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Returning home to a wounded Britain

By DAVID ADAMS
Published July 24, 2005

MIAMI - Arriving back in Britain earlier this month on vacation, I was struck by a tremendous climate of expectation.

The country was swept up in the issues of global warming and ending poverty in Africa in advance of the G-8 summit of wealthy nations in Scotland. Hyde Park in central London was being prepared for the massive Live 8 concert, including the much-anticipated reunion of Pink Floyd, rock heroes of my youth.

Aging rock stars Bob Geldof and Bono appeared to be running national policy. Prime Minister Tony Blair was forced to take a back seat. It looked as though George Bush would be in for a quite a reception when he arrived for the G-8.

It was all quite refreshing. It reminded me of the heady days of the Live Aid concert 20 years earlier, which had captivated me as a young man growing up in the U.K.

There was also the excitement over London's bid for the 2012 Olympics, due to be announced in Singapore on the eve of the G-8. And as the British Lions rugby team was taking on the mighty New Zealand All Blacks, Australia and England were duking it out on the cricket field.

Wow, I thought. What a great time to be back home.

My main purpose in making the trip was not to cover any of these events as a journalist (though in hindsight I rather wished I had thought of it). Instead, mine was a more somber, personal visit.

I had agreed with my twin brother to accompany our mother to Sedbergh, a small town in the north of England, to spread the ashes of my recently deceased father on a remote hilltop.

Sending him off in this way was an idea we had come up with soon after his death. He loved The Calf, which rises over Sedbergh, nestled in the Cumbrian hills.

It was a moving moment, watching his ashes being carried off in the wind. I found myself thinking I was saying goodbye not just to a father. His death in February, at the age of 84, marked the passing of a generation for me.

My father had gone to an old-fashioned boarding school in Sedbergh. The school and its pastoral setting on the edge of the picturesque Lake District made a lasting impression on him. Education at Sedbergh consisted of cold baths before breakfast - a ritual my father kept up into his 70s - cross-country runs and roaming the fells for peregrine falcon nests.

A year after he left Sedbergh, World War II broke out. My father was lucky to survive the war, shot down on his first flight as a Wellington bomber pilot. He spent the next four years as a POW in Germany.

Not that many of his generation are still alive. The 60th anniversary this month of "Victory in Europe" was heralded as the last big celebration in the lifetime of those who fought.

Britain is a very different country today from the one my father grew up in. The Sedbergh school now offers pupils hot water. Due to liability issues, boys are no longer allowed on the fells except under staff supervision.

Soon after we came down off The Calf, we would learn, in dramatic fashion, just how different Britain has become.

Only 50 miles away from Sedbergh, in the city of Leeds, four young Muslims were being prepared as human bombs.

We drove back to London on Monday morning. Four days later, the the suicide bombers also headed to the capital.

Before accompanying my mother back to her home in Devon in southwest England, I had just enough time on Tuesday to take my 8-year-old son to see the dinosaurs at the Natural History Museum. To get there, we treated him to a ride on a bright red London double-decker bus.

From Devon, we watched the Wednesday celebrations as London erupted in joy after being chosen to host the 2012 Olympics.

When news came Thursday morning of explosions in London, the mood quickly changed. I tried to hide from my son the pictures of the red bus with its roof blown off and the blood splattered across the facade of the British Medical Association offices.

We were due to travel back to London the next day by train, before flying on to Madrid for the second half of our vacation. We were assured that transport services would be running, although at reduced levels. Londoners were determined to show the terrorists their stiff upper lip.

By choosing mostly underground targets, the terrorists may not have fully succeeded in their objective to create terror. Most of their dastardly work was hidden from view. But last Thursday's attempt to repeat the attacks, which this time miraculously failed to cause casualties, has certainly raised Londoners' fear to a new level.

Our trip back to London was uneventful, except that my wife left her suitcase unattended in a newspaper kiosk at the railway station. Staff quickly secured it in the station manager's office. But we were able to retrieve it without any fuss.

There were a few signs of extra security in central London the next morning as we drove to the airport. Heathrow was busy but calm. Airport security staff, many of whom are Hindu and Muslim immigrants, were friendly and efficient.

But the biggest shock of all was yet to come. It soon emerged that the London bombers were home-grown terrorists, second-generation sons of immigrants.

Britain today is a multiracial, multicultural society. It's something we've become rather proud of, albeit some more reluctantly than others.

My father, a journalist who spent much of his life working in the Arab world, embraced multiculturalism. He was also among the earliest to warn that the West's misguided policies in the Middle East would have a backlash. But I don't think he ever imagined that the new threat would come from within our own Muslim communities.

The London attacks raise troubling questions about Muslim integration in Britain. Britain's first Muslim nobleman, Lord Nazir Ahmed of Rotherham, who grew up frying fish and chips for a living, wrote an article in part blaming Asian parents who came to the United Kingdom but never embraced British culture, thinking one day they would return home.

Instead, they stayed. But in families that clung to a foreign culture, children grew up alienated from mainstream British society. "They were condemned to live their lives in the grip of an identity crisis - neither Indian, Pakistani, Bangladeshi, nor properly British," wrote Lord Ahmed.

"Over the past decade, a new breed of politically motivated ideologues, mainly from the Middle East, recognized these disenfranchised people as a fertile recruiting ground," he wrote. "They urged them to compare their suffering with that of Muslims in Palestine, Chechnya, Iraq and the Balkans, and to rise up against what they describe as "infidels.' "

Britain is unlikely to undergo major changes in response to this month's attacks. Yes, the British government's military role in Iraq is under attack in some quarters, especially after the respected Chatham House think tank issued a report this month stating that British involvement there had exacerbated the terrorist threat to the nation.

New laws are being discussed to require Muslim mosques and education centers to crack down on extremists and to outlaw the incitement of terrorist acts and the training of terrorists. There is revived discussion of an existing proposal to introduce a national identity document.

British intelligence services will also be looking at their own flaws, especially after the terrorist threat level was reduced shortly before the bombing.

But no one is so far talking about a complete overhaul of security policy, such as the U.S. creation of the Department of Homeland Security.

The British public has lived with the threat of terrorism for many years, thanks to the IRA. When it comes to public transport, people understand that only so much can be done to protect lives.

There are 3-million journeys every day on the Tube, as the London Underground is known, and 275 stations to protect. Buses in the city make another 4.5-million trips each day.

Trains and buses are already fitted with closed-circuit TV cameras. Body-scanning machines are being considered for random checks on the Underground, but that's as far as it goes.

There is a general sense that we need to be more vigilant as a society, especially after Thursday's new scare. But there is also a concern that this could lead to a rise in racial mistrust. Reported incidents of Islamophobia have risen tenfold since July 7.

So, unlike my father's generation, which had to defend the country from foreign invasion, Britain today is looking at a threat from within. Like the Nazis, today's enemy also espouses an evil and twisted ideology. But it's not something that can be defeated with conventional warfare.

How we tackle the problem is today's great debate. When it's my son's turn to dispose of my ashes, I hope he can look back on July 7 as a date long buried in the past. My father's generation met the challenge of World War II. Now our generation faces its test.

David Adams is the Times Latin America correspondent.

[Last modified July 22, 2005, 18:08:02]