A true battle for the 'British way of life'

THE sirens did not stop until the evening. In every other way, London felt uncannily quiet and terribly sad, the blood on the buildings of Woburn Place a mark of the violence and chaos that halted the morning rush hour.

This is a city accustomed to terrorism. One of the saddest things about Thursday was how familiar it felt to have another bombing joining Canary Wharf, Harrods, Hyde Park, Woolwich, the Old Bailey and the Tower of London. Even a bus has blown up before, when an IRA bomber died in the Aldwych nine years ago. While last week's deaths and injuries were on a bigger scale, there is the same sense of an everyday activity - tourism, shopping, going to the pub - acquiring a lethal dimension.

Equally familiar are the affirmations of British resilience and British values. As Tony Blair said on Thursday, visibly upset: "This is a very sad day for the British people, but we will hold true to the British way of life."

There is, however, a tussle going on over 'the British way of life', and his government is in the thick of it. What should be the balance between freedom and security? Between diversity and solidarity? Could we, in trying to defend the British way of life, run the risk of destroying it?

These were not complexities to be addressed on the day of the bombings. But they are vividly topical, whether in parliament, in the media or on the street. Police tried last week to balance the rights of protesters against the security of the G8 leaders. Legislation on identity cards, once considered fit only for our benighted Continental cousins, is making its way through the Commons. Sir Ian Blair, commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, has been heavily criticised for pursuing action against officers who made offensive references to Muslims.

Privacy, free assembly, free speech: these might appear to be vital ingredients of 'the British way of life'. But all are under pressure from competing notions of what that means and how it should be maintained. The idea of 'Britishness', long challenged by Scots politicians and thinkers as a constructed imperial identity, is once again an ideological battleground.

Is it 'British' to support identity cards, detention without trial and criminal penalties for incitement to religious hatred? These are all measures advanced by the Prime Minister while bitterly contested by critics. Is it 'British' to be told by the Council of Europe that your government is subjecting foreign terrorist suspects to "inhuman and degrading treatment"? Or to be awaiting a Lords decision on the admissibility of evidence obtained abroad by torture?

The effect of 9/11 has been to re-order moral priorities. What once seemed shocking becomes acceptable in a context of threat and fear. During the American presidential campaign, both John Kerry and George Bush spoke of wanting to "hunt down and kill" terrorists, ignoring not only the idea of legal process but the intelligence value of taking Osama bin Laden alive rather than dead.

The aftermath of a terrorist attack is the riskiest time for such slippages. So it was heartening to hear Charles Clarke resisting what sounded like an invitation, from John Humphrys on Radio 4's Today programme, to arrest Muslim clerics with inflammatory views. (The Home Secretary made the reasonable point that preaching was not the same as planting a bomb on a bus.) The Prime Minister took care to praise Britain's 1.6 million Muslims, 60% of whom live in London, as "decent and law-abiding people who abhor this act of terrorism" - although that did not prevent the Muslim Council of Great Britain from receiving a flood of hostile and threatening e-mails.

Clarke also admitted that identity cards would have "made no difference", which was refreshingly candid but not what he has been saying in the House of Commons. On June 28 he told MPs that identity cards helped lead Spanish police to the Madrid bombers, citing the view of a French anti-terrorism expert that they would help protect Britain against terrorist attacks.

The London Underground bombings will probably ease the passage of Clarke's identity cards bill and blunt resistance, especially among peers, to the review and renewal of anti-terrorism laws in the autumn. The temptation for ministers to bring forward new measures will be huge. Among those already being discussed are the introduction of body-scanners on the Tube and the colour-coded threat levels that are broadcast in the US.

Anyone who travels on the Underground will know that body scans, even if randomly applied, would be impractical for a system that hosts three million journeys a day and is severely overcrowded at rush hour. As for the American colour alerts, it is fair to say that no one understands the different threat levels. They serve merely to raise the blood pressure of airport passengers who, instead of gazing anxiously at a television screen, could be noticing that abandoned bag in the corner.

What the Americans have not yet learnt, but the British ought to know after living with decades of the IRA, is that security cannot be imposed from outside. It comes from within, from the vigilance of ordinary people - looking under cars, spotting random parcels, noticing when something isn't right. It sounds as if the bus bomber may have been observed by a fellow passenger dipping his hand into a bag.

That is part of what Ian Blair meant when he said on Friday: "It is communities which beat terrorism."

No matter who planned the bombings, within this country or outside it, there will be others who knew of their plans or observed their behaviour. One of the dreadful strands in the 9/11 story is the number of people, from flying instructors to check-in staff, who noticed something strange about the hi-jackers but said nothing - or said something and were ignored.

This outsourcing of surveillance has a dark side, which is why both Blairs, politician and policeman, tread so carefully with what they say. It runs the risk of vigilantism, score-settling, snooping on the neighbours - all as 'un-British' as detention without trial. The use of informers, a key weapon in the fight against the IRA, can be as morally dubious as the use of draconian anti-terror laws.

Javier Solana, the EU foreign policy chief, once said that Americans see terrorism as an external threat, whereas Europeans know it lives among us. That insight will only be useful if we recognise the Hobson's choice it poses: an authoritarian state or a self-policing society.