The London Bombings:
Why Did It Happen?
By Chris Marsden
20 July 2005
World
Socialist Web
The response of
the Labour government to the July 7 bombings in London has been a mixture
of hand-wringing and hypocrisy.
We are told repeatedly
that four, and possibly more, young British men from immigrant families
were prepared to blow themselves up simply due to an irrational hatred
of Western civilisation inculcated by Islamic fundamentalism. No reason
is offered for why these and hundreds more Asian youth are attracted
to religious extremism and are prepared to kill and be killed. To even
raise the question of the role played by Britains participation
in the Iraq war in fomenting anger amongst Muslims is to invite denunciations
of being an apologist for the terrorist atrocities.
But to explain is
not to condone. The emergence of Islamic fundamentalism and terror bombings
is a manifestation of a deep-rooted disease in society and the body
politic. Bitter denunciations will do nothing to change this reality.
It must be understood.
It is obvious that
the London bombings were a response to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan
and the ongoing occupation of those countries. It did not require a
great deal of social insight or immense powers of political foresight
to anticipate that acts of terrorism would be one of the responses to
Britains participation in a predatory and illegal war.
The toxic combination
of Blairs alliance with the White House-Pentagon militarists and
his foully hypocritical invocations of democracy were bound to have
lethal consequences within this country. Only those such as government
spokesmen and official apologists for the war would deny this. But to
point out the anger generated by the war amongst British Muslims is
only the beginning of an explanation.
There is no direct
and inevitable connection between even the most intense outrage against
the war and the decision to commit a terrorist act directed against
the civilian population. The emergence of suicide bombers within Britain
is an indication of a pathological state of social relations within
this country.
We are not dealing
here with psychotic killers, where a family tragedy or some other individual
life experience can be shown to play a part in the development of a
personality disorder. The three alleged bombers originally identified
were students and a family man, who acted out of religious conviction.
Shehzad Tanweer,
22, was born in Bradford but lived most of his life with his parents
in the Beeston area of Leeds. He was a good student and a sports science
graduate. His Pakistani father owns a chip shop and is a respected member
of the local community.
Hasib Hussain, 18,
a college friend of Tanweer, also came from Beeston. His father works
in a local factory.
Mohammed Sadique
Khan, 30, from Beeston, was married with a young daughter. He worked
in a caring profession, as a primary school mentor for children with
learning difficulties. His father worked in a foundry. His estranged
wife is a neighbourhood environmental officer. Last year Khans
mother-in-law, Farida Patel, was a guest at a Buckingham Palace garden
party, where she received an award for her work as a teacher specialising
in bilingual studies.
The fourth alleged
bomber, a Jamaican-born resident of Britain in his thirties, Lindsey
Germaine, was named only yesterday.
These young men
are alleged to have planned and carried out a truly horrific deed. Consider
what it would take to board a tube train or a bus and look at the faces
of those around youmen, women and children who bear absolutely
no responsibility for the actions of the Blair government. And then
to detonate ten pounds of high explosives, knowing the bomb will kill
all those around you.
An act of this character
expresses an extraordinary level of social alienation. It is all too
easy to attribute this to brainwashing or the perverted
and poisonous doctrines of Islamic extremism, as Prime Minister
Tony Blair did in Parliament on July 13. Such declarations evade the
real questions. Why were four educated young men attracted to the millenarian
visions of a heavenly paradise for the martyr peddled by the fundamentalists?
How have such reactionary doctrines taken hold and won support?
The ability of groups
sympathetic to Al Qaeda to win influence is connected to significant
social, economic and political changes within British society itself.
Even as we employ the term British society, we are obliged
to recall that it was the former Tory leader Margaret Thatcher, in support
of her dog-eat-dog political and economic philosophy, who insisted,
There is no such thing as society.
She declared, I
think weve been through a period where too many people have been
given to understand that if they have a problem, its the governments
job to cope with it. I have a problem, Ill get a grant.
Im homeless, the government must house me. Theyre
casting their problem on society. And, you know, there is no such thing
as society. There are individual men and women, and there are families.
The coming to power
of Thatchers government in 1979 marked the definitive break by
Britains ruling elite with the post-war policy of securing social
consensus by maintaining a welfare state. Instead, Thatcher refashioned
Britain as a cheap labour platform for the major transnational corporations
by mobilising the full might of the state against the working class.
Thatchers
contempt for the fate of ordinary working people and the cultivation
of extraordinary wealth for a select few began a quarter century ago.
It has resulted in the disintegration of all the complex social arrangements
and institutions that once gave people a connection to a broader community.
The elevation and glorification of the powerful individualthe
billionaire businessman, the fabulously rich celebrityas
the epitome of success has been accompanied by the impoverishment of
millions in Britain and all over the world.
The four alleged
bombers may not all be from the most impoverished layers, but in their
social being they reflect conditions affecting broad sections of the
working population that have developed in Britain over the past decade-and-a-half.
They live in a part of the country, Yorkshire, that has been devastated
by the mass closure of mines, textile mills and factories. A small number
may have prospered, but most new jobs that have been created offer only
low-wage employment in the service sector.
Beeston is an example
of the type of urban deprivation that has been created. A July 2004
report by Leeds City Council states that Beeston has failed to
benefit from the growth in the economy of the city, leaving wide gaps
between the haves and have nots.
Immigrant communities
make up only 22 percent of the population. Most residents are poor whites
struggling to make a living. Unemployment stands at nearly eight percent,
and only a third of the total population are in full-time employment.
Nearly one in six residents suffers from long-term illness. Two-thirds
of residents rent rather than own their homes.
This social polarisation
has been accompanied by the growth of all manner of social and intellectual
backwardness, of which the growing influence of religion and its most
apocalyptic variants, in particular, is one manifestation.
To explain this,
one must identify the other key factor leading to the extreme alienation
from society of many young peoplethe disintegration of the labour
movement and its disappearance as a significant force in British society.
It is not necessary
to repeat here the criticisms made by the Marxist movement of the reformist
programme advanced by the Labour Party and the trade unions. Despite
their extreme and ultimately fatal limitations, these mass organisations
reflected, even if inadequately, the sense of class solidarity and the
socialist aspirations that were deeply felt by millions of workers,
and even significant sections of the middle class. There existed a genuine
confidence that capitalist oppression was on the way out, and Britain
and the world would be made anew. It was not a question of if capitalism
would be replaced, but how and when. The youth responded to this optimism,
and flooded into socialist organizations well to the left of the Labour
Party.
Within such an intellectual
and social climate, disaffected youth seeking a better Britain and a
better world turned to a study of Marx and embraced the most advanced
philosophy ever devisedone characterised by optimism, human solidarity
and the highest idealism.
This was still true
as late as the mid-1980s. It took an unbroken series of betrayals by
the Labour Party and the trade union bureaucracy, beginning with the
miners strike of 1984-85, followed by a massive propaganda campaign
proclaiming the death of socialism after the collapse of
the Stalinist regimes in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, to change
this.
Today, the Labour
Party is a bastion of political reaction. Its prime minister is a mouthpiece
of the Murdoch media empire. In the name of New Labour,
Blair imposes the economic philosophy pioneered by Thatcher in Britain
and recommends it as a model for Europe and the world. He portrays war
and colonial conquest as the Wests great civilising mission to
bring democracy to the peoples of the Middle East and Africa.
As for the trade
unions, these spineless and impotent organizations are no longer taken
seriously.
The younger generation
is offered no means of influencing and changing society. Every avenue
for doing so has been closed off.
In February 2003,
more than one million people marched in London to oppose the plans of
the US and Britain to invade Iraq. The response of Blair to this unprecedented
display of opposition was to declare that the essence of democratic
governance was the willingness of political leaders to defy the popular
will.
Contemporary Britain
is a deeply troubled and dislocated society. In the course of 25 years
of political reaction, the festering and neglected social contradictions
of the country have assumed a malignant character.
The cure can be
found only in politics, but of a very different character than that
which prevails today. Only through a resurgence of genuine socialism
can a way forward be found out of the present impasse. The great principles
of internationalism, social equality and genuine popular democracy will
act as a powerful antidote to religious obscurantism, and provide the
basis for uniting all workers and youth in the struggle for a better
future.