Our sympathy is with the people of London and London’s many international visitors, especially with the relatives of those who died in the terror attack on parliament on Wednesday. The attack seems to have been a solo effort designed to create as much mayhem as possible, and it is important to note that it failed in achieving that wider purpose.
The idea behind a terror attack is not just to kill and maim, but to create panic and a sense of public disorder that shatters the self-confidence of the assaulted city or nation. This has not happened in London as the people have united behind their leadership, and stand ready to insist that such a tragedy cannot derail a whole society. London Mayor Sadiq Khan caught the mood of the moment when he said that “My message to those that want to harm us and destroy our way of life is: You won’t succeed; you won’t divide us; we won’t be cowed by terrorists.”
The attacker seems to have been a British citizen and was not an immigrant or foreign terrorist, although the police are correctly refusing to discuss this as they carry out their investigations. Prime Minister Theresa May has said there was a “single attacker”, and the police has said that they think they know who he is, and are “working to look at associates”.
They have also unusually asked for restraint from investigative journalists in working out who he was so that reporters do not stumble over some important aspects of the active investigations. Nonetheless, the police have said that the working assumption is that the attacker was “inspired by international terrorism” and “Islamist-related terrorism”.
The attack follows a theme of recent terrorist acts in Europe of using very simple techniques. In this case, the attacker drove a car along a crowded pavement and attacked parliament with a knife, to great and destructive effect.
But it is very different from a terror attack that means a large and complex set of bombs, which might require months of planning.
The fact is that the intelligence agencies have got a lot better at identifying those plots and disrupting them, so the so-called lone-wolf attack creating simple but horrifying destruction may be deeply worrying, but it is also a mark of the success of the forces of law and order and intelligence agencies in thwarting lethal bomb attacks.
