One year on, and what have we done?
If ever proof was needed that The Government Is Not Our Friend, then the treatment of the survivors and the families of the victims of the July 7 bombings is surely it.
Today being the first anniversary of the bombings it’s worth looking back on the treatment of the people who simply had the misfortune to board the wrong tube trains or bus last summer. Those fortunate enough to emerge alive, many with terrible injuries, both physical and psychological, were met with official incompetence, ignorance, suggestions of culpability in future attacks and, on one memorable occasion, outright hostility.
The testimonies of some of the survivors to the London Assembly’s 7 July Review Committee are a good place to start. As many as 6,000 people who walked away from the scenes of the bombings may have been ’severely psychologically affected’ but most are not known to the authorities. In the absence of formal assistance they’ve had to form their own support groups. Three hundred of those injured in the bombings are still waiting for their much needed (and let’s face it, paltry) compensation to be agreed.
Danny Biddle who sustained many injuries, had to decide which were the three most severe as that’s all the compensation system will consider. ‘It’s like going through an Argos catalogue, picking the most expensive things,’ he said. Both of his legs, an eye and his spleen added up to just £118,332. According to the Criminal Injuries Compensation Authority system, the loss of an eye is worth £27,000. They then take 70 per cent off that if it’s your second worst injury. Danny put the loss of his legs first. So that was £110,000 for his legs, £8,000 for his eye and £332 for his spleen. He’s still waiting for the money for his spleen. Dewhursts the butchers would have shown more sensitivity.
Smaller things also stand out, adding to the sickening feeling that the survivors were overlooked, forgotten or sidelined while the Government got on with creating headline-catching initiatives to appease the media (and yet of the 64 recommendations made by the task force put together last summer to tackle Islamic extremism, only one has been given the go ahead by the Government). VIPs were invited to the Government-organised memorial service at St Paul’s but not, until they complained, the survivors. One Australian survivor was visited in St Thomas’ Hospital, with its view of Westminster, by the Australian Prime Minister but nobody from the British government. She’s still waiting to be contacted by British government officials. ‘We have had more contact from Australian MPs than we have had from British ones… The answer is: if you are going to be in an emergency, make sure you are not British,’ said her partner.
And then there were the inevitable insults to add to the injuries. The Attorney General, Lord Goldsmith refuses a public inquiry on the grounds of how much it might cost (The Bloody Sunday inquiry, for example, is spiralling its way to the £400 million mark). This from a government happy to throw three quarters of a billion quid at the Millennium Dome, throw Kilimanjaros of cash at ID cards and shoddy computer systems, allow tax avoidance to cost the nation between 25 and 85 billion pounds every year, fork out £25 billion on redundant nuclear weapons and £2 million a year on an even more redundant Deputy Prime Minister. By way of twisted coincidence, Gordon Brown announced this week that there will be no cap on military spending.
At a meeting with some of the survivors who are requesting a public inquiry into the bombing, two-fisted Home Secretary John Reid sensitively asked them how they would feel explaining to the families of future bomb victims how a public inquiry had diverted attention and resources away from investigations. One survivor’s father approaching the then Home Secretary Charles Clarke at a meeting to ask why there was to be no public inquiry was told, ‘Get away from me, I will not be insulted by you, this is an insult’. (In another display of empathy, while dismissing survivors’ calls for additional compensation, he also compared being blown up on a tube to being ’stabbed outside a pub’.)
To make matters worse, in the absence of any official support, some survivors have had to, by themselves, fend off voracious conspiracy theorists and journalists. Survivor Rachel North has become a focus, via her blog, of much media attention. She has had to deal with a stalker and a legion of conspiracy theorists who simply refuse to take the facts at face value. Some of them have even imaginatively accused her of being a team of MI5 disinformation agents. (For the record, we should note that we met Ms North recently. We can vouch that she is definitely just one person, charming, urbane and, most importantly, free with her fags. It’s not breaking any confidences to note that she works in advertising which possibly makes her the Devil but we won’t hold that against her here.)
On the question of a public inquiry, the government’s refusal to hold one gives tacit approval to the investigation into the bombings being conducted by gossip. The inquiry into the intelligence failures in the run up to the bombings, along with their causes and ramifications, have been left to the media via anonymous police and MI5 briefings and leaks (although John Reid is now looking to stop all that with amendments to the Official Secrets Act removing the defence of leaks being in the public interest - the problems won’t go away, we just won’t hear about them any more). This serves to stoke even more resentment and paranoia while eroding further the Government’s vestigial reputation as a straight dealer and fuelling the not unreasonable suspicion that it has something to hide. And that’s before we even arrive at the vital conclusion that getting to the heart of this atrocity might just prevent another one. The survivors don’t want glory or publicity; it’s a matter of sparing others what they themselves have been through in the last year.
The conclusion we should take from this is a straightforward one. Maybe too straightforward for these cynical times. Helping the victims’ families and the survivors, and preventing future atrocities, is about simple compassion, reaching out to those in pain. (There are those who disagree. ‘I hate all that shit,’ said one commenter, worried about where his taxes are going, on The Guardian’s Comment is Free blog.) Put plainly though, it’s about who we are and who we want to be. There but for the grace of God and all that.
But it’s also about, and this is where Blair should get on board, it being his catchphrase, Sending A Message. Paint it in letters a hundred feet high. Honour the dead and comfort the living - demonstrate in all the ways we can that we’re better, higher, more civilised beings than the creatures who took their rucksacks to London on July 7 2005 and those who might choose to follow them.
(First published in this week’s The Friday Thing.
Posted on July 7th, 2006 at 5:23 pm
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Two years ago I left the UK. I signed up to do volunteer work with VSO and was lucky enough to end up in Vietnam.
In short I was no longer proud to be British. I wanted out. Between the rise in racism fuelled by the media and the on-going war with Iraq I had become ashamed of my country.
Now, tonight I have watched on BBC World the unfolding of the one year anniversary of the London terrorist attack.
Can you answer me this? If this deserves a national two minute silence and what appears to be a whole raft of commemorative events and memorials, where has this concept been before?
Where were the minutes silence one year on from the sinking of the Herald of Free Enterprise when 197 people died. Outside of football grounds I don’t recall many minute’s silence for the death of 95 Liverpool fans in the Hillsbrough tragedy.
How about the Ladbroke Grove train crash when 31 people were killed? No national minute’s silence there either.
I guess that is because they were as a result of civil negligence, bad policing and the mismanagement and wrecking of our train systems. Not as a result of the “war on terror”.
This is not a rememberence, it is propaganda pure and simple. It’s over the top. When did we become so Americanised in our grief? When did we start to believe that a relatively small number of our citizens are so much more important than literally tens of thousands of another country’s.
To put in it some kind of perspective - an average of 36 Iraqis are dying violent deaths - PER DAY as a result of the UK/UK invasion and its aftermath.
I have no time for fundamentalists of any description but people in Iraq watching the events unfold in London must be sickened. The whole country comes to a halt for, in the grand scheme of things, a handful of lives.
The London terrorist attack was horrific and shouldn’t be forgotten. But neither should the rest of the many tens of thousands of innocent people who have lost their lives as a result of the Iraq invasion. And that includes Iraqis.
This is American ill-advised sentamentality creeping into British culture, media and government. It is sickening.
I don’t want to come home to this. I don’t want to be British.
On the two minute silence point - Britain has them at the drop of a hat nowadays. I expect we’ll have one when Harry Potter goes. One day Britain will grind to a complete halt.
I seem to remember George Best, a wife-beating drunk, got one minute. If that doesn’t devalue the whole concept I’m not sure what does.
I didn’t observe today’s. I tried to pay my respects (for what they’re worth) by writing this post.
Thanks Justin.
You can ponce fags any time.
At the silence, I and quite a few others I was with ( from the bombed Piccadilly train) thought of the victims of all bombs, everywhere, as that seemed an appropriate thing to do. And the sight of so many out on the streets was appreciated by all the people I was with.
Someone said yesterday to me ‘ There’s so much coverage, and seems like everyone is thinking about one day last year. It helps, actually, because pretty much every day of my last year has been like what is on News 24 now. Bombs bombs bombs. Today, it feels like we’re all on the same page, everyone is inside my head thinking about what I have been thinking about for 365 days and I now feel like I can let go of it, because everyone has walked a little with me today. It makes it easier to move on’
Having survived years of post 9/11 memorials, where the legitimate emotions surrounding that day were hijacked to fuel a political agenda, I couldn’t help but feel extremely cynical about the 7/7 memorial. I wasn’t sure whether to be annoyed that Blair couldn’t be bothered to visit Kings Cross, or glad that he didn’t - possibly turning a tragedy into a Bush-style stump speach.
Sad but not surprised to learn that behind all of the public weeping, in private its just business as usual at number 10. Just glad that if another bomb goes off, my own passport isn’t British.
I wasn’t happy about my comment about silences - I should have been a lot clearer. So I’ll take the opportunity here.
For you Rachel, and all the other people caught up in the bombings, I can entirely see the point of the silence - the oasis of peace in what must have been a hellish day.
For those not involved, while I’m very, very glad that you draw comfort from it, I feel very much that such things are part of an emotional incontinence that we suffer from in this country - the Diana Effect. It seems to me that the country will stand still for anything (see George Best) and that devalues occasions, like yesterday, when proper respect and reflection is warranted.
It’s also a form of parasitism - feeding on, wanting to be part of, wanting a piece of, somebody else’s grief. Like wanting to be at a party to which one hasn’t been invited. You’ve seen that yourself in the past year from the number of foul hangers-on you’ve unwittingly attracted.
It’s a fire-and-forget gesture - cheap dues paid, go back to your lives without a backward glance - and there are more tangible ways of showing respect. If only, for example, all the people who stood still for two minutes yesterday had taken a similar amount of time to sign the petition or email their MP. John Reid would be announcing the inquiry this morning.
It’s the same with the flowers. I can appreciate how laying flowers would be part of yesterday’s healing, leave-taking ritual for you, Rachel. But I look at the seas of flowers left by the public (the Diana Effect again) and think of the money spent and Danny Biddle still waiting for the pathetic £332 for his spleen.
To me it’s money down the drain and the sour misanthropist in me suggests it’s indicative if an emotional retardation - that anonymous donations don’t allow some people to display their feelings in a way satisfactory to their egos. I’m not the most practical person and I’m also prone to sentimentality, I just thought there were better ways of paying respects.
A message should have gone out - No flowers by request, all donations to the London Bombings Relief Charitable Fund (which, incidentally, is being bloody closed).
Yeah, I wish more people had actually done something constructive, like ask for an inquiry. I managed to subvert every single piece of media I was asked to do by getting that message across, aided by a dozen other survivors. We made it clear: no interview untless you let us talk about this. And if they said ‘ but we just want your personal story - did you, you knmow, *step over any severed limbs?* we just refused to talk to them until they had apologised, or agreed that we could talk about public inquiries.
It worked: I don’t think you could have missed the message on the day. We all said it, again and again and agin. Live, in pre-records, in interviews, in articles we wrote.
I called the editor of the Mirror and he is running a full campaign for one. It might sound scarily-Campbellesque, but talking via the media is the only way to make them listen. Hey, the terrorists made the mistake of bombing a media strategist.
If I have to put up with conspiraloons, death threats, armchair ghouls and stupid fricking questions from idiots with no idea how to conduct interviews, then whatever. If I get called a celebrity victim, a bitch journo whore who stands on the shoulders of the dead, then whatever, because it’s not true and what I’m doing is something I beleive in.
If I have to hijack the mawkishness, surf the horror, seem to sell my soul to get the message across, then I will. Because I don’t think there is any hope of unpicking the mess we’re in without forcing the issues, difficult as it may be. If one life is saved and one injured person gets treated better next time, it’s worth it, and I have never ever felt alone. I’ve always had real support at my side.
And for that, I’m more grateful than any number of silences or any number of bunches of flowers could make me feel.
Very well done, and very well said.