is it about England?
At first, people asked this question with a sort of awed bewilderment. Where were the riots? How could it be that racial attacks in London actually declined after the bombings, to below their June level? How could people just go on with their daily business? Did these people really not care? Did they not bleed?
My favourite expression of this came from the Madrid newspaper El Correo, whose London correspondent expressed his befuddlement with the British this way: "The feeling that people had reacted in an orderly manner was a point of pride in people's conversations in a country where the word 'emotional' is used to indicate a personality defect."
In Leeds, that personality defect seems to be afflicting a lot of people. Here is the other side of that beloved English sang-froid: a degree of mutual mistrust, neighbourly alienation and social isolation that can push people, large groups of them, into outrageously radical positions.
There is a growing feeling among many of the Londoners I know that it was not so much radical Islam that attacked them, or al-Qaeda or some deranged youth cult. It was Leeds that attacked London. Here was the other England, the impoverished, hateful, culture-devoid England, attacking the country's much more successful, happily pluralist urban pole.
Enough has been written about the brown-skinned Muslims of Leeds, and the social conditions that somehow caused a violent and effective terrorist group, and the beliefs behind such a group, to foment among its youth.
Let us turn for a moment to the white people of Leeds. To understand them, I dropped in on one of their more successful representatives, a 31-year-old retired squash pro named Nick Cass.
Mr. Cass, a red-haired giant, is the Yorkshire organizer for the British National Party, the most successful of Britain's far-right political parties. It has been enormously successful in this part of England, electing city councillors and pulling strong results in national elections -- to the point that the Tories actually parroted the BNP's anti-immigrant line almost word for word in the May elections.
And the BNP has used last week's bombings to its great advantage, distributing leaflets all over England showing the exploded Number 30 bus below the words "Maybe it's time to start listening to the BNP."
The BNP, unlike al-Qaeda, does not actually advocate killing its enemies. Supporters who opt for that kind of solution, Mr. Cass told me in his living room in the Leeds suburb of Wayfield, are sent over to the more radical National Front.
No, the BNP has managed to become the voice of a great many white people in Leeds with its less-skinheaded sort of utopian plan.
"We've always said it's not about individual cultures or races or religions. We just think that when you put them all together in the same space, it doesn't work," he said as his infant son burbled away in the playpen beside him. "It never has worked, not in any country in the world."
Osama bin Laden could not have put it better. Infidels out! And Mr. Cass has a plan to get them out. Yes, he said, it did complicate things that three of the bombers were not actual immigrants, so his party's back-on-the-boat argument would need some refining. There would be a government program, a very expensive one, to pay people of Indian and Pakistani descent, along with Jamaicans and Africans (I didn't ask about Welsh and Scots) to return to their motherland.
After all, he explained, this is just how things are in Leeds. This business of racial harmony is strictly poncy London stuff.
