by Paula Mitchell, Socialist Party Executive Committee
During rush hour on the morning of 7 July 2005, four suicide bombers attacked three London Underground trains and a bus. 52 people were killed and over 700 injured.
The bombers were young British men inspired by the ideas and methods of al-Qa’ida, a fundamentalist right-wing Islamist network which had previously carried out the horrific suicide plane attacks on the ‘Twin Towers’ World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon, in which around 3,000 people died, on 11 September 2001 – 9/11.
In response to 9/11, the US government led by George W Bush, with Tony Blair’s New Labour government in the UK willingly trotting along behind, launched a so-called “War on Terror”.
Photo: Francis Tyers/CC
The Socialist warned at the time that this was “an excuse by US imperialism – with the support of Blair – to subjugate the Middle East and other regions it considers crucial for its own ends.” That included the invasion of Afghanistan in 2001 and the occupation of Iraq in 2003, opening up a bloody nightmare of occupation, terror and social breakdown for the people of both countries. Between the invasion and the summer of 2005, at least 100,000 people were killed in Iraq (added to by a further 50,000 over the following ten years).
These actions were opposed by a huge global mass movement. Two million people marched on the streets of London to try to stop the invasion of Iraq – on the same day, about 35 million marched worldwide. On ‘Day X’, the day the war started, tens of thousands of young people walked out of schools and colleges. The war was one of the key reasons why Blair’s Labour lost 5 million votes between 1997 and 2010.
Yet, as the editorial of the Socialist on 14 July 2005 pointed out, it wasn’t the warmongering capitalist leaders who were killed or terrorised by the 7/7 London bombs, but ordinary people.
‘Ordinary working-class people’
“The photographs of the victims, the details of where they live, their cultural, ethnic and religious background — including Muslims — demonstrate that it was not the ‘rulers’ but the ‘ruled’, ordinary working-class people, who were blown to smithereens, or who had their lives blighted by terrible injuries, by the perpetrators of his obscene terrorist act.
“Those who carried this out deserve unequivocal and unqualified condemnation. But so do those who have created the conditions for the growth of terrorism.”
Tony Blair rushed to say that the ‘Iraq war had nothing to do with the events of 7/7’. Then Labour Foreign Secretary Jack Straw said the attacks ‘came out of the blue’. But as the Socialist said at the time, “He must be the only person in Britain who holds that view. Police and intelligence chiefs have been warning relentlessly that it was not a question of ‘if’ but ‘when’ such an attack would be made.” 20 years later, in 2025, former head of counter-terrorism Neil Basu told the Guardian: “A driver of the 7/7 attacks was foreign policy and Iraq”.
Al-Qa’ida was itself, we explained, “a product of the humiliation of the Arab peoples and ruthless occupation by imperialism in the past of the lands of the Muslim peoples. That occupation was continued by the Israeli ruling class, in collusion with US imperialism, in the territory of the Palestinian people.”
But al-Qa’ida was not a genuine movement of national liberation. It was and is a vicious reactionary organisation, enforcing extreme discrimination against women and violence against all those – including Arabs and Muslims – who do not accept its outlook.
Its methods, which include terrorism, can offer no way forward for the struggles of the oppressed. Violent acts by individuals or small groups, including and especially those carried out indiscriminately on ordinary people, alienate the mass of ordinary people, and are used by the ruling class to justify further repression. They are the opposite of what is needed to bring an end to oppression, including national oppression – a united mass struggle against the capitalist system, led by the working class.
20 years later, as people look back at these terrible events in London, and as hundreds of thousands protest at the horrific onslaught waged by the Israeli state on Gaza and Palestinians, and the bombing of Iran, many will be fearful that we could face the same again now in Britain.
The ‘war on terror’ has not eradicated terror. In fact, right-wing Islamist terrorism increased as a result of imperialism’s actions. Al-Qa’ida did not exist in Iraq until the invasion. But just between May and July 2005, the months leading up to the London bombings, 120 suicide bombs took place in Iraq. Mass terror attacks continued for over a decade and in every continent, with most victims Muslims.
‘War on terror’
The ‘war on terror’ has been used as a cover for brutal actions by capitalist states – most recently by the Israeli state to carry out extreme state terror in Gaza.
It is true that after ten years, the US finally managed to assassinate al-Qa’ida’s leader, Osama bin Laden. But many young followers then moved over to a new, even more brutal formation, known as ISIS or ‘Islamic State’. At one stage, ISIS held vast swathes of Iraq and Syria under a self-styled ‘caliphate’, declared in 2014, controlling the population through extreme brutality.
A US-led coalition of military intervention eventually beat ISIS back. However, both al-Qa’ida and ISIS still exist, and carry out attacks in Iran and Syria. Right-wing Islamist terrorism is rife in parts of Africa. Given the horror of Gaza, the attacks on Iran etc, it cannot be ruled out that angry and desperate individuals or groups get misled and drawn into using terrorist methods against ‘the West’ again.
The ‘war on terror’ also whipped up division in Britain and increased Islamophobia. Decades of subjugation, war, exploitation and brutality were swept under the carpet, as capitalist leaders pointed the finger of blame at Muslims. Racist attacks increased 600% after 7/7. The day after the attacks, the vile Sun rag said: “Britain is crawling with suspected terrorists and those who give them succour”. The same day, the Muslim Council of Britain reported that 30,000 threatening emails had been received by Muslim organisations.
The ‘war on terror’ at home included anti-terror legislation and measures such as the ‘Prevent’ programme to combat ‘extremism’.
But these measures have not made the threat of attack go away. New anti-terror laws were introduced in 2000 and 2001 which did not prevent 7/7. But the laws have been used to threaten peaceful protesters. The latest use has been to try to intimidate the hundreds of thousands who have protested against the Israeli state’s war on Palestinians. Starmer’s Labour government has attempted to ban Gaza demos, prosecute members of the band Kneecap and investigate Bob Vylan, and proscribe Palestine Action.
The Prevent programme was first trialled by Tony Blair in the wake of 7/7, and became a legal requirement in the Counter Terrorism and Security Act 2015. It requires staff in all public services to report on anything that might suggest someone is “vulnerable to extremism”. Not to report a suspicion is potentially a criminal offence.
Prevent training involves stereotyping Muslims in particular, but the definition of radicalisation is undefined and has been interpreted by some trainers to include extreme left-wing ideas. It is no coincidence that anti-extremism laws came at the same time as the Tory Trade Union Act in 2016, an attempt to make striking harder.
Neither anti-terror legislation nor Prevent have succeeded in stopping terror attacks. There have been at least 24 attacks in Britain characterised as ‘terrorist’ since 2005, including the Manchester Arena bombing and London Bridge attack in 2017.
Both Tory and Labour governments have told us these measures are necessary for our safety. But the reality is these capitalist governments have no interest in our welfare. The heroes of 7/7 were the firefighters, tube workers, bus drivers and hospital workers – the same workers who were again the heroes during Covid. But since 7/7 those workers have seen their real pay eroded by 20+%, savage cuts and privatisation under Tory austerity, the closure of fire stations and tube ticket offices, the rampant privatisation of NHS services, and a historic cost-of-living crisis.
Conditions for terrorism
Terrorism cannot be eliminated by capitalist governments as they create the conditions for it. The Socialist Party has always argued that the only way to rid the world of the threat of terror attacks is to eradicate the conditions that breed them: poverty, war, oppression and exploitation. In 2005, the Socialist Party in London campaigned for the unity of all working-class people in London, and for demonstrations to oppose war, terrorism, racism and oppressive legislation.
The obscenities of the actions of western imperialism in the Middle East have continued till today. But in some respects the world is now a different place from 2005. The disastrous war in Iraq was the beginning of the unravelling of US dominance on the world stage. The world economic crisis of 2007-08 shattered the idea that capitalism could provide a decent life for everyone. It was followed by mass industrial movements, especially in Europe, the Arab Spring uprisings, and attempts at establishing new parties and leaders that could fight in the interests of workers in a number of countries – including temporarily the possibility of transforming the Labour Party presented by Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership. Jeremy had been one of the few Labour MPs who stood out against the Iraq war and the ‘war on terror’.
The crisis of capitalism in the multi-polar world we now face, a crisis expressed and exacerbated by Trump’s presidency, makes the world a more dangerous and volatile place. But it also increases the likelihood of struggle of working-class people, and the search for political representation and a socialist alternative to this brutal unjust capitalist system – which is the route that is necessary to end terror.
- Paula was Socialist Party London Secretary at the time of the 7/7 bombings in 2005