Bolting the Door Too Late
by Adrian Ash
Yeah, we’re all fine. But the tannoy says we have to stay inside the building. Don’t breathe too deep, eh?
No buses in Zone 1, no Tube, and all mainline stations evacuated. Phone lines intermittent. Word is, the mobile phone network’s just been shut down by the authorities.
Twenty dead at Aldgate in the City says the radio. Six explosions in total. Parliament meeting to discuss…what exactly? Initial news from London Underground and the police said the four Tube blasts caused by a power surge. Then news came in of a bus being ripped in two. At least one dead at Russell Square.
Did anyone walk away from this?
FTSE down 1.8% on news, gilts up strongly, London Clearing House evacuated, so too a quarter-mile zone around Liverpool Street station. Guess we’re all walking home tonight. Quickly.
Gotta wonder whether it would have been Paris if not London this morning. But then, the British had it coming, no matter than 2 million people marched through London in March 2003 to say they weren’t willing to be part of any coalition in the desert.
And the G8…? Kinda knocks debt relief and climate change off the agenda. Certainly takes them out of the headlines. Might give a fillip to oil prices though.
Am writing up Niall Ferguson’s “1914” thesis – you know, that this ain’t the ’70s like the BIS claims…nor the ’30s like Gary Shilling believes. It matches the calm before the firestorm triggered in Sarajevo, esp. the lack of any risk priced into financial assets.
The Islamo-Bolsheviks and their fizzing anarchists bombs are with us – on the bus, riding the Tube, in university lecture halls, behind the cashdesk in the local grocery store.
How can they be stopped? They can’t. Will they make people living in London more anxious and afraid? Of course.
But haven’t we been here before? Oh yes…back in the ’70s with the IRA.
What’s different is the planning – the Provo’s rarely co-ordinated more than one blast at a time. Also the frequency – New York, Madrid, now London. Best part of two years between each. The IRA took three decades to kill 3,000 odd. But the scale aimed at is also greater.
Bin Laden managed that in one morning on 9/11.
Timeline of today’s events below. Well planned, nicely executed. Gotta hand it to the killers. They know how to create confusion, meddling with everyday freedoms and business for weeks or maybe months to come as the authorities try to bolt the door too late:
http://www.sky.com/skynews/article/0,,30000-13382111,00.html
But most worrying for the rich, capitalist, degenerate West will be the reaction of the British State. ID cards, electronic tagging of automobiles and the suspension of habeas corpus were already being debated in Westminster and planned in Whitehall long before this morning.
If you think we’re fighting to defend freedom, beware the fifth columnists. They’re not out on the street, speaking Arabic behind cupped hands. They’re going to stand up in the Houses of Parliament tomorrow and state in a loud, clear voice, that the only way to defend my civil liberties is to remove them.
Your London correspondent…out.
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