ABSTRACT
The events of 7/7 were responsible for initiating a wide debate into the nature and future of British multiculturalism which had, for many, been proved wanting by the fact that the young men responsible for the London bombings had been born in Britain and educated in British schools. There was a widespread sense that the events of 7/7 would mark a turning point in the nature of British race relations and that there needed to be a wide public discussion about the history of British multiculturalism and how it had come to take the institutional forms it had. For a time at least, it looked as if traditions of multiculturalism were somehow to be blamed for the events of 7/7 because the bombers themselves had been killed in the Underground and on the bus at Tavistock Square. Since they could not be brought to trial, and so brought to justice and made to pay, it seemed as if the target for displaced fear and anger was to be multiculturalism itself.1
