The answer, I suppose, is that they think it will sell more newspapers.
A Sun report on what turned out to be two unfounded bomb scares in Birmingham is headed:
Britain gripped by fear with TWO bomb scares in Birmingham
Britain is not gripped by fear and it is irresponsible, even unpatriotic, to say we are.
This seems a good time to repeat what I wrote in the aftermath of the 7/7 bombings in London:
I lived in London for a couple of years in the 1980s, working for some of the time in the big department stores at the height of an IRA bombing campaign. When there was a bomb warning - and they were almost daily events - we each searched our own little part of the building and then carried on with business as usual.
This gave me some modest understanding of what London must have been like in the Second World War, and I am sure it is the spirit that the city will show after the terrorist outrages yesterday.
I live in Birmingham and had not even heard of those bomb scares until I read about them here. They didn't get a mention on social media which is how I usually find out about these things - and the IRA pub bombings still live on here in the folk memory.
ReplyDeleteBack in the 70's a school friend triggered a bomb scare when he accidentally left a bag of clothes in a bus station. Bomb threats and building evacuations were commonplace but everyone just shrugged their shoulders and carried on.