The noose of terrorism is slowly tightening around London as the freedoms that have long been taken for granted in the birthplace of democracy are being taken away.
Nowhere is this more evident than at the city's international airports, where the welcome banners in a dozen languages stretched across the last-minute duty free counters now present an ironic contrast to the increasingly distrustful attitude of immigration officials.
Even those with European passports are not immune, following the train blasts in Madrid that killed 202 people. Today, London's airports, along with many across Europe, have introduced draconian security measures recalling the pre-European Union days of filling out arrival forms, forming orderly lines and awaiting the grace of an overworked but congenial immigration officer.
The bureaucracy is back, but this time it is tinged with wariness and suspicion. For some, who perhaps conform to an official personification of the escalating threat in Europe, the process takes a little longer, is a little more humiliating, and a lot less welcoming.
At some European airports, a guard examines passengers' passports before they even get off the plane. Amid the quiet hysteria that such security measures symptomise, Londoners are being bombarded daily with warnings from government, police and emergency services that their city is an inevitable target of a terrorist attack. And that when the horror does finally hit home, the city is ill-equipped to cope with anything on the scale of the atrocities that struck Madrid, or New York on September 11, 2001.
The recent arrests of nine young men of Pakistani origin in connection with what Scotland Yard said was a plot to carry out a major bomb attack in London has galvinised the population in fear and readiness, even as a senior member of the Emergency Planning Society has said that Britain is 'very, very badly prepared' for such a spectacular attack.
