Terrorist attack in London

The morning has rather been overtaken by the news of the terrorist attack in London. First of all, everyone here is OK. My office is on Houndsditch which is one of the roads which has been closed and we are being advised not to leave the building but my feeling is that the threat is over at the moment.



Everything is rather confused at the moment with all sorts of wild reports coming out about Al Qaeda being responsible, it’s probably best just to stay calm, deal with the short term problems of injured people, and a capital which has ground to a halt before getting into the bigger picture stuff.



Currently there are no trains running anywhere into or out of London but hopefully that will change later on. I have already found out that it is possible to bus out from Whitechapel to Ilford, get a train from there to Shenfield, then another train from there to Colchester and then finally change to get to Ipswich and beyond so, in theory I can get home tonight but it’s going to be a long day.



Obviously our main thoughts now are with the people who have been murdered and those who are injured. If you have the time, then a moment’s silence is called for.

Update: (20:30) Tragically it seems that the death toll is increasing all the time, at the moment it is 37 and it will continue to rise.

The transport system is recovering incredibly quickly. Liverpool Street opened at about 16:00 and I managed to get the first Norwich train out of the City at about 17:30 and was home a couple of hours later. Apparently everything will be running tomorrow (although I would expect there will be some delays).

There are two key things now, from my point of view. The first is to carry on life as normal, it achieves nothing by not going to work as usual, in fact it is an admission of defeat. Secondly, and most importantly, we must not carry out some sort of witch hunt. Let the police do their work, catch the perpitrators and carry on. This is not an excuse for us to invade somewhere, and likewise it must also not be used to railroad new legislation which further intrudes on our lives such as the proposed ID Cards.