Leo Marsh

An aspect of the bombings is making me uncomfortable in a moral sense. It’s this.

You’ll have seen that the police are pushing for extended powers, not least of whichis their wish to extend their rights to detention without trial to three months, when they already have 21 days.

What I find awkward about this is the company I find myself obliged to keep. I’m not keen on the incitement to hatred laws. I don’t like detention without trial. I’m not keen on the removal of right to trial by jury in some cases. I deplore the removal of double indemnity, and of the right to silence. All these have been retrograde steps, in my view.

But what I dislike almost as much is that I find lunatic right-wingers such as Peter Hitchens on the same side as me. I wish they’d go away.

The recent events in London are provoking a wide range of reactions. I heard ‘Any Questions?’ on Radio 4 this week. It featured people who thought that if the police need to detain suspects for up to three months without charge, they should be allowed to do so. If they didn’t need more than the 21 days they have currently – 21 days, mind – they wouldn’t ask for it, would they, the argument ran. They know what they’re doing.

Well, the mistaken suspect who was shot and killed gives one cause to doubt. It seems to me that he panicked, and the police did, too. Eight shots, seven of them to the head, does not sound to me like the response of people calm and in control.

But as I say, the reactions are wide-ranging. At one end, the Sunday Express says the accidental shooting was all the terrorists’ fault. Also, Sir John Stevens, former head of Scotland Yard, says his heart goes out to the police gunman.

Someone put this on the BBC message board: ‘If a guy who fits the profile of a terrorist is running through a subway station and does not obey orders to stop then lethal force is completely justifiable.’ A quite astonishing comment.

But in Pakistan, a well-educated family interviewed for Radio 4 at the weekend said that Britain is reaping what it sowed by invading Iraq. “The public reaction in Britain is disproportionate,” the wife of the family also said. “There were only 50 deaths.” “ONLY 50 deaths?” asked the incredulous interviewer. “There were 56.” “50, 56,” the woman said. “It is not a big number. Not when compared to the numbers of people being killed in Iraq every day.”

“The people killed in the Middle East are Moslems,” her husband said. “Moslem deaths are not as significant as those of non-Moslems. Moslem victims don’t have names.”

The old man of the family, a retired colonel, said that Ken Livingstone was the only western commentator he’d heard who pointed out that the West was reaping what it sowed in another sense: in the sense that in the 80s, it recruited Osama bin Laden and people like him, trained him and gave him weapons, so that he could provide guerrilla support in the fight against the Soviets in Afghanistan. The West should not be surprised, he said, that guerrillas such as these should turn on them.

This family has a point, of course. In fact, several well-made points. But, such is the mood in Britain right now, and such is the understandable horror at these events, that few people will regard them as anything other than cynical.

I think that’s a shame. I think it’s useful to see things from different perspectives. So, wherever you’re reading this, and especially if you’re abroad, I’d be interested to hear what local opinions are as to the events here in London.

The bombing in London this week was dreadful - not least, to my mind, because it was so cheap and nasty.

There seems to have been a downward scale in all this. 9/11 was the grand gesture, commandeering 747s and crashing them into landmark buildings. Bali was a single bomb on a huge scale, detonated in the back of a parked truck. Madrid was a series of smaller bombs, detonated on trains remotely by mobile phone.

And now, in London, we have - what? Small bombs on tube trains, and one on the top deck of a bus. It seems cheap and mean-spirited to me.

I could be angry, and many people are. I spent an hour arguing with a slightly drunk man about it on the train home last night. But I'm not so much angry as sad - sad that people can drift into a state where they no longer see members of the public, strangers, as other people, but as an abstract representation of everything they hate. How else could they go through with it, if they did not anaesthetise themselves in this way?

The best expression I can recall for the process describes Pharaoh's unwillingness to let the people of Israel go. He 'hardened his heart against them', it says.

That's just it, isn't it? These people have hardened their hearts. God forbid that we should do the same.

The Queen promises to invite everyone round for tea, and the IOC ditches Paris and chooses London for the 2012 Olympics.

Bah.

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