London Is Fine.
Fearmongerers let me tell you — London is fine.
I was stuck out last night, spilt from the guts of a festival where London was tens of thousands of young people, inexplicably both sunburnt and rain-drenched, cheerfully elbowing each other in the head to the tune of ‘Lie, Cheat, Steal’. London was people with glitter streaked across their cheekbones trying to mud-ski across the wasted fields on pairs of crushed Tyskie cans.
London was the packs of people crowded at the closed tube stop, clustered into corner shops for beer and strawberry laces. London was the old bloke peering topless through the window.
London was the warmth of the Blind Beggar pub, once patrolled by the Kray twins, now ruled over by a cantankerous ginger tom. London was a game of three-on-three snooker, played terribly because it lasts longer that way, and London was a very precarious pint of beer.
London was the Raj Mahal sweet shop which will fill you to the eyes with sugar syrup at any hour god sends, which offers bulk-buy bargains for iftar.
London was a hundred keep safe messages glowing blue in your friend’s palm.
London was a man carrying an old dog-basket filled with back issues of ‘Take a Break’ Magazine.
London was waiting with your phone near dead for the tubes to open or something to happen.
London was the graceful quiet of the central mosque across the road, frocked with clothes shops and pancake houses.
London was a gin-soaked lock in at the toys Vauxhall tavern, where drag queens and queers and waifs offered their Like-A-Prayers to everyone on the other side of the bolted doors.
London was the stumbling pairs and threes of high-heeled revellers, clung to the edges of buildings like the road was trying to buck them from its back.
London was the 243 trundling past, its top deck windows whited with the steam-heat of three dozen bodies, faces ghosted up against the panes. They weren’t holding their breath — just thinking home now.
I feverishly refreshed TFL, the Met twitter page, the check-in function of Facebook — and everything told me go home.
Shivering against a lamppost, I thought — I’m already there.
London is my home — my adopted home. It’ll break your heart and nick your wallet soon as look at you, but it’s still home. This morning it’s seven lives poorer, and that fucking hurts — because, it’s home.
There’s a lot of grim shit in this city. You have to scrape it grey-black from the undersides of your fingernails when you get in the door every evening, if you can. Kids leave each other stabbed and bleeding in carparks. People in smart suits meet in the cool of hotel lobbies to bargain over bulk-sales of ammunitions to be shipped off elsewhere, so it doesn’t matter. People are left to freeze and starve on the pavements. People breath in scum and dust and petrol fumes every day. People fling themselves under trains and into the river. Walking back from the tube stop, I fist my keys wolverine-style through the gaps in between my knuckles — like most other women i know. Hijabis get their headscarfs ripped off. Black men are shot down by cops. Migrants are ghosted away in the middle of the night. There are swastikas on the insides of toilet doors. There’s a lot of grim shit in this city.
And it’s still home. That’s why you fight for it. It’s still home even when the pipes freeze over and there’s a strange rattling sound from , when there are weeds in the garden and your landlord is hassling you for rent. That’s why I refuse to be scared. Because if you’re scared, it isn’t home any more.
I’m still calling it home.
Terrorism is a slippery word. It adheres most easily to the bodies of people of colour. When mournfaced ministers traipse to the press podiums to talk combatting terrorism — they rarely means the violence perpetrated by the likes of Dylan Roof, Thomas Mair or Anders Breivik, who struck at the heart of what they considered a poisonous multiculturalism. In a media landscape crowded out by the Murdoch press and those willing to lazily peddle cabinet press releases, it’s hard to collectively decide on working definition of terrorism that avoids being a) unhelpfully vague or b) kowtowing to racist myth-makers by automatically exculpating white folk from suspicion. (A recent media quest to dredge up spurious links between the Labour Party and IRA attackers has accidentally admitted the fact that white folk are perfectly capable of terrorism as well. No one claimed the Daily Mail was out to make sense.) But if we can get a grip on it at all — it’s perhaps helpfully understood something that uses violence to carve out a space of fear. A space where you hold your breath every time the tube rattles. A space where you don’t trust the person on the bus next to you. A space where you have a word in the ear of an officer because that young man with the dark beard is acting a little funny. With people so breathlessly yammering that last night’s brutality were muslim attacks on western freedom, it’s perhaps easy to think that folks who pray to the same god at the attackers are somehow exempted from this space of fear.
It that were the case, then we could assume that terrorism, despite its persistence as the first resort in a patchwork campaign of would-be guerrilla warfare, is spectacularly inefficient. But ISIS are not stupid. Murderous, yes — evil, certainly. But not stupid.
The space of fear is not the exclusive preserve of white Londoners so hasty to claim a muslim conspiracy of silence, to decry the failings of multiculturalism and ‘PC culture’ turned murderously lax. Its priority members are in fact muslims and people of colour. It’s worth remembering at times like these that throughout the world, the vast majority of victims of terrorist attacks are themselves muslims. Just the other day, a triple-suicide bombing in Kabul claimed the lives of twelve people. But crucially, these are the folk who bear the brunt of a relentless white-lash against the apparent source of the threat. Theresa May was quick to underline the importance of a strong border policy and dystopian surveillance powers — policies she’s being reliably rolling out ever since her tenure as home secretary. Fascists are crawling out of their gutters, using these incidents as clarion call to action to ‘defend’ white nationhood from a spectral muslim menace — unleashing a poisonous slew of hate crimes on anyone, as the BBC’s Nick Robinson once notoriously gaffed, “of muslim appearance”. The propagandising of reactionary theocrats often cleave neatly to those of white nationalists and would-be-autocrats.
That’s what makes terrorism such an effective tactic — if we let it. The propagandists of ISIS and organisations like it trade on tales of the west’s endemic and immovable hatred for all things muslim, for its willingness to stamp out muslim life wherever it finds it. What better way to spin the tale than to convince the gullible racists of western nations to attack their neighbours, to call them cockroaches and call in the police and border agents. What better way to sharpen young men’s anger and disaffection than by ensuring that their own government treats them as a cancer to be cut out of the body politic — or by ensuring that disastrous, abortive foreign incursions continue apace. They are always in need of new recruits.
That’s what makes it such a miraculously efficient tactic — if we let it. Their project of systematically alienating muslims to prop up their own power-grab has been seamlessly outsourced. It’s been neatly parcelled off to everyone from your average mouth-breathing street fascist, to border-policing neocons in the cabinet, to your auntie who’s the sweetest woman in the world if you tune out her her ‘legitimate concerns’ about her muslim neighbours. When it works, these sporadic acts of terrorism make the everyday violence it takes to sustain a propaganda campaign — well, somebody else’s problem.
This is why London is fine. Because it has to be. Because this tactic only works if we let it. If we let it turn us against one another. It only works if we allow it to become a foil to racists and reactionaries. Because to say ‘London is fine’ is not simply a statement. It’s a promise to keep each other safe — to stand up to islamophobes in our home streets and in our halls of power just the same. To keep London a home for everyone.
So, say it again…
London is ours. London is fine.
