Overcast day, overcast soul

It's grey and gloomy and muggy here today. That reflects how I'm feeling. I don't want to live in a country where the Prime Minister – for whom I campaigned and voted in 1997 – gets up and, time and again, tries to silence criticism about Iraq. And does so by pretending that the only reason we have terror on our streets is because terrorists basically run around looking for excuses to blow people up, so that if it wasn't Iraq, it would be something else. What drivel! It's so ridiculous that it's risible. Yet, coming as it does from the Prime Minister, it's sinister. It means that there's not going to be any attempt to get rid of the root causes of terror on our streets. And the danger of not dealing with the real causes, but with made-up ones, is that things fester and get worse.

I don't want to live in a country where bombs go off because young Muslims are becoming radicalised because they're alienated, discriminated against, and because they look at what's happening in Palestine and Iraq and conclude that Britain and the USA are anti-Muslim and pro-Israeli. I don't want to live in a country whose policies contribute proactively to death and terror on the streets of Iraq and Palestine and which cannot then understand young people in this country wanting to do something to change things.

I don't want to live in a country where moderate Muslims have to be called in and paraded before society, both to say "See? Not all Muslims are evil!" and also, in a sense, to give account of themselves. I don't want to live in a society that is suspicious of Muslims rather than of terrorists because it assumes that the two are synonymous. I don't want to live in a country that spends most of its time and effort investigating whether there is something intrinsically wrong about Islam, rather than looking at its own actions in the Muslim world. I don't want to live among people whose working assumption (promoted by the media) is that the bombings show that all Muslims are fanatical, evil, violent fundamentalists, when the IRA never led them to ask the same questions about Christianity.

And I don't want to live in a country where the Daily Telegraph can run a front page showing Ken Livingstone in a line with two radical Muslim clerics under the headline, "These men blame Britain!" (Mind you, it would be nice to be able to live here without the Daily Telegraph!)If we have got to the point where we lump all criticism of the government under the same heading, and assume that critical voices are pro-terror voices, and silence engagement by suggesting publicly that it is the same as associating ones self with voices calling for British deaths, then we are deep, deep, deep in the brown smelly stuff!

I don't want to be told to "Go home, then!", either. I'm not saying I don't want to live here. This is my home. I want it to be a good place, though – a place where the logic of terror makes no sense at all.

Permission to use The Dancing Madonna

Lis is happy to give permission for use of her photographs. Please just email her to ask and to let her know you like and want it! I'll try and trace the sculptor. I'd be glad to know, too, who found it helpful.