Maximum Vigilance

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 for a security emergency, so here come the dissident Republicans.

Their hatred of Gerry Kelly, the erstwhile IRA Chief of Staff who is still a member of the Army Council while also serving on the Policing Board, is very real indeed. Anyone who thinks that they are off-the-books operations of the IRA is just making it up, and if questioned, on this as on any issue, will usually produce some anecdote that made him look like the central historical figure of the last however many decades, or at least in possession of peerless expertise. It is a Boomer thing.

On Northern Ireland, such people cannot forgive those who live there for almost never being as Unionist as they are, and never in the same doolally integrationist way, nor can they forgive the people who voted for Ken Livingstone, Jeremy Corbyn and John McDonnell while living 24 hours a day with the Troubles in London, whereas they themselves caught the train home to the Home Counties from which they have now worked for years. No bomb would go off anywhere near them. 

Like the Loyalist paramilitaries, if the dissident Republicans did not exist, then our rulers would have to invent them. And at different times, those did not used to exist. In March, four Protestants, at least one with known Loyalist paramilitary connections, were arrested in relation to the attempted murder of Detective Chief Inspector John Caldwell. In May, there were a further 11 arrests, including of eight Protestants. One shies away from this kind of thing, but there has always, always, always been a school of thought that the New IRA was a false flag operation.

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, when they are not letting each others' blood without mercy. 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.

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. That is all unconnected to any sincere pursuit of a United Ireland. Sinn Féin is so shot through, so to speak, with British Establishment payroll voters that they have first swung it in favour of the EU and now, if only in all but name for the time being, they have swung it behind NATO, of which whether Ireland was in fact a member has always been the non-Yes-No question that British membership of the EU has also become. In either case, if you think that the answer is a straight "No", or even "No" at all, then you are not in the club. Sinn Féin has lately received the President of the United States before attending the King's Coronation, so it is in the club.

With Michelle O'Neill as First Minister, or even with only the present state of affairs in Northern Ireland, and with Mary Lou McDonald as Taoiseach, then who would need a border poll? Why would the IRA want one? No referendum would ever endorse rule by the Army Council. Once that were established across the whole of Ireland, then the beneficiaries would never wish to give it up, and everyone else would find it practically impossible to make them. That day is now well within sight. But there will always be dissidents of one sort or another. They are too useful for there ever to be allowed not to be.

Still, when I tell you that there is going to be a hung Parliament, then you can take that to the bank. I spent the 2005 Parliament saying that it was psephologically impossible for the Heir to Blair's Conservative Party to win an overall majority. I predicted a hung Parliament on the day that the 2017 General Election was called, and I stuck to that, entirely alone, all the way up to the publication of the exit poll eight long weeks later. And on the day that Rishi Sunak became Prime Minister, I predicted that a General Election between him and Keir Starmer would result in a hung Parliament.

To strengthen families and communities by securing economic equality and international peace through the democratic political control of the means to those ends, including national and parliamentary sovereignty, we need to hold the balance of power. Owing nothing to either main party, we must be open to the better offer. There does, however, need to be a better offer. Not a lesser evil, which in any case the Labour Party is not.