Our Communities At Grave Risk

The raising of the pension age to 68 has been delayed until after next year's General Election, because we had been coming to realise that the reason why the French would never be made to work until they dropped, or reduced to a pension such as ours that was less than half their present one, was because of how they reacted to the suggestion of far less than that. But this is only a delay, and neither party will go into that Election promising not to go through with the measure itself.

We also look approvingly at the Dutch farmers, and while some of us are baffled as to how this Israeli Government was supposed to be different from its predecessors, we cannot deny our admiration for those who have risen against it. We observe all of this against the background of our own strikes, which will soon have been running for a year. Lo and behold, there is renewed attention to Northern Ireland. From a Government already possessed of powers beyond those which the Israeli Government was seeking to give itself, prepare for the clampdown. And prepare to be told to blame it on the Loyalist paramilitaries and the New IRA. Those are not discrete categories.

Republican and Loyalist paramilitaries have always been heavily involved in traditional organised crime in general, and in drug-dealing in particular, leading to generations of professional and social interaction of the kind that also takes place routinely among, for example, rival Mafia families, as well, as of course, the sort of merciless bloodshed that goes on in that world.

There has never been any secret that the Loyalist organisations were off-the-books arms of the British State, while the old IRA was also riddled from top to bottom with Police informants, MI5 assets, and so on, as was the Real IRA, and as at least has been the much older Continuity IRA, which goes back to the split over abstentionism in 1986. The recent documentaries about David Rupert, and about "Robert" by the superlative Peter Taylor, undeniably broke ground, and were a reminder of how good the BBC could be, but they could not have surprised anyone.

And early last month, four Protestants, at least one with known Loyalist paramilitary connections, were arrested in relation to the attempted murder of Detective Chief Inspector John Caldwell, for which the New IRA had already claimed responsibility. There has always been a school of thought that the New IRA was a false flag operation. There has never been any doubt as to the true nature of the likes of the UDA, the UVF, and Ulster Resistance, which provided the then Queen's Government with confidence and supply from 2017 to 2019. Across that ostensible divide, it is all heating up over there just as it is all threatening to heat up, by our standards, over here.