I DO hope the England cricket team will return to India and play the two Test matches booked before Christmas.

I know it’s easy for me to say this, as I sit here in the safety of my own home, but I believe the players should be courageous and honour their tour arrangements for one overwhelming reason: if we allow our plans to be thwarted and our lives messed up, then the terrorists have won already.

Too much has been conceded to the terrorists.

Everywhere we go we are subjected to security checks. Personal and political liberties have been curtailed by the law about detention without trial for 28 days. And a worse restriction is in the offing with the prospect of identity cards. On a much smaller scale, but still infuriating, is the fact that long ago the litter bins were removed from the City of London as the IRA might have used them to plant bombs. The Irish troubles are a thing of the past, but the bins have not been restored. So the place is forever filthy, and every time I see this filth, I am reminded that here is another small victory for our enemies.

Comparisons are in order. On July 7, 2005 the tube bombings effectively closed down the capital. Buses and trains stopped running and there were no cars. The eerie sound on all the streets was the clack-clack of pedestrian heels. In the London Blitz between 1940 and 1941, bombs rained down on the capital day in and day out, night after night for months. But the buses kept running.

Taxi drivers would say: “I can’t take you all the way along the Tottenham Court Road, but I’ll take you as far as I can towards where you want to go.” The death toll from Hitler’s bombing campaign was 2,000 each week for months. In all, 50,000 Londoners perished.

But there was a slogan: “London can take it!”

And the people heroically carried on.

On December 28, 1940, 14,000 fires raged in the Square Mile. A Past Master of the Worshipful Company of Cutlers told me how he, as a boy, helped his father that night rescue the contents of the company’s wine cellar and save the wrought iron company emblem, the elephant, which hung over the front door of the Livery Hall in Warwick Lane. A hundred yards away, firefighters risked their lives to douse the flames which threatened to engulf St Paul’s. Imagine what a propaganda coup would have been handed to Hitler if those firefighters had thought first of their own necks and let the cathedral burn down.

Also, when London was attacked on 7/7, the Australians were in the middle of a cricket tour. They didn’t pack up and return home but finished the series – widely reckoned to have been the best Test series ever – including two Test matches in London.

I know it’s easy for me to say that I hope the England cricketers will play those two Tests – I’m not the one who’s being asked to go to India when it is a dangerous place. But I hope, if I were to be asked, that I should have the courage to go. By going back, the England team will show uplifting solidarity with the Indian people who suffered most in last week’s atrocity.

■ Peter Mullen is Rector of St Michael’s, Cornhill, in the City of London, and Chaplain to the Stock Exchange.