The Company That Auntie Keeps

In relation to today's opening of a Marie Stopes "clinic" in Northern Ireland, the BBC is campaigning relentlessly for the extension of the 1967 Abortion Act to that territory. Like the 1969 Divorce Reform Act, which does apply there, the 1967 Abortion Act could never have been enacted if there had still been 100 Irish MPs at Westminster, just as there would be no charges for visiting the doctor in the 26 Counties (or for using the hospital in The City With Two Names if you do so from adjacent Donegal) if those Counties had not seceded from the United Kingdom a generation before the creation of the National Health Service.

But all of that is by the by. The spokeswoman for Marie Stopes is Dawn Purvis, best known for her time as the face and voice of the Progressive Unionist Party, which is in fact the Ulster Volunteer Force, an illegal terrorist organisation, largely inactive but by no means fully disarmed. Most of such voters as it has are probably Protestant fundamentalists, but the party itself is pro-abortion and otherwise extremely liberal socially. Since Purvis resigned in 2010, it has had no seat in the Northern Ireland Assembly.

Northern Ireland's other pro-abortion party has never won a Stormont seat. It is the Workers' Party, and, again, at least a good many of such voters as it still attracts are probably at least occasional practitioners of Catholicism. But the Workers' Party is really the Official IRA, the Stickies, which did not decommission any of its weapons until 8th February 2010, within the last 24 hours of the existence of the Independent International Commission on Decommissioning. Backed by the Soviet Union, it fought an exceptionally vicious war within the Republican community against the CIA-funded Provisional IRA, the Provos. There is, to say the least, no evidence that either organisation has ceased to exist, although the Provos are undeniably far more active.

The entire system of government in Northern Ireland is designed to ensure that the Provos are always in office, while the Stickies' coup within the moribund old Irish Labour Party, which always holds the balance of power in the Republic and has lately secured the election of its candidate for President, effectively places them in the same position. The number two job in each state is now always held by those who not very long ago were trying to bomb them both out of existence in pursuit of the claims to 32-County sovereignty on the part of their respective Army Councils. Both of which still exist.

And with one of which the BBC is lining up on a matter of public policy against all members of the Northern Ireland Assembly and almost everyone to hold elected office at any level in Northern Ireland. But alongside the Ulster Volunteer Force, which regularly foments riots, and which committed murder in broad daylight on the streets of Belfast as recently as 30th May 2010.