On not blogging

The terrible events of these past weeks have made blogging difficult. It seems wrong to have a voice – no matter how quiet – and an audience – no matter how small – and not talk about what’s happening in my country. I’m breaking all kinds of self-imposed rules about what I thought was appropriate to talk about in this blog. Tomorrow, normal service will be resumed.

Any observations on the trivialities of technology and business are insignificant compared to the tragedy of a man gunned down by my government just three tube stops from where I work, and the absurdity of a proud city rendered ever-fearful through the simple brute will of four ordinary men.

I am truly fearful, but not of terrorists. I worry that the country’s simple desire for individual liberty, which was for me the proudest part of being British, will be further eroded by well-meaning politicians seeking to protect me from the consequences of their international brutality.

Every day it seems another of my liberties is traded away, by sound-bite, in the service of my security. After the end of the second world war, George Orwell wrote measuredly of a small incident involving the arrest of socialist newspaper sellers in Hyde Park:

“I am not suggesting that the arrest of five people for selling harmless newspapers is a major calamity. When you see what is happening in the world today, it hardly seems worth squeeling about such a tiny incident. All the same, it is not a good symptom that such things should happen when the war is well over, and I should feel happier if this and the long series of similar episodes that have preceded it, were capable of raising a genuine popular clamour, and not merely a mild flutter in sections of the minority press.” [link to text]

Every day now, I strain to hear the “clamour”. Why is no one shouting?