Whose fault is it anyway?

The July 7th reports were greeted with a chorus of disapproval about their refusal to assign blame – but the demand for easy answers misses the point.

Last week’s reports on the July 7th bombings were cautious, ambiguous, and very careful to hedge their bets. The same can’t be said of the reaction to them.

The Times managed to get the word “whitewash” into paragraph three of its preview. The BBC’s Paul Reynolds wrote an analysis under the disappointed heading, “Missed chances but nobody blamed,” and unflatteringly compared the reports to the rather more gung-ho American investigation into 9-11.

The Guardian went one better, ending a blog post (“Playing the blame game“) with an invitation to readers to tell the world, “Who do you hold responsible for the failure to prevent the attacks?”

And said readers enthusiastically did so: “If MI5 wants to know how to prevent Terrorist attacks, how about getting Bush and Kipper Blair to be nice to people,” offered one. Other posters to other fora have instead placed responsibility for the atrocities squarely on Muslim communities, or the failure of multiculturalism. But wherever you look, it seems that while the names of the guilty may change, the message is always the same. There should be an explanation. Someone or something is to blame.

I’m not acquainted with the ins and outs of British intelligence. There very probably are people who were negligent or worse before the bombings. But nonetheless, I can’t help but think: What if things aren’t that simple? What if no one is to blame?

This demand for a simple solution, for instant answers in place of thoughtful analysis, is a pretty standard reaction in the British media. Something Must Be Done, the pundits cry; ergo, it is the government’s job To Do It. It’s this habit that resulted in dangerous dogs legislation being rushed through after a moral panic in the early 90s; and it’s why there are outraged demands for government action every time someone uses the phrase “postcode lottery”. (How, precisely, do you ensure the identical quality of services in radically different areas?)

There is something comforting in this. It’s a very seductive idea, that there is a solution and that someone could implement it if only they had the resources/nerve/competence to do it. We like the world to be simple and explicable. “Lock the criminals up and we won’t have any crime.” “Increase welfare and we won’t have any poor people.” “Invade Iraq, and it’ll be a democracy in time for tea.”

The problem is – it’s bullshit. People aren’t numbers, theories aren’t equations, and social sciences rarely live up to their name. Reality is complex, and attempts to get it to conform to any theory you can sum up in two sentences will almost certainly have unintended consequences. The welfare state can create poverty traps; criminals learn their craft at Holloway Polytechnic; don’t even get me started on Iraq.

I’m not saying we shouldn’t be asking what went wrong before July 7th, or what we can do to make a repeat less likely. But I am saying there I doubt the existence of a simple solution. The bombings were probably the result of a nebulous mix of Anglosphere foreign policy, globalization, the failure to integrate ethnic communities in the inner cities of the north, Islam’s disaffection with the west, the inability of parts of the religion to come to terms with modernity, intelligence failures, government complacency, popular complacency, and no doubt some stuff about the bombers’ relationships with their dads. And that’s before we get to notions of good and evil.

How do we fix all those? Buggered if I know – and I’d be terribly suspicious of anyone who told me that they do. By demanding easy answers we neglect the wider causes of terrorism, and forget the difficult, long-term efforts needed to fix things. What matters is not the magic bullet, but the long, slow process of discussion, policy and feedback.

Parts of the media forget that in their search for narratives that can be couched in terms like “cause” and “blame”. And the government, terrified of looking soft on something over which they may have little power, rushes through badly drafted legislation that attacks the wrong problem. Thus we have a prime minister who believes that human rights are the problem, not the solution; that liberal is a term of abuse; and that ID cards will make us more free.

We do need an independent enquiry into July 7th. But not because it will give us the answers we so desperately crave about why it happened, who is to blame, or what surefire way there is to prevent a repeat. We need it because information is our best weapon against both bad government and fundamentalist ideologies. Sometimes, there is no simple answer – but that just makes it all the more important we keep looking for the complex ones.