What will life be like in post-Saddam Britain?

The Christian cause wasn't helped by rumours of Bush and Blair praying together - a truly creepy image

In these parts, the first casualty of war was a decent supply of Perrier water. Within a day of the outbreak of hostilities, signs appeared in the local Safeway announcing that "due to the current world situation", the management had been obliged to ration bottled water. Security-wise, it was thought that hoarding by a few shoppers might endanger the supply lines to other civilians in Diss.

It is true that this part of the country does not have a good record when it comes to fortitude in the face of global conflict – the general assumption seems to be that, come the great conflagration, south Norfolk will be a prime target for international terrorism. After 11 September, there was a stampede for the few Second World War gas masks on sale in the local army surplus store, The Quartermaster's Daughter. When supplies ran out, a panicking local lobbed a brick through the shop window and made off with the last one, which was on display.

But more generally there does seem to be a change in the hearts and minds of many of those on the home front. War does that, of course, but this conflict has a different feel to it. With journalists reporting from both sides of the battle front and cameras following tanks, troops, jets and even missiles through the desert, we at home no longer have the sense that we are helpless onlookers. Peacenik or warmonger, we all somehow feel implicated in what is happening, and right now it feels as if we have reached a moment of change.

So how will it be, post-Saddam Britain? A more edgy and fearful place, that's for sure. The years of peace and easy consumerism will begin to seem like an illusion, more fragile and vulnerable than we had ever imagined at the time. The problems of troublesome, luckless, distant parts of the world, over which we worried in a vague, unfocused way, will suddenly become our problems. If some of the terrorist alerts of the past two years have not always been justified, they certainly are now. That has been the one sure effect of war on global terrorism – a drastic increase in the risk of global terrorism.

In matters of faith and trust, small but significant geological shifts are taking place. For all the efforts of the saintly Rowan Williams, this has been a bad war for the God squad. At the very moment when grand moral arguments have been needed, the words of religious leaders have been drowned out by those of pundits, politicians, even journalists. The Christian cause was not helped by rumours that, as they prepared for war, Bush and Blair prayed together – a truly creepy image. There has been a sense that, for the odd bunch who now hold power in America, this was, for all their denials, something of a holy war waged by the fundamentalist right.

Attitudes towards America will change. We had become so used to the view of American society offered by their entertainment industry – liberal like West Wing, sassy like Sex in the City, irreverent like South Park – that we clean forgot about the good-ol'-boy oilmen who now run the show. We certainly no longer trust them but then nor, to judge by the e-mails coming in recently, do many Americans.

As for politics here, a strangely paradoxical process seems to be unfolding. During the war, the opposition has all but disappeared; Iain Duncan Smith's dutiful echoing of the government line, however responsible and patriotic, has made him seem even more marginal than ever.

If there is regime change, it seems likely to occur from within the Labour Party. There have been hints in the way Blair has presented himself that this may be something of a last hurrah for him. After effecting what he clearly believes is the most important policy of our times, it somehow seems unlikely that he will be happy to address a largely ungrateful electorate on matters of transport, housing or agriculture. A dignified, statesmanlike exit may well seem an attractive option.

And yet, for all the cynicism on the home front, the events of the past few days have engaged popular debate and have made people think about world events in a way that no other recent issue has. We have had a shock. We have been shaken out of a mood of comfortable complacency. Once we have put away our gas masks and drunk our hoarded bottles of Perrier, we might just wake up the fact that politics, and the way that we vote, really do matter after all.

terblacker@aol.com