Great news greeted Londoners this morning. The Central Line is reopening!
|
I'm kidding, of course: unless you happen to be one of the 80 volunteers preparing to participate in a simulated terrorist attack.
|
For the non-Metropoles among you, the Central Line is one of the London Underground's key commuter lines, which has remained resolutely and notoriously closed since a non-fatal derailment back in January. The closure has brought havoc to the capital. The schedule for getting the Central Line back in business closely mimics the shifting deadlines for war on Iraq; and we are constantly reminded that this procrastination is necessary, because safety must come first.
|
But on 23 March, an exercise will simulate 'the effects of a chemical attack on the Central Line'. Volunteers will act as passengers, while the beleaguered emergency services are put through their paces. Bank Station will, in fact, be closed for the day, to help avoid public hysteria. Never mind the inconvenience - because, in the event of one of home secretary David Blunkett's 'catastrophic incidents', safety must surely come first.
|
The plan for the 23 March terror experience was announced at the same time as news reports revealed the government's own contingency plans for the safety of their ministers. Should there be a major terrorist attack in London, the prime minister and other government personnel will be shipped out to alternative bases outside of the capital, where there will be nuclear bunkers and high security (but also good communications, apparently, so government representatives can talk to the people while cowering in their bunker. As one senior official said of Tony Blair: 'He will not be like Bush' - referring to the US Secret Service's decision on 11 September to put the president on Air Force One, so that he spent hours incommunicado in the air) (2).
|
Should there be a terrorist attack outside London, of course, the government will simply go downstairs to the nuclear bunker in Downing Street. Sorted. If contingency planning is anything to go by, Britain must surely be prepared by now.
|
Prepared for what, exactly? With all this talk of catastrophe and chemicals and smallpox vaccines and dirty bombs and nuclear bunkers, you could be forgiven for thinking that war against Iraq meant that Iraq was likely to attack Britain. Last I heard, Saddam was apparently destroying any missiles that travelled over 150km, and the flying dustbins he employed during the last Gulf War were in no position to collect air miles.
|
The apparent attempts to invoke the Blitz spirit of the Second World War, when there were air-raid shelters and gas masks and something called the Blitz, involving nightly bombing raids and many deaths, seems to miss the rather obvious difference between having a Blitz here in Britain and a Blix far away in Iraq.
|
Ah - but, the Whitehall sages will say. What we're looking at is the possibility of a terrorist attack - maybe even a catastrophic one - which is made all the more frightening because we don't know who might do it, why they might do it, how they might do it, and what the hell we're supposed to do about it. But why now? What's the point?
|
11 September happened at a time when America and Britain were engaged in nothing obviously warlike in Afghanistan or anywhere else; and while it's a drag to keep having to say it, the weapons used in that catastrophe were not anthrax, smallpox, radioactive materials or even bombs. They were aeroplanes and box-cutters - non-conventional weapons only in the sense that these are not generally considered weapons at all. No amount of contingency planning could have prepared the USA for these attacks, or made much difference to how New York and Washington dealt with them on the ground.
|
Lacking in any obvious rationale, the British terrorism-attack practice runs appear more like panicked PR than useful exercises. Like the high-profile decampment of the army to Heathrow airport the other week (which resulted, bizarrely, in the discovery of a man with a grenade at Gatwick), the UK government's anti-terrorism warnings and measures seem to ring increasingly hollow. They are motivated by the government's own insecurities about its ability to deal with a crisis, and a desire to use the possibility of a crisis to connect with the public. Trouble is, the public is cynical on both fronts.
|
It is reasonable to assume that, should there be a terrorist attack, the UK will be completely useless at dealing with it. But this has nothing to do with contingency planning, or available stocks of anthrax - it is about Britain's institutional inability to deal with any problem.
|
A perceptive editorial in The Times (London) summed it up. 'It was the events of one September week that showed that Britain was inadequately prepared to cope with a civil emergency', it states. 'These events, however, were not the ones that took place in New York in 2001. They took place closer to home and a year earlier.'
|
The paper is talking about the fuel protests of 2000, in which 'a few inconveniently parked lorries brought the country to a juddering halt within days'. A spontaneous protest against petrol prices by a motely crew of lorry drivers threw the government into paroxysms of doubt and disorganisation - showing that, when it came to rising to the occasion in the face of an unanticipated problem, the previously suave New Labour regime tended simply to lose it.
|
When an inch of snow can paralyse the entire transport infrastructure of the south-east; when a Tube derailment or a train crash can knock out the network for weeks; when a livestock disease like foot-and-mouth can bring the nation to its knees, is it any surprise that we greet the possibility of a really big problem like a catastrophic terrorist attack with a certain degree of fatalism? If we're waiting for the government to save us, then surely we're all going to die.
|
One of the key moments of 11 September 2001 was the contrast between the heroism of the New York firefighters and the collapse of the US state. For a few crucial hours, political leadership disappeared. Two years on in the UK, even the expectation that a comparable event could inspire political leadership has disappeared. It's not healthy, of course, that such high levels of cynicism exist about the government's ability to deal with a crisis. But the government's attempts to show willing in the abstract only deepen this cynicism further.
|
When the army was sent to Heathrow, the immediate reaction was to dismiss this as a PR stunt by the government. The fact that this reaction was so widespread indicates the depths of our disbelief. No wonder, really, when the home secretary talks about catastrophic attacks before telling us not to panic; when bogus terror alerts are issued and then retracted; when open warfare breaks out between Blunkett and health service officials about the availability of smallpox vaccines and the wisdom of using them. The government's often opportunistic attempts to demonstrate how it is taking a lead in times of terror is greeted with the assumption that it is just scaring us witless to support the war effort.
|
It's not like this has made the British public immune to the culture of fear. Rather, the obsession with personal vulnerability, and with every risk that may lie around the corner, leads to a deepening suspicion of official advice. If the public doesn't trust the government on the MMR vaccine, why should it trust whatever the government might say about the smallpox vaccine? If government ministers tell us that a potential terrorist threat could be catastrophic, why should we trust them to keep us safe?
|
In this sense, whether the government's motivations are cynical or sincere makes no difference to the way its advice is interpreted. No doubt the government thinks it is being responsible, in its attempts to plan, down to the last detail, where it might go during an attack so that it can reassure the nation and keep things under control. But by broadcasting all this to the nation's press, it just looks like self-aggrandisement. The message is, 'You will need us, and we will be there'. The response is, 'Sod off - and where are our bunkers and vaccinations?'. All this does nobody any favours.
|
Because as 11 September showed, in the event of a genuine 'catastrophic incident' political leadership is crucial. But if there was one lesson the UK government should have learned from this, leadership is something you do, not something you just talk about and plan for. If anything should actually happen, I hope Blair would rise to the occasion. But I rather suspect that he'd be somewhere in Spain or the Middle East, and we'd be listening to Blunkett telling us not to panic.
|
Read on:
spiked-issue: War on terror
(1) 'Dirty bomb' and gas attack plans tested on Tube, The Times (London), 4 March 2003
(2) 'Dirty bomb' and gas attack plans tested on Tube, The Times (London), 4 March 2003
(3) Be prepared, The Times (London), 4 March 2003
|
