A Message From London

A little message for all you people out there who don't live in the UK, but have decided you can pontificate about how we should behave in the current situation.

With all due respect (which, right now, ain't very much):

Fuck Off.

Everyone I know here in London is just getting on with it. We're getting on the buses and tubes and trains and doing our jobs and living our lives, despite the fact that that there are people out there actively trying to blow the hell out of us right now. Oval station, where one of the 'failed' bombs that went off on Thursday? My wife passes through that station twice every working day.

This isn't some theoretical sandbox for you to show off your good-hearted liberal views or hyper-sensible neo-conservative philosophies. This is our lives.

Frankly, my tolerance for the normal internet bullshit is at an all-time low, and my respect for people's taste and judgement is plummeting by the day.

For example, those of you trying to construe the shooting as some sort of sinister shift towards a police state, well, you can fuck right off. First of all, do some fucking research before you shoot your mouth off. The guy jumped a security barrier, ran down and escalator and onto a crowded train. Some news reports don't mention that - and that's because they're trying to spin the story the same way you are.

I don't know a single Brit who is happy about the situation, but that doesn't mean we're all jumping to some sort of assumption about a paranoid right-wing conspiracy. Maybe, just maybe, the reason that British people aren't on the streets protesting this (despite the fact that some are) is that the British police have a pretty decent record of self-policing on this. Maybe we respect the fact that they completely admitted and apologised for the error within 48 hours, at a time when it would have been very easy to conceal the error behind the fact that most family and friends don't know that their loved one had become a suicide bomber. Maybe we still have some faith in our judicial system.

But no, why let facts get in the way when you decide to lecture people who are getting on with their lives in the face of a very real daily threat?

Like I said, fuck off.

Now, I'm off to catch public transport. Any fucker out their fancy telling me exactly how I should behave when I do so?

Scenes from a London day

There were two police officers on Lewisham train station this morning, keeping half an eye on the commuters.

One was white. One was black. Both were female. Neither was armed.

I love this country.

A Thought on the Shooting

A discussion in the office has just clarified my thinking on the shooting incident in Stockwell, and what went wrong.

And the answer is:

Why the hell was he ever allowed to get near the tube station? If the police were tailing him, and they had good reason to do so, he should have been challenged and stopped long before he arrived at a public transport node.

There was a failure of the police here. But it wasn't in the guys who participated in the emotive, viscereal act of pumping five bullets into the guy. In the position they were placed in, they did the only thing they could. The failure was with their superiors who let the situation get near that point. By not ordering an earlier intercept, the not only guaranteed the end of this poor guy's life, they put dozens of commuters' lives at risk.

And destroying an innocent life while endangering others - that's unforgivable.

Shooting victim had outstayed his visa.

Well, at least we know why the Stockwell shooting victim reacted in such a paniced fashion to the police - he was in the country illegally.

This in no way excuses what happened to him, but it does contribute to our knowledge of what happened that day.