When faced with social or cultural problems, a strong impulse among self-consciously Sensible centrists is to downplay the seriousness of those problems. Typically, they will run with some variation on ‘Twas Ever Thus. Worried about rising street crime? Try watching Peaky Blinders, mate! Concerned by modern sexual culture? Er, actually, teens have always had sex! Think pop music is increasingly explicit and crude? The squares hated Elvis too, you reactionary idiot! And so on and so on ad infinitum. They have to do this, because the alternative is that conservatives might have a point about something and that is too monstrous to contemplate.  

The rather tiresome rhetorical strategy described above – a kind of gaslighting about the past – was on show yet again recently, when a tweet by Greater Manchester Police noting that armed police would be patrolling Christmas markets earned the ire of rightwingers. Many of them made reasonable points: notably that it was dispiriting to see this treated as something unremarkable, and that the authorities were, as ever, strangely coy about what exactly shoppers were being kept safe from.

The main answer to this latter question, of course, is rampage attacks, generally with bladed weapons and occasionally with vehicles, of the kind that have become increasingly routine across Europe in recent years. In the public mind they are often associated with jihadi terrorism, and this is not unjustified — think of the London Bridge attacks in 2017 and 2019, or the horrendous Nice lorry attack in 2016, or the diversity festival stabbing in Solingen this August. But in some cases of random public attacks, there is no clear terrorist link. This seems to have been true of the Southport horror this July, and the Nottingham stabbings in June 2023. 

If you start to ask questions about the growing prevalence of this kind of outrage, the Sensibles will chime in with their “Well It’s Nothing New Really, You Know” routine, like the pub bore whose eyes light up when he hears an unsuspecting punter at the bar mention his pet subject. 

British cities — especially London — have always had to be very careful about security in public places, runs the argument, ever since the development of modern terrorism in the late nineteenth century. Historically, there have been several waves of Irish nationalist violence, most seriously during the Troubles, but also attacks by anarchists and Suffragettes, Palestinians and Iranians, the far left and the far right, and more recently jihadis. The threat of political violence has been a constant drumbeat of urban life in England for 150 years, much heightened at certain times, but always there to some degree. We should, therefore, be relaxed about the increasing need for intrusive public security measures. For the Sensibles, there’s no use complaining about any of this or wondering whether it might be the result of political decisions that could be undone. Like the poor, the terrorists ye have with you always, it’s just a fact of life.

Well. None of the above history is wrong, exactly. I can remember the 1999 far-right bombing campaign in London. The Provisional IRA carried out regular attacks in England for twenty years until the mid-1990s, and Flanders and Swann’s comic Song Of Patriotic Prejudice — which noted satirically that the typical Irishman “blows up policemen, or so I have heard / and blames it on Cromwell, and William The Third” — refers not to the Troubles but to IRA campaigns against British targets in the 1940s and 1950s. Even further back, Conrad’s brilliant novel The Secret Agent, one of the first literary investigations of the psychology of the modern urban terrorist, was published in 1907 and set in the 1880s. 

But the Sensibles are missing the point, in more ways than one. The instinctive indignation that people felt when they saw the GMP Tweet did not stem from a misguided belief that British cities have invariably been havens of tranquillity. Rather, it is rooted in the realisation that regular random street rampages perpetrated by fanatical or mentally ill immigrants, or children of immigrants, often specifically targeted against women and children, are a new phenomena in Britain. It simply does not follow that, because we have had particular kinds of public safety problems in the past, we should be complacent and blasé about new threats emerging.  

The rampage attacks are traceable to specific policy decisions by political leaders

This is especially true when the new threat imposes a very different and acute kind of psychological burden on the population, because of its randomness and its exceptionally indiscriminate nature. I have no interest at all in defending the IRA, but they generally (though not always successfully) sought to avoid mass civilian casualties on the British mainland itself — for propagandistic reasons if nothing else. Jihadists have no such concerns. Additionally, the centralised nature of Irish nationalist terrorism offered more potential for a coherent state response. The diffuse nature of jihadist terrorism presents a bewildering array of targets.

The rampage attacks are traceable to specific policy decisions by political leaders, and most of them are preventable given the necessary will. The same goes for mass casualty terrorist incidents, like the Manchester Arena bombing. In most cases there is simply no good reason why the perpetrators of these atrocities should be in the country at all. Salman Abedi, the Manchester bomber, came from a Libyan family whose claim to refugee status was highly dubious, given their return to the country during the civil war. Valdo Calocane, the schizophrenic Nottingham stabber, was from Guinea-Bissau, but was able to settle in Britain because he had joint Portuguese nationality. Ali Harbi Ali, who killed Sir David Amess, was from a Somalian family who moved here when Ali’s father lost out in one of the country’s endless internal power struggles. 

Part of the tragedy is that we so easily get used to the gradual imposition of new and irksome security precautions

This is a crucial point when attempting comparisons with, say, the IRA. Irish nationalism is deeply entwined with British history. Our two islands are inextricably bound up with each other. We are, as it were, stuck with the complex and bloody history of Anglo-Irish relations. By contrast, rampage attacks — whether explicitly jihadi or simply carried out by inadequate, alienated oddballs — are almost entirely a recently imported problem. It is a new and terrible risk that our political leaders have chosen to impose on us, through their dogmatic attachment to mass immigration.

Part of the tragedy is that we so easily get used to the gradual imposition of new and irksome security precautions, to the point where we cannot remember that life was not always like this, just as the deterioration of manners makes it hard to imagine a time when people genuinely spoke and acted with more dignity and restraint. One of the most heartbreaking parts of Nineteen Eighty Four is when Winston Smith goes to a prole pub to ask some old men what things were really like before the Revolution, and all they can give him is random contextless fragments & half-digested propaganda about evil bosses in top hats.

It is vital that we do remember, and that we challenge our politicians to tell us what they are willing to change, so that we can recreate those heady far-off days twenty years ago, when men with sub-machine guns did not need to watch over little old ladies selling homemade Christmas cards, and large ugly bollards were not needed to block pedestrianised areas and the pavements of London bridges.