We will never surrender
Posted by: John Channing on 07 July 2005
Not today, not next week, next month or next year. Not ever. I'll be on the tube again tomorrow morning sticking two fingers up at the bastards who think they can scare us.
John
John
Posted on: 07 July 2005 by Steve G
I'm not sure if the tube will be running tomorrow but I'd wholeheartedly agree with your fuck them & no surrender sentiments.
Given our proximity to the G8 talks I suspect these attacks could have been targeted at Edinburgh had the place not been awash with police at present.
Given our proximity to the G8 talks I suspect these attacks could have been targeted at Edinburgh had the place not been awash with police at present.
Posted on: 07 July 2005 by John Channing
For anyone waking up tomorrow morning feeling scared, I would ask them to think about the statistical risk. Over 3 million people travelled on the tube this morning, 37, tragically, died. So the chance of being killed was ~ 1 in 100,000. I'm probably more likely to die crossing the road at the pelican crossing on the way to the tube than I am to get blown up.
John
John
Posted on: 07 July 2005 by Mick P
John
I totally echo your sentiments.
Regards
Mick
I totally echo your sentiments.
Regards
Mick
Posted on: 07 July 2005 by wellyspyder
The rascals who did this will win if you change you ways! Especially when there is nothing wrong with what you are doing.
Cannot stay at home all the time! Even then you never know what might happen?
Cannot stay at home all the time! Even then you never know what might happen?
Posted on: 07 July 2005 by Jim Lawson
"Looking at Northern Ireland, I don't think that it is much of a precedent either. As you know, most Brits on the mainland have never considered that province to be fully, well, British. They didn't in 1970. They don't now. I suspect that, if you'd polled them in 1970 most mainlanders would have said that they wanted the people of Ulster to sort things out for themselves, almost regardless of what resulted. That hasn't changed over all this time, and I think it's that attitude, rather than weakness in the face of terror, that has allowed the UK to acquiesce in the rise to 'respectability' of the loathsome Gerry Adams."
Replace "Northern Ireland / Ulster" by "Iraq" or "the Middle East," and you pretty much make my point.
Replace "Northern Ireland / Ulster" by "Iraq" or "the Middle East," and you pretty much make my point.
Posted on: 07 July 2005 by bhazen
"We will never surrender..."
Posted on: 08 July 2005 by Kevin-W
Great thread John
In another post somewhere on this forum I mentioned that I come from a London family which suffered the Blitz in the early 1940s, then later lived under the dread shadow of doodlebugs and V2s (totally indiscrimate weapons, interestingly). If my gran and my nan were still alive they'd be telling everyone to carry on as normal and not to let events grind them down. After all, "that little bugger Hitler" never drove any of them out of their city or stopped them going about their daily business. But that's not unusual, as Londoners are a very resourceful and resilient lot.
I think we will see a large number of people defiantly going to work, determined to go about their rightful business. Like John, I certainly will be, as it's a way of sticking two fingers up at these degenerates.
I feel very proud of how London and its people have coped in the last 24 hours - virtually no panic or hysteria, just a willingness to help or to muddle through. Great work by the emergency services too.
Perhaps most importantly, it makes a complete mockery of that Internet statement (picked up by BBC monitoring, and from a previously unknown terror group) that Britain was quaking with fear. These scum will never win, and we will never let them win, no matter how many of us they try to kill.
Well done everyone.
Gotta go and get on the Tube now. No surrender!!!
K
In another post somewhere on this forum I mentioned that I come from a London family which suffered the Blitz in the early 1940s, then later lived under the dread shadow of doodlebugs and V2s (totally indiscrimate weapons, interestingly). If my gran and my nan were still alive they'd be telling everyone to carry on as normal and not to let events grind them down. After all, "that little bugger Hitler" never drove any of them out of their city or stopped them going about their daily business. But that's not unusual, as Londoners are a very resourceful and resilient lot.
I think we will see a large number of people defiantly going to work, determined to go about their rightful business. Like John, I certainly will be, as it's a way of sticking two fingers up at these degenerates.
I feel very proud of how London and its people have coped in the last 24 hours - virtually no panic or hysteria, just a willingness to help or to muddle through. Great work by the emergency services too.
Perhaps most importantly, it makes a complete mockery of that Internet statement (picked up by BBC monitoring, and from a previously unknown terror group) that Britain was quaking with fear. These scum will never win, and we will never let them win, no matter how many of us they try to kill.
Well done everyone.
Gotta go and get on the Tube now. No surrender!!!
K
Posted on: 08 July 2005 by Dev B
John - Couldn't agree more!
cheers
Dev
cheers
Dev
Posted on: 08 July 2005 by Berlin Fritz
I'm proud to be a European, innit 
Posted on: 08 July 2005 by Roy T
I have my travel card and this is my city so I'll travel wherever and whenever I want.
This artical written a few weeks ago for the FT by Rahul Jacob captures very well the London I know and I think it also shows why the City will survive.
The best of times in the world's best city
By Rahul Jacob
Published: June 11 2005 03:00 | Last updated: June 11 2005 03:00
Last month, an unusually moving remembrance service was held for the nearly 300,000 victims of December's tsunami. Twelve lit candles were carried to the altar, each bearing the name of one of the countries affected by the disaster. They were placed on the altar to the strains of a Thai lament played on a traditional Thai fiddle. Then, as if the heavens had opened, petals of a myriad flowers began to drift down on the congregation of 1,800: jasmine from Indonesia and Myanmar, water-lilies from Sri Lanka and Thailand, and lotus from India.
The service was held in London, of course. I say "of course" only because it is fitting that the world's most multicultural city hosted the most inclusive memorial to the tsunami's victims all over the world. Those petals raining to the floor of St Paul's Cathedral on May 11 amounted to more than a remembrance of the 148 Britons who died and indeed the estimated 273,800 who had died in the disaster. Petals of waterlily from Bangladesh, protea from Somalia, and pink rose from the Maldives - it is hard to think of a more evocative metaphor for a city's immigrants. Even more than New York or Toronto, London celebrates - not just tolerates - its diversity.
Growing up in Calcutta, I knew London only as a succession of addresses on a Monopoly board - Bond Street, Piccadilly Circus, Park Lane. Now that I live here, I often miss the street signs completely because I am mesmerised by the daily pageant on its streets - Russian men walk alongside English, Senegalese women in bright national dress alongside Saudi women in black robes. London often seems to me to be the best city in the world.
That is a skyscraper of a claim and I can already hear the mutterings making an alternative case for the entrepreurial energy and abundance of grey cells in New York, the beaches and restaurants in Sydney, the scenic beauty of Cape Town and San Francisco. Aside from possessing all the usual characteristics of a premier world city - culture, major business hub, easy access - London trumps them all handily on three counts; its robust multiculturalism, its extraordinary civility and its gorgeous parks and communal gardens. The only serious contender is New York and, as a former New York resident, I would subjectively argue that London is well ahead on all three criteria. (New York's mayor, Michael Bloomberg, owns a house in London. I rest my case.)
Yes, London has its problems and its rough neighbourhoods. Coping with high prices is a perennial hazard of living and travelling here, in part because London has been enveloped in a property bubble for some years now and the wealth effect has had a knock-on impact on prices. And, sadly, on a coarsening of casual conversation. It is almost obligatory at London social gatherings to endure two questions from perfect strangers: 1. Where do you live? and 2. Do you buy or rent? (you respond by inquiring about their kitchen renovation).
Yet, it is the civility of London in trying situations that most impresses me. I put it down to the British being genetically programmed to queue. Two years after moving to London from Hong Kong, for me queuing now symbolises one of the most important lessons in life: things eventually come to those who wait (but not always at a time of our choosing) and its corollary, that life is more marathon than sprint. As the sociologist Kate Fox, author of Watching the English observes, the invisible queue exists even in a crowded bar. People know who approached the bar milliseconds ahead of them and there is never a hint of jostling.
A world view influenced by the need for patience makes the occasional headaches of London life - the daily announcements, say, on the tube that the Circle Line is experiencing severe delays, the District Line has emergency engineering works and the Northern Line has staff shortages - seem minor. There is a much lower incidence of road and sidewalk rage than you would expect; Fox purposely bumped into people on the street - 80 per cent of the people she lurched into apologised. She quotes George Mikes: "A man in a queue is a fair man; he is minding his own business, he lives and lets live . . ."
This is London's most agreeable trick - civility and calm in the middle of the ceaseless commotion of the modern metropolis. Quiet side streets aside, this is also because so much of the city is parkland. Where else can you leave the tumult of Trafalgar Square, the National Gallery and the theatre district and within minutes be contemplating the puzzle of why swans swim so gracefully yet waddle so awkwardly?
London's most popular tourist attractions such as the Tate Modern (a cleverly remodelled power plant in search of an outstanding modern art collection), Portobello Road (a fruit and vegetable market), and Buckingham Palace ("A child with a box of bricks could have done better", is how it is characterised in Virginia Woolf's Mrs Dalloway ) escape me, however. If you are unlucky, the bucolic scenes in St. James's Park will be disrupted by the Changing of the Guard. The first time I chanced on this spectacle, I was mystified by the campness of it all - grown men strutting about in tight red liveried coats and black bouffant wigs - and wondered if it was a corporal punishment devised by those exclusive British boarding schools one hears about.
What I love most about London is how easily native Londoners take to people - and culture - from elsewhere in the world. Something called the Bollywood Brass Band is on the bill at Somerset House for July alongside Keith Haring's sculptures and African DJs. Inter-racial marriages seem much higher in London. Even Britain's bureaucracy is instinctively inclusive as I discovered filling out a national insurance form recently. Page one of the sample form had as its first entry not a hypothetical John Smith but a Nadia Singh, who I took to be Hindu or Sikh. A Polish cycle courier was killed in a road accident near the Financial Times office in 2004. Bouquets of flowers commemorated his life on the first anniversary of his death; his funeral service a year earlier had been attended by people of every ethnicity imaginable. A test of the 21st century metropolis is how it embraces outsiders.
In Salaam Brick Lane, one of the best non-fiction works of 2005, Tarquin Hall describes the cultural changes undergone by that gritty part of east London, once popular with Jewish immigrants, now with Bangladeshis. Hall describes in hilarious detail how his landlord, a Mr Ali, who arrived in London as a malnourished teenager from Bangladesh, responds to the complaints of his Jewish pensioner tenant about noisy gay neighbours upstairs. Mr Ali calls the police and demands they do something about what he assumes to be buggery going on day and night. ("The Koran forbids it, yeah."). The police laughingly dismiss the complaint, and Ali ruefully recalls that they said Her Majesty's law allowed it.
In microcosm, you have an immigrant's absolute faith in the police in his adopted homeland and their good-humoured insistence on the primacy of tolerance and the rule of law. For all its differences, London's most winning characteristic is that it is at peace with itself.
This artical written a few weeks ago for the FT by Rahul Jacob captures very well the London I know and I think it also shows why the City will survive.
The best of times in the world's best city
By Rahul Jacob
Published: June 11 2005 03:00 | Last updated: June 11 2005 03:00
Last month, an unusually moving remembrance service was held for the nearly 300,000 victims of December's tsunami. Twelve lit candles were carried to the altar, each bearing the name of one of the countries affected by the disaster. They were placed on the altar to the strains of a Thai lament played on a traditional Thai fiddle. Then, as if the heavens had opened, petals of a myriad flowers began to drift down on the congregation of 1,800: jasmine from Indonesia and Myanmar, water-lilies from Sri Lanka and Thailand, and lotus from India.
The service was held in London, of course. I say "of course" only because it is fitting that the world's most multicultural city hosted the most inclusive memorial to the tsunami's victims all over the world. Those petals raining to the floor of St Paul's Cathedral on May 11 amounted to more than a remembrance of the 148 Britons who died and indeed the estimated 273,800 who had died in the disaster. Petals of waterlily from Bangladesh, protea from Somalia, and pink rose from the Maldives - it is hard to think of a more evocative metaphor for a city's immigrants. Even more than New York or Toronto, London celebrates - not just tolerates - its diversity.
Growing up in Calcutta, I knew London only as a succession of addresses on a Monopoly board - Bond Street, Piccadilly Circus, Park Lane. Now that I live here, I often miss the street signs completely because I am mesmerised by the daily pageant on its streets - Russian men walk alongside English, Senegalese women in bright national dress alongside Saudi women in black robes. London often seems to me to be the best city in the world.
That is a skyscraper of a claim and I can already hear the mutterings making an alternative case for the entrepreurial energy and abundance of grey cells in New York, the beaches and restaurants in Sydney, the scenic beauty of Cape Town and San Francisco. Aside from possessing all the usual characteristics of a premier world city - culture, major business hub, easy access - London trumps them all handily on three counts; its robust multiculturalism, its extraordinary civility and its gorgeous parks and communal gardens. The only serious contender is New York and, as a former New York resident, I would subjectively argue that London is well ahead on all three criteria. (New York's mayor, Michael Bloomberg, owns a house in London. I rest my case.)
Yes, London has its problems and its rough neighbourhoods. Coping with high prices is a perennial hazard of living and travelling here, in part because London has been enveloped in a property bubble for some years now and the wealth effect has had a knock-on impact on prices. And, sadly, on a coarsening of casual conversation. It is almost obligatory at London social gatherings to endure two questions from perfect strangers: 1. Where do you live? and 2. Do you buy or rent? (you respond by inquiring about their kitchen renovation).
Yet, it is the civility of London in trying situations that most impresses me. I put it down to the British being genetically programmed to queue. Two years after moving to London from Hong Kong, for me queuing now symbolises one of the most important lessons in life: things eventually come to those who wait (but not always at a time of our choosing) and its corollary, that life is more marathon than sprint. As the sociologist Kate Fox, author of Watching the English observes, the invisible queue exists even in a crowded bar. People know who approached the bar milliseconds ahead of them and there is never a hint of jostling.
A world view influenced by the need for patience makes the occasional headaches of London life - the daily announcements, say, on the tube that the Circle Line is experiencing severe delays, the District Line has emergency engineering works and the Northern Line has staff shortages - seem minor. There is a much lower incidence of road and sidewalk rage than you would expect; Fox purposely bumped into people on the street - 80 per cent of the people she lurched into apologised. She quotes George Mikes: "A man in a queue is a fair man; he is minding his own business, he lives and lets live . . ."
This is London's most agreeable trick - civility and calm in the middle of the ceaseless commotion of the modern metropolis. Quiet side streets aside, this is also because so much of the city is parkland. Where else can you leave the tumult of Trafalgar Square, the National Gallery and the theatre district and within minutes be contemplating the puzzle of why swans swim so gracefully yet waddle so awkwardly?
London's most popular tourist attractions such as the Tate Modern (a cleverly remodelled power plant in search of an outstanding modern art collection), Portobello Road (a fruit and vegetable market), and Buckingham Palace ("A child with a box of bricks could have done better", is how it is characterised in Virginia Woolf's Mrs Dalloway ) escape me, however. If you are unlucky, the bucolic scenes in St. James's Park will be disrupted by the Changing of the Guard. The first time I chanced on this spectacle, I was mystified by the campness of it all - grown men strutting about in tight red liveried coats and black bouffant wigs - and wondered if it was a corporal punishment devised by those exclusive British boarding schools one hears about.
What I love most about London is how easily native Londoners take to people - and culture - from elsewhere in the world. Something called the Bollywood Brass Band is on the bill at Somerset House for July alongside Keith Haring's sculptures and African DJs. Inter-racial marriages seem much higher in London. Even Britain's bureaucracy is instinctively inclusive as I discovered filling out a national insurance form recently. Page one of the sample form had as its first entry not a hypothetical John Smith but a Nadia Singh, who I took to be Hindu or Sikh. A Polish cycle courier was killed in a road accident near the Financial Times office in 2004. Bouquets of flowers commemorated his life on the first anniversary of his death; his funeral service a year earlier had been attended by people of every ethnicity imaginable. A test of the 21st century metropolis is how it embraces outsiders.
In Salaam Brick Lane, one of the best non-fiction works of 2005, Tarquin Hall describes the cultural changes undergone by that gritty part of east London, once popular with Jewish immigrants, now with Bangladeshis. Hall describes in hilarious detail how his landlord, a Mr Ali, who arrived in London as a malnourished teenager from Bangladesh, responds to the complaints of his Jewish pensioner tenant about noisy gay neighbours upstairs. Mr Ali calls the police and demands they do something about what he assumes to be buggery going on day and night. ("The Koran forbids it, yeah."). The police laughingly dismiss the complaint, and Ali ruefully recalls that they said Her Majesty's law allowed it.
In microcosm, you have an immigrant's absolute faith in the police in his adopted homeland and their good-humoured insistence on the primacy of tolerance and the rule of law. For all its differences, London's most winning characteristic is that it is at peace with itself.
Posted on: 08 July 2005 by Berlin Fritz
This weekend should show some good old London partying for VE/VJ Day, I hear Valentines Park (Which I know very well ) will be the place to be, innit.
Fritz Von I just jhope nothing gets cancelled !
P.S. I don't quite see the point of the above
cut & paste diatribe personally ?
Not to forget that Binbags aim in life is to induce war & hatred between the Christian & Muslim worlds, are you gonna let him though, that is the question, innit ?
Fritz Von I just jhope nothing gets cancelled !
P.S. I don't quite see the point of the above
cut & paste diatribe personally ?
Not to forget that Binbags aim in life is to induce war & hatred between the Christian & Muslim worlds, are you gonna let him though, that is the question, innit ?
Posted on: 08 July 2005 by Nigel Cavendish
Surrender to whom or what?
That is the appalling question. Even if we wanted to surrender, to whom would we do it? Even if we wanted to give "them" what they wanted, we don't know what it is "they" want.
This is killing for the sake of it and those who do it know that they will never succeed, but they will continue because that is what they do, that is all they do, that is all they can do.
That is the appalling question. Even if we wanted to surrender, to whom would we do it? Even if we wanted to give "them" what they wanted, we don't know what it is "they" want.
This is killing for the sake of it and those who do it know that they will never succeed, but they will continue because that is what they do, that is all they do, that is all they can do.
Posted on: 23 July 2005 by John Channing
This was not a terrorist attack against the mighty and the powerful. It was not aimed at Presidents or Prime Ministers. It was aimed at ordinary, working-class Londoners, black and white, Muslim and Christian, Hindu and Jew, young and old. It was an indiscriminate attempt to slaughter, irrespective of any considerations for age, for class, for religion, or whatever.
That isn’t an ideology, it isn’t even a perverted faith - it is just an indiscriminate attempt at mass murder and we know what the objective is. They seek to divide Londoners. They seek to turn Londoners against each other.
Londoners will not be divided by this cowardly attack. They will stand together in solidarity alongside those who have been injured and those who have been bereaved
And most people will remember him for the congestion charge...
John
That isn’t an ideology, it isn’t even a perverted faith - it is just an indiscriminate attempt at mass murder and we know what the objective is. They seek to divide Londoners. They seek to turn Londoners against each other.
Londoners will not be divided by this cowardly attack. They will stand together in solidarity alongside those who have been injured and those who have been bereaved
And most people will remember him for the congestion charge...
John
Posted on: 23 July 2005 by Jonathan Gorse
John,
I was reminded by your post of a scene from one of my favourite films Guy Hamilton's masterpiece: 'The Battle of Britain' - the last 3 lines are a perfect example of why the terrorists will never succeed in breaking the British spirit. Hitler spent two or three years bombing us into oblivion nightly and still we wouldn't bend.
Curt Jurgens - "Goering and his Luftwaffe would like to flatten London as a prelude to invasion"
Ralph Richardson - "It's two lumps you take isn't it"
CJ - "What's left of your army abandoned it's weapons at Dunkirk, you're defeated and just playing for time. We know the moves you are making in Washington, and we know the Americans won't be drawn in, their Embassy gives you 2 weeks"
RR - "So what's stopping you"
CJ - "Look David the Fuhrer has been very reasonable he offers guarantees"
RR - "Experience shows that the Fuhrer's guarantees guarantee nothing
CJ - "What about Churchill?, after our last appeal what do we hear, we will fight them on the beaches, with what?"
RR - "Winston gets carried away sometimes"
CJ - "With liquid courage so they tell me"
RR - "Clearly you do not know him"
CJ - "David we are not asking for anything, Europe is ours, we can walk into Britain whenever we like"
RR - "If you think we're going to gamble on Herr Hitler's guarantees you're making a grave mistake, all those years in England seem to have left you none the wiser.
We're not easily frightened, also we know how hard it is for an army to cross the channel, the last little corporal to try came a cropper.
So don't threaten or dictate to us until you're marching up Whitehall and even then we won't listen"
Jonathan
I was reminded by your post of a scene from one of my favourite films Guy Hamilton's masterpiece: 'The Battle of Britain' - the last 3 lines are a perfect example of why the terrorists will never succeed in breaking the British spirit. Hitler spent two or three years bombing us into oblivion nightly and still we wouldn't bend.
Curt Jurgens - "Goering and his Luftwaffe would like to flatten London as a prelude to invasion"
Ralph Richardson - "It's two lumps you take isn't it"
CJ - "What's left of your army abandoned it's weapons at Dunkirk, you're defeated and just playing for time. We know the moves you are making in Washington, and we know the Americans won't be drawn in, their Embassy gives you 2 weeks"
RR - "So what's stopping you"
CJ - "Look David the Fuhrer has been very reasonable he offers guarantees"
RR - "Experience shows that the Fuhrer's guarantees guarantee nothing
CJ - "What about Churchill?, after our last appeal what do we hear, we will fight them on the beaches, with what?"
RR - "Winston gets carried away sometimes"
CJ - "With liquid courage so they tell me"
RR - "Clearly you do not know him"
CJ - "David we are not asking for anything, Europe is ours, we can walk into Britain whenever we like"
RR - "If you think we're going to gamble on Herr Hitler's guarantees you're making a grave mistake, all those years in England seem to have left you none the wiser.
We're not easily frightened, also we know how hard it is for an army to cross the channel, the last little corporal to try came a cropper.
So don't threaten or dictate to us until you're marching up Whitehall and even then we won't listen"
Jonathan