It had become a cliché - an official one at that - to say that it was a matter of when, not if, London once again became the target of a terrorist attack.
Even though there had not been one for almost twelve years, the security services assessed the risk as ‘severe’, meaning an attack was highly likely. Now it has happened. London joins Paris, Berlin, Brussels and other European cities in suffering an outrage that was all but unpreventable. Must we now regard the horror of Westminster on a Wednesday afternoon as normal and just get used to it?
In one very important sense it is absolutely impossible for us to do so. We cannot treat the barbarism of the attack as normal if, by that, we mean we just shrug and carry on. We cannot shrug when unarmed policemen, doing their job defending the public, are knifed to death. We cannot shrug when French children on a school trip from Brittany are deliberately mown down, when tourists from Romania, South Korea and elsewhere are deliberately targeted for murder as they gaze up at Big Ben from Westminster Bridge and when an innocent woman has to leap into the Thames in fear for her life. We need to remain outraged, to insist we cannot accept this as normal, because the acts of terror that cause such carnage challenge everything a civilised society believes in.
It has become another cliché for people in authority to say, after such terrorist acts, that their thoughts go out to the victims. But that phrase merely betrays the feebleness of language in the face of such horror. We cannot treat terrorism as normal precisely because our thoughts must always go out to the family of PC Keith Palmer and everyone else whose lives were transformed for ever by what happened on Wednesday.
Yet we cannot also avoid the conclusion that what happened then is becoming normal, in the sense that it is almost impossible to prevent and therefore likely to be repeated. No doubt the authorities will re-examine all the details of security. There will be discussion of the carriage gates at the Palace of Westminster, of whether there can any longer be unarmed police in prominent public places. Critics and supporters alike will look again at the Investigatory Powers Act to see what else may or may not need doing. Governments will introduce new security measures, such as banning laptops on certain flights from certain countries.
Even as the events were unfolding at Westminster on Wednesday, President Trump’s Secretary of State, Rex Tillerson, was hosting a meeting of the sixty-eight countries Barack Obama assembled to fight Islamic State. The new president has made it his priority to defeat so-called Islamic State. But even if this coalition achieves military success, as it is already doing in Mosul and elsewhere, few believe that will be the end of the matter. Indeed military defeat may simply deflect Islamic State’s activities away from the defence of territory and towards even more international terrorism.
We don’t yet know whether the man shot dead carrying out Wednesday’s attack was acting under orders, although the police regard it as related to Islamic terrorism. He may instead have been responding to Islamic State’s more generalised exhortation to the faithful to use cars as terrorist vehicles. He may simply have wanted to emulate what he had seen on television: Islamic suicide terrorists driving trucks into a promenade of sunset-watchers at Nice or through a crowd of Christmas shoppers in Berlin. He may have had a completely different motivation. We may never know. But we do know that such a ‘sick and depraved’ act, as the Prime Minister called it, cannot ultimately be prevented. So we must brace ourselves for it becoming normal.
In which case, we may run out of things to say. Journalists, perhaps more than anyone else, are aware that the enormity (in the proper sense of the word) of an event cannot always be matched by what seems like the necessary scale of the response. There simply isn’t enough to say. We find ourselves scratching around in more and more detail just to fill the space. But what actually needs to be said can be expressed much more concisely.
Perhaps this gives us the clue as to how we should treat what we must fear will become this new normality. Perhaps a certain reticence is the necessary response for everyone. Terrorism works by creating a sense of outrage. If we steal ourselves to mute the expression of that outrage, the effect is lost. The police are aware of an aspect of this. They withheld the name of the attacker. The widower of Jo Cox, the murdered Labour MP, expressed the same point: he didn’t want the name of his wife’s murderer to become widely known because it shone the spotlight on the wrong aspect of the crime.
After several hours of disruption on Wednesday afternoon, London got on with its life. Maybe the way to treat the “normal” nature of terrorist attacks is to do just that and, in doing so, deter future potential attackers from doing the same. If they can’t shock us, why should they bother?
Have we, after Wednesday, entered a new era? Must we get used to the idea that such attacks may become normal? And, if so, how should we respond?
What is your view? Let us know.
