Woolwich: we have to talk about the bystanders

Brendan O’Neill, Revue Spiked

There’s no more avoiding it: we must discuss the chilling fact that people casually watched and photographed the aftermath of a brutal murder.

The best known of the three heroic women – French-born former teacher Ingrid Loyau-Kennett – has expressed shock that during the eight minutes she was talking to the killers, a large crowd formed, and none of them did anything. She says she is disturbed that lots of people seemed only to want ‘to watch and record the unhappiness of others… watching like it’s on TV’. She thinks this reflects a lack of caring, a dearth of social bonding in modern society. ‘I prefer the values of the past [over] the non-values of today’, she says, ‘where most people don’t seem to give a damn about others’.