Ten years ago

Ten years ago today I was at home. A plumber was doing some work on the boiler. As the horrible events of the morning unfolded I, like other Londoners, became aware of them gradually. Partial, confused information, began coming in. The plumber couldn't contact his wife, who was in central London; the mobile networks were down. The radio started reporting that something had happened: perhaps it was an electrical fire. The subsequent blasts made it clear that this wasn't the case. News of casualties came, then images - we were by this time glued to the television, fixated on pictures that had an uncanny quality. Here was the city we knew, loved, and worked in; so familiar, yet so utterly different.

The feeling was one of utter confusion; nobody knew what would happen next. The media reflected this : armed police had drawn their weapons outside the Downing Street gates, what was going on? Rumours and misinformation spread - someone had been shot at Canary Wharf, my neighbours falsely claimed. Finally, as thousands of commuters struggled to get home across a city whose public transport was shut down, the grim realisation of the extent of what had happened began to settle in. The skies were eerily quiet, all planes had been diverted; millions of Londoners were similarly stunned into silence. This was an attack that was felt.

That was the thing about 7th July 2005. Its initial impact was to unify. Against those sections of the left who cannot see an outbreak of the collective with any popular purchase without sniffing reaction in the wings, this was something to celebrate, the human determination breaking through an otherwise relentless darkness. The shared grief, the shared efforts of emergency and tube workers (will we remember the latter when they are demonised for striking tomorrow?), the collective  resolve of those struggling to walk home in their office shoes. It was a spirit captured by Ken Livingstone's response, surely his finest moment. Our response, he said, must be unified. This was an assault on working class people, of all faiths. We must not allow ourselves to be divided. In terms that stand as a marker of the extent to which attitudes to migration hardened in the subsequent decade, he ended:

In the days that follow look at our airports, look at our sea ports and look at our railway stations and, even after your cowardly attack, you will see that people from the rest of Britain, people from around the world will arrive in London to become Londoners and to fulfil their dreams and achieve their potential.

 They choose to come to London, as so many have come before because they come to be free, they come to live the life they choose, they come to be able to be themselves. They flee you because you tell them how they should live. They don't want that and nothing you do, however many of us you kill, will stop that flight to our city where freedom is strong and where people can live in harmony with one another. Whatever you do, however many you kill, you will fail.

What followed, on the part of central government and security agencies, was the systematic negation of the attitude proposed by Livingstone. One person fitting Livingstone's description of someone coming to London to live their life was Jean Charles de Menezes,  who should be counted the 53rd victim of 7/7 - murdered by police in a moment of paranoid frenzy. The New Labour government rolled out successive pieces of anti-terror legislation at a dizzying pace - only being prevented by a parliamentary vote from implementing 90 days detention without trial. MI5 recruited as never before; its staff has doubled since 2005. London's Muslim communities were criminalised and surveilled.

London became a city increasingly dominated, and policed, by fear. We have become used to armed police, as we before became used to the street homeless. The years since 2005 have seen the city change in other ways. Gentrification has accelerated: the multicultural diversity and the capacity of ordinary people to live and work in this city which were both integral to the city's initial resolution in 2005 have suffered at the hands of the housing market. We are, these days, a superficially hip city whose well-groomed exterior hides a fear all too willing to lash out if provoked. We have lost so much, and those who have lost most are given least opportunity to tell their stories.