’s greatest cities thanks to our diversity, bagging the Olympic games by showing that London is the world in one city. A day later, we proved the point again with a roll-call of victims from all points of the globe. Both 6/7 and 7/7 told the same story: London is the city of many colours.

Of course, Los Angeles is diverse too: the trouble is, if Crash is any guide, all those diverse communities are at each other’s throats. We like to believe London is different. It’s becoming part of our self-image that we have attempted the great mix once associated with the major American cities – and made a go of it. Race riots in London are a 25 year old memory. To paraphrase Rodney King, the black motorist whose beating by white police sparked the LA riots of 1992, we are the city where “we can all get along.”

This is not just a cosy self-delusion. Figures released by the IPPR think-tank last week showed that one in four Londoners was born outside Britain. Factor in those whose parents were newcomers to this country, and London’s boast looks real: truly, this is a city of immigrants. But this is also the place where tolerance seems most deeply embedded. Talk to government officials and they’ll tell you that the MPs who report the greatest opposition to asylum and immigration in their constituencies also represent the areas with the fewest migrants. In London, with the greatest diversity in the UK, acceptance is greater.

And yet the Crash question still nags. Have we really woven all these different threads into a single fabric – or are there some among us who cannot find their place? If we do lack the friction and confrontation on show in LA, might that not be because we are nicer, more tolerant people – but because we simply encounter those different to ourselves less often?

That’s a live issue in London, where communities often exist in their own enclaves, behind invisible walls. Think of the stretch of Edgware Road where men walk arm in arm, sipping coffee and twiddling beads, as if in an Arab capital; or the streets of Stamford Hill, where ultra-orthodox Jews live, work and pray as they might have in 18th century Poland or Russia.

There’s a risk that the only Poles other Londoners will meet are those who serve them in a bar or repair their drains. That this city’s Kurds or Germans or Bengalis will remain as far apart from each other as if they had never left home.

This is a danger, one whose risks we don’t need a film to point out. We saw them all too clearly ten weeks ago, at the height, and depth, of this strange, bittersweet summer.

Posted on September 15, 2005 05:20 PM

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