Ed West Ed West

Multiculturalism is Europe’s new faith

Never mind the terrorists, chaps, London will just keep calm and carry on. We’ll put the kettle on or defy them by going out and getting pissed, because life will just continue as normal. That’s the fitting response to terrorism, and it won’t affect our lives.

Except it will. It will affect your life when you’re queuing endlessly to be searched by security in every public building. When you pass by bollards and barriers put in place to stop mass vehicular homicide. The nervousness you’ll feel whenever you’re on the Tube or when your child gets on public transport in the morning. As the attacks increase, you’ll hear more and more anecdotal stories about acquaintances or Facebook friends or even actual pals caught up in these events. (The wife and seven-year-old daughter of a good friend of mine were in the carriage at Parsons Green, and caught up in the crush.) And they will increase – there is very little chance of this problem going away.

To counter this we’re presented with these strange arguments that Britain endured (for now) worse terrorism in the 1970s and much worse during the Blitz, and still survived. Around 40,000 people died in the Blitz – so that’s not exactly a comparison I would like to make with my own future – while the 1970s were, by any conceivable 21st-century measure, awful.

It’s the same argument people make about crime: why are people so worried, when we have less crime than in the 1990s? But we have far more crime than in the 1950s. If this sort of decline had taken place in an area like child poverty or maternal mortality, such comparisons would hardly be taken seriously. Imagine if cancer survival rates were now worse than 40 years ago: would anyone be arguing ‘lol they were much worse in Victorian times, chill out’?

We’re always told these things won’t divide us, when in fact they clearly do; not just between Muslims and the majority, but between white liberals and white conservatives.

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