Waiting for the 7 July Report

Sorry I have not blogged much. Work is madly busy, the campaign for an independent public enquiry is hotting up, and answering enquiries about the lack of an enquiry is taking up a lot of time. You'll hear me and others talking a lot about this in the next few weeks. Monday sees the publication of the London Assembly 7th July Review Committee report; with harrowing testimony from thirty or so survivors, plus the emergency services, communications providers and other key people from the day. This is the first, the only public interrogation of the facts so far, and the report ( which will be a lot longer than the Narrative or the ISC report) was produced by a cross party committee, with very modest resources and a strictly limited remit ( two full time staff shared the job as well as well as other duties.) ''It is not,'' in the words of the Chair Richard Barnes, ''intended to be a substitute for a full public enquiry''. The Committee began investigating in September; they produced a report of well over a hundred pages ten months later. If the local London Assembly can do this, then why the bloody hell can't the national Government manage something? When asked this by survivors, Dr Reid kept talking about the Bloody Sunday enquiry - a cumbersome leviathan of a legal bun-fest. Why pick on such an extreme? ( ha, rhetorical question). Do the Government have so little confidence in their ability to hold a reasonable public enquiry or independent enquiry that comes in on time and on budget and reassures the public that they are doing and learning all they can to protect us? Why do we have to be content with a series of pamphlets produced behind closed doors as a result of ''internal enquiries'' - by people appointed by the Prime Minister - that manage to find nobody to blame and outrageously manage to mention the bloody Iraq war not at all, even to dismiss it as a radicalising factor in the bombers? We are exhorted not to be afraid, by Ministers with body guards who work in buildings protected by concrete bollards and armed police, who are driven to work in armoured cars - then in the same breath we are told we face grave threats, and must surrender our civil liberties and carry I.D as we last did as a temporary measure in a time of threatened enemy invasion and ariel bombardment from weapons of mass destruction and nerve gas fears; we must submit to ever more intrusive surveillance, lest one of us, maddened beyond endurance, should self-detonate outside the one mile exclusion zone around Parliament Square.

What the hell is there to be afraid of? You tell me. I get on the tube. I am afraid. But I need to get to work. I'm not in charge of protecting the nation. Is keeping your job more important than saving innocent lives and sparing suffering? The survivors and bereaved I have spoken with have said that it is not about blame, but can nobody in Government see further than a possible threat to their own career? Can anyone in power really say they have listened and they have learned and they have acted on what they have learned? I don't know. Nobody does.

The London Assembly report will detail in page after page the chaos after the carnage, the communication breakdowns, the harrowing testimony of those who held dying strangers and called out for rescuers that were held back from entering tunnels because of ''protocol'', the desperate attempts of ordinary people to help each other in the confusion, the heroism of individuals, police officers, fire officers, and other emergency service workers and London Underground staff. It will also ask questions and make recommendations. It will state the fears of so many that nothing has changed, little has been learned. Are we any safer - or are we less safe than we were a year ago?

Your thoughts would be appreciated...after all, you're the public, you're the target, and you're the ones walking the streets, and travelling on public transport, in London, and everywhere else. Do you feel confident that all the lessons have been learned from last summer? Do you think we'd cope any better with another 7th July? And if the answer is yes, then I'm pleased, and envious - but I wonder if you will still feel the same after the news on Monday.