The battle for Britain.(AT WAR)

'HIS was the English pluck, and there is no tougher or truer, and never was, and never will be." Walt Whitman wrote that of the British sailor when he was our enemy during the Revolutionary War. Everyone thought it of ordinary Londoners after 7/7. They stoically pulled themselves out of rubble and blasted subway stations, and by the next day had returned to their business.

The authorities showed their mettle too, with a combination of well-laid contingency plans and intelligent improvisation. They used buses, which were readily at hand, to deliver the wounded to hospitals rather than waiting for ambulances. And knowing that the Madrid bombings had been triggered by mobile phones, they shut down the mobile-phone system all over the city.

A jihadist website claimed, wrongly, that Britain was "burning with fear and terror." That hope had been nourished by the election victory of Spain's socialists three days after last year's Madrid bombing. When the new government withdrew Spain's troops from Iraq, the terrorists inevitably chalked it up as a concession, a suing for peace. In contrast, Tony Blair and the Tory opposition both struck a note of determined defiance.

But two long-term trends are not amenable to the stiff upper lip. Britain, even more than the United States, has an anti-war movement that spans Left and Right. George Galloway, the Saddamite MP, is its Oswald Mosley face, both comic and menacing. But it is well-entrenched in a portion of the political, academic, and chattering classes. It controls the BBC. ...