When the first news from the attack in Westminster began filtering through I, along with many others, felt that familiar knot in the stomach — the kind one feels when braced for a predictable battle to separate fact from hysteria, plead for a sense of proportionality and entreat the hurt and the angry not to generalise.
Despite being poised for the response, something felt different this time. Seemingly within minutes, former English Defence League leader Tommy Robinson was at the scene stirring hate while the shock was fresh. Nigel Farage was on the radio a few hours later, spewing predictable bile. Katie Hopkins published her usual MailOnline column, its tone sharpened to meet the high-octane moment, and was hosted on Fox News. Twitter abuse flooded towards Sadiq Khan, unleashed by Donald Trump Jr, who criticised London’s mayor hours after the attack for a perfectly reasonable and responsible claim he made six months ago that terrorist incidents were now part of the experience of living in a large city. We can only assume he singled out Khan because he was Muslim. All this happened in less than 24 hours after the attack.
This time, the right wing was literally waiting in the wings, almost grateful that the imaginary fears it had been trying to provoke had become real ones. There was no respect for the dead, dying and grieving, there was just an opportunity. In a way, you can roughly trace the growth of the hate industry along the lines of the reaction to the three terror attacks in London since 2005. I remember after 7/7, van drivers hurling abuse at random people on Edgware Road, London’s main Arab street, but not seeing or hearing that hatred promoted by politicians or the media. By the time the soldier Lee Rigby was murdered, in 2013, things were already changing as a cohort of professional terror-response agitators hesitantly ventured on to the scene.
On Wednesday, they were fully arrived. The so-called Overton window — the mainstream range of ideas considered politically or socially acceptable — has shifted so much to the Right that we are now subjected to the disgraced Tommy Robinson’s views on the attack in mainstream news organisations. This burgeoning industry is not because our awareness or possession of the facts has improved when it comes to such attacks, or our knowledge as to what motivates them or how they can be prevented. If anything, we are more ignorant than ever. It is because over the past few years an infrastructure of hate promotion has been established and incorporated within the mainstream. Radio shows on national stations, columns in popular newspapers, networks and relationships in the media that can get you on TV from your living room within minutes.
As politicians who had been crawling on the floors of Westminster and witnessed a police officer who protected them perish appealed for calm, an entire industry was ramping up to take over the airwaves and foment the opposite. And yet, and yet. Somehow, it didn’t seem to take. Even at a time when people are most vulnerable to reactionary tendencies, all the right-wing hate felt disembodied. There is something about London, not the usual “Keep calm and carry on” spirit but the expansive, shock-absorbent soil of it, a rich texture that rejects simplistic incendiary rhetoric. It isn’t just because London is a diverse or a resilient city, it’s because it is a complicated one. When I first moved to London as a broke student 15 years ago, I was struck by how familiar a city it was to someone with no networks or friends.
All the layers that the place has accumulated over the years, all its history, its small tolerances and cheek-by-jowl living and commuting have made it at once both reserved and welcoming. There is so little space, but as anyone who has ever taken a tube at rush hour knows, there is always more to be created if you just shuffle down the carriage and press into your fellow traveller’s face without making eye contact.
What one has in London is this — not a sentient defiance, but a composite of millions of individuals making way and turning the other cheek. This is not to claim that London is immune to hate or has not, particularly since the Brexit vote, displayed moments of xenophobia or intolerance. So much venom has been poured into its ears on a daily basis, provoking and normalising such behaviour, but that feels as alien to London as the attack on Wednesday itself. You can try, whether it is via hate speech or terror, and that may sway a national mood or fan the flames of conflict on another level, but not in London. Hate resonates when complications are flattened. It thrives in simplicity, it resonates in hollow spaces, it echoes off a flat surface.
London is none of those things. “One man can shut down a city,” claimed Walid Phares on Fox News. It wasn’t an assertion of fact, it was an expression of hope on the part of Phares and all the other agitators on Britain’s
airwaves. I am afraid London is going to disappoint them.
— Guardian News & Media Ltd
Nesrine Malik is a Sudanese writer and commentator who lives in London. She previously worked in the financial sector.
