The hashtag #BritishThreatLevels has taken off as people in the UK respond with humor to warnings of an imminent terrorist attack.
Following the announcement that the official terrorist threat rating would be raised to the highest level, Twitter celebrity Nick Motown decided not to take it too seriously.
โWe’re British. You can’t scare us until you raise the threat level to โI’m sorry, but there’s only continental breakfast left,โโ Motown posted to his 23,500 Twitter followers.
The gag was quickly picked up by other punters, including the head of money transfer service World First, Jeremy Cook.
โWe’re British. I don’t get scared until the threat level hits โReplacement Bus Service,โโ Cook wrote.
In under two hours the hashtag #BritishThreatLevels was trending, with Brits jesting about the kinds of things that would actually scare them.
โWe’ve run out of teabags,โ wrote the hashtagโs creator, Andrea Mann, joking about the nationโs favorite beverage.
โThe temperature goes below 5ยฐC or above 20ยฐC,โ said Ross Lawson, mocking the well-known British obsession with the weather.
โI love the #britishthreatlevels hashtag. it’s laughing in the face of danger, and it’s making me strangely proud,โ said California-based British journalist Nicky Woolf.
โIf you want to understand how Brits respond to terror, #BritishThreatLevels is how,โ wrote Canadian commentator Lauren Dobson-Hughes.
Harsher police measures were introduced as a precaution after Mondayโs bombing at the Manchester Arena concert venue, which took the lives of 22 people, including several minors.
People across the internet loved the comic relief, with many praising stoic Brits for confronting terrorism with laughter.