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Dear Aussies: don't come to London for holidays

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My Parramatta High School sweetheart told me she was flying to London to catch up on my 27 years abroad. My heart soared. A few swapped messages later I told her what was really on my mind – fellow Australian, stay away. Why I gave the warning is a cautionary tale of being an Oz abroad. After decades of being sofa-surf host to the hotel-allergic Sydneysiders I was typing words of unwelcome:

"The morale in London is so low at the moment, with Brexit, blades and burning towers, you've made a good call to hang out with the gloating French. We are a nation best left to our own self-inflicted sufferings."

The northern summer has turned hot but the mood is dark. Blow after blow has hit since the spring: a Westminister drive-through killing; a nail-bomber at a Manchester kiddie concert; knifemen slayers striking a pub street by Borough fruit market. That last assault had brought out the plucky inner-Churchill in us all: "Keep Calm and Carry a Pint" was the rallying cry honouring a Londoner photographed fleeing terror while saving his lager from grim Islamist butchery.

Last Wednesday the pluck snapped. London woke up to see Grenfell Tower, a high-rise of the poor in wealthy Kensington, burning like a wicker man. The social housing block had been clad on the cheap to prettify it for surrounding posh people in what amounted to Little Lucifer fire-starters. This adornment had been hammered to a soundtrack of a Conservative government "Red Tape Challenge", a dob-in-a-rule campaign to rid Britain of the "monster" of health and safety regulations. 

Now the tape played wobbly scenes of  a housing block as Roman Candle, set to a soundtrack of screaming children. The Blitz spirit left me. I wept in sorrow and self-pity. I live in a high-rise block, and had spent years nagging about fire safety against cold stares of council-controlled apparatchiks. The week before, that suicide van of fanatics had crashed at the bus stop at Borough I'd sat at every day with my young daughter. The attack had seemed the apex of cruelty. Then this week, another van was driven deliberately with intent to injure into a group of Muslims in Finsbury Park, killing one and injuring others.

All this with the backdrop of Grenfell Towers, which smokes with 78 lives likely lost and bodies still inside. London is overshadowed by a medieval symbol: a new black tower of the scorched poor. It tops off a year-long bonfire of tolerance, equality and empathy that followed the vote to leave the European Union.

 Just two weeks ago a snap election returned a fanatical, but now minority, government propped up by Northern Ireland sectarians. For years its obsession had been penny-pinching austerity; its font of unity harping against refugees. Yet mine is a city built by new arrivals invited to clear the craters of Blitz woes. From Notting Hill carnival to Pakistani fruit stalls, Polish plumbers and Brazilian beauties, I'd seen waves of immigrant cliches propel London from a grimness I'd arrived to as a migrant in 1990, to a city transformed to a sparkle approaching the multicultural Sydney I had left. 

The tower ignited the week Prime Minister Theresa May started Brexit talks to wall the island from having to welcome any more of Europe's huddled masses. London is no longer a holiday town. Any guest surfing my sofa would suffer my rage at the turnaround of a country that once welcomed me as a migrant. France has elected a handsome young leader, Emmanuel Macron. Go to Paris, and eat cake under the Arc de Triomphe I say. England must stare alone at its ashes until it figures if Australians, if any strangers, are welcome to the tower it has built.  

David Monaghan is a former Fairfax journalist working in London.

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