Proven Only Too Well

Diplock courts, or whatever they are now being called, are to be kept in Northern Ireland. Every argument that is advanced for them has been supposedly the case throughout the United Kingdom for 22 years. All sorts of measures have been enacted on that purported basis.

Not only that, but the United Kingdom is going to be the worst-performing economy in the G7 this year, so a lid needs to be kept on any popular dissent. It is time, then, for a security emergency, thanks to one or both of the Loyalist paramilitaries and the dissident Republicans. If those did not exist, then our rulers would have to invent them. And at different times, those did not used to exist. 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.

Our masters have already introduced identity cards by requiring them if you wanted to vote, and they have done so specifically because, "They have them in Northern Ireland." Watch out for Diplock courts. Those are already coming to Scotland, and unlike on gender self-identification, there would be nothing that the British Government could possibly say about them even if it wanted to.

The availability of the not proven verdict was the reason why it was ever possible to be found guilty on the verdict of a mere eight people, but the former provision is to go while the latter is to remain. As in our own benighted jurisdiction, anyone who had ever made a complaint of sexual assault will now enjoy lifelong anonymity even after having been convicted of having made a false allegation. And sexual assault itself is to be tried by a salaried State employee sitting alone, under orders to meet the State's target conviction rate, which is clearly 100 per cent. As, of course, it would be, since the State brings the prosecution.

Once this were in place in Scotland, then it would be said to have worked there, and it would be introduced Kingdom-wide. A preemptive strike is urgently necessary. The Holyrood by-election at Nicola Sturgeon's seat of Glasgow Southside cannot possibly come to soon. And in a one-off vote for a Holyrood or Westminster candidate who supported Scottish independence, it needs to be won by Alex Salmond.