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Just reading back my last post, and I realise it sounds a little patronising. But, I meant what i said about that sort of thing cutting into the national psyche. Attacks at home are not something that had hitherto featured heavily in the American experience, not until 9/11.
My own experience as a Brit is a little different. The threat of terrorist attack does not feel like a new thing for me, it just feels like a different (albeit more frightening) brand of something that already formed a part of my British experience. Watching news reports at the age of 12, that showed leading government ministers and the Prime Minister of the country exiting the shattered remains of their hotel after a terrorist bomb attack doesn't inspire any feelings of national invulnerability.
Apart from a smattering of years between the Good Friday agreement in '98 and the War on Terror after 9/11, bomb threats, and terror alerts have been a fairly normal undercurrent to life in Britain, for as long as I can remember. The tone of that undercurrent has changed. Many of the IRA attacks were intended to be damaging but not fatal, including the Warrington bombings in which several people were killed but which had apparently gone terribly wrong. The current crop of terrorists seem to go for maximum death toll and that makes them more frightening overall. But the idea that a bomb might go off in the shopping centre when you are doing your Christmas shopping was never far away whilst I was growing up, and has now merely been replaced with the fear that the train or bus will blow up on the way home.
Warrington, by the way, is a nondescript and unimportant northern town, not far from the nondescript and unimportant northern town in which I grew up. That was one of the terrifying things about the bomb scares: they really could happen anywhere.
When i was working as a shop assistant in a clothes store in Bolton, the shopping centre was evacuated several times due to bomb threats/scares, all of which fortunately proved false alarms. But that sort of thing etches itself into your sense of the world around you. As did travelling to work through the devasted remains of the main shopping centre in Manchester in the New Year after it had been hit - (the largest bomb attack in Britain since WW2, and caused over £400 million worth of damage).
None of these attacks had anywhere near the scale of Al Quaeda's attack on America, and I can only guess how such a large scale assault might impact on Britain's national psyche, but what it would not do is shatter a sense of national invulnerability, because we just don't have one to start with :p
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