A dark day at Westminster
Photo: Jack Taylor / Getty Images
Right
now, “who?” does not matter. Right now, “why?” is for later. The “how?”
can wait for another day as well – even though we may suspect the
answers to each of these enquiries. Suffice it to say that today’s
attack on the Palace of Westminster is neither a surprise nor likely to
be the last time something terrible, something shiveringly appalling,
like this happens.
The
symbolism matters, of course, just as it mattered when the IRA attempted
to assassinate Margaret Thatcher in Brighton and John Major and his
cabinet in Downing Street. And just as it mattered when Thomas Mair
murdered Jo Cox in her Yorkshire constituency less than a year ago. Even
so, a terrorist attack at the Houses of Parliament is about something
more than symbolism.
Politics is
a brutal business, made harder – and necessarily harder – by a British
scepticism that considers politicians guilty until proved innocent. That
scepticism can curdle into cynicism too easily but it remains a vital
component of our democratic culture. Nor, despite what we sometimes like
to think, is it new. There never was a golden age or, if there was, it
was one that was not readily apparent at the time. The public has always
been beastly to its representatives and rightly so.
And yet,
within that, there are limits. An attack on the Houses of Parliament is
qualitatively different from a car bomb placed in the heart of the City
of London and different in kind again to a senseless atrocity carried
out on a Cornish beach or a train. Those horrify too, of course, but in a
different way. In those instances, had fortune turned just a little
differently, it could easily have been you or me who found themselves at
the centre of appalling events. In those instances, terror’s power
comes from its apparent randomness. The victims are chosen by an
accident of time and place.
An attack
at Westminster is different. Today’s appears to have combined the
randomness of a street attack with the specific targeting of a building
of national significance. In that respect, there seem to have been two
targets: those people unfortunate enough to be on Westminster Bridge at
precisely the wrong moment and those, more numerous and symbolic, who
work inside the Houses of Parliament itself.
That latter
is, whatever your political preferences, an assault on a very specific
place that means and represents something vital about our country.
Westminster is the place we honour our shared agreement that our
differences must be settled peacefully. That is the founding principle
of modern politics; the contract upon which everything else in our
society even, if you will, our civilisation is based. Except in the most
truly exceptional circumstances – circumstances so rare they have not
been seen in Great Britain in living memory – the use of force, the
coercive enlistment of violence to achieve or advance a political
objective, crosses an almost sacred boundary. Give an inch there, and
you rapidly lose a mile.
Whatever
our parliamentarians’ shortcomings and whatever the divisions that
fester in and pollute our politics, that vital principle still holds.
Democracy is more than a building, naturally, but the building still
matters as a statement of a shared commitment to the principles we have
decided, over the years, decades, and centuries, should define us and
shape the way we conduct our public affairs.
Institutions,
so often questioned in an age less deferential than its predecessors,
still matter. That’s one lesson we should learn again today. There are
many things many of us think wrong with British politics at present,
many things that could and should be ordered differently and better. But
those shortcomings fade away on an afternoon such as this, replaced by
something else that’s too easily forgotten: the importance of the values
we say we honour but too often simply exist as platitudes to be paid
lip-service but not much else.
An open
society is also a vulnerable society but its openness is also the source
of its strength. Amid the wailing of sirens and the confusion of the
moment it is hard to remember this which makes it all the more necessary
to do so. There is a limit to what even brave policemen and women and
the security services can do to protect us; sometimes the bomber, or the
shooter, or the knifeman, will get through.
Amid the
horror, that’s a provocation too, one that tempts us to abandon the very
things we say we cherish. That temptation must be resisted because
yielding to it leads us nowhere useful. The principles parliament stands
for – principles we often forget or take for granted – do matter even
if it sometimes takes something terrible to remind us of that fact.
An attack
on parliament is an attack on us all and an attack on the liberalism
that guarantees our sense of ourselves and our society. As such it
pierces us for it is, symbolically at least, an assault on us all.
But it’s
precisely for that reason that it will fail. Because it reminds us of
what we have in common: a civilisation shared on certain enduring
principles that, though tested on days such as these, are strong enough
to withstand those tests. This kind of horror cannot prevail; it will
not stand. Because it asks us to be people we are not and we cannot,
will not, do that. We hold the line.
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