Would I demonstrate grace under pressure if I found myself in the midst of a terrorist attack? I like to hope for the best, even while suspecting that a cowardly vacuum gapes where a heart of oak should pound.
As a journalist, I have reported from the scenes of several terror attacks. In Nice and Paris, I noted the speed of normality’s return. On the beaches of Sousse, I marvelled at holidaymakers who took to their sunbeds in defiance of the horror. In Nairobi, where gunmen had picked off shoppers at the Westgate Mall, I heeded the advice of experts and planned escape routes in enclosed spaces.
As the terrorists have grown more ruthless, so the advice to those left to their untender mercies has grown more realistic. Sheepish compliance is no longer an option when those wielding weapons have shown a nihilistic determination not to negotiate. Our government now says we should run and hide because putting hands in the air only invites a bullet.
But are we still too supine? I think back to the assault on Glasgow airport, where I reported from in 2007. John Smeaton, a baggage handler, took on the terrorists. He was later awarded the Queen’s Gallantry Medal. On the Thalys train, which I sometimes took when living in Brussels, a gunman sought to rampage through the carriages in 2015 until passengers intervened. The “have-a-go heroes” in that instance were US servicemen, whose training probably gave them an edge.
Does this mean countries with more people under arms are likely to be better able to resist terrorism? Do Western nations, whose citizens no longer perform national service, need to think harder about how they can cultivate collective resistance in the face of a death cult? In short, do countries like ours need a “martial plan” to transform innocent civilians into paragons of self-defence?
It’s a scary thought, although not an abstract one. We already know what such societies, stretched to the limit, might look like. On my first visit to Israel I was struck, as many are, by the sight of men and women with M16s slung over their shoulders. Attacks against the public with cars and knives, like the one we saw in Westminster last week, are not new to cities like Jerusalem. The assailants are often incapacitated before the arrival of police.
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The latest shepherd to divide sheep from goats is David Goodhart. An Old Etonian turned centre-left magazine editor, he has written a book that asks if we are citizens of “somewhere” or “anywhere”. Those who fall into the “somewhere” camp are more rooted. They “usually have ascribed identities – Scottish farmer, working-class Geordie, Cornish housewife – based on group belonging and particular places”. The “anywheres” tend to be graduates, have often worked in London for a bit and abroad for a couple of years. They were mocked by Theresa May as “citizens of nowhere”.
To make it easier for us to decide which side of the wall we land on, Goodhart allows for a large number of “inbetweeners”. Leaving home at 18 for university made me an “anywhere”, as did stints living abroad. But by 40 I was well on the road to “somewhere”. I will not be the first middle-aged man to recoil from the rootlessness of London, but I may be the first who expressed it by turning to his wife and announcing: “I can’t die in Twickenham”.
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David Goodhart seems to have been stung into action by a conversation at an Oxford college dinner. He was sitting next to Gus O’Donnell and Mark Thompson, then the UK’s top civil servant and BBC boss respectively. Both agreed that global wellbeing mattered more than whether things were hunky-dory in Britain, and that that “may reflect their moderately devout Catholic upbringings”. This is personally interesting because I can’t work out whether Catholicism has made me more inclined to “anywhere” or “somewhere”.
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I still work in London, which means a big commute by car. There’s no point driving anything too posh for the motorway slog. A long warranty and fuel economy is the ticket. Our new car, therefore, is from a South Korean firm. They are built in the Czech Republic to a standard of reliability they did not always attain. A friend who had an earlier model refused to call his Hyundai anything but “high and dry”, since that is how it frequently left him.
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