Their Banner The Cross

Hail, glorious Saint Patrick, thy words were once strong

Against Satan's wiles and an infidel throng;

Not less is thy might where in heaven thou art;

O, come to our aid, in our battle take part.

Lodged In The Mind

Most people in Great Britain have never taken either side in Northern Ireland.

But whereas the IRA was a long time ago, the DUP is now. And they don't like it. They don't like it one little bit. 

They simply do not see it as their own culture in any way at all. Try and imagine an Orange March down your street, and the point is made.

In any case, even the Hard Right now wants rid of Northern Ireland for the sake of Brexit. As we have already seen over the House of Lords, it will pay any price whatever for the sake of Brexit.

Except, that is, break with the Conservative Party, a party that of course exists to conserve the status quo, and which is simply not pursuing Brexit at all.

Post Facts

Those abortion pills through the post, they were not invented for Ireland. Initially, they were not even intended for Ireland.

Women in Ireland happen to have found them on the Internet. But they were there, anyway. Most of their sales are not to Ireland even now. 

So there is absolutely no reason to assume that a Yes vote in tomorrow's referendum would have any effect whatever on their use.

Cast Your Minds

Gavin Havery writes: 

A mining union is supporting campaigners opposed to the creation of an opencast coalmine in North-East countryside.

Protestors gathered at County Hall in Durham on Wednesday morning to demonstrate against the start of extraction operations near Consett, arguing conditions of planning permission are not being fulfilled. 

The Banks Group plans to remove 500,000 tonnes of coal from the Bradley site, but is obliged to create an access road so it can be transported on the A692 from the entrance, which lies between Leadgate and Dipton.

Alan Cummings, secretary of Durham Miners’ Association, said: “The Durham Miners’ Association has opposed opencast mining for many decades and support the locally lead campaign to protect the Pont Valley. 

“It damaged deep mining in the past and now threatens to ruin our environment for no perceivable benefit. Our communities have suffered enough with the decline of the coal industry and they do not need to have more injury added to insult. 

“There are deep mining projects reopening in various parts of England. So, there is little need to rip up the countryside to get coal. We are opposing Banks Group’s destructive and divisive plans to destroy the Pont Valley for its own gain.” 

Planning permission was initially rejected by Durham County Council, but the decision, which was upheld at two public inquiries, was overturned following a lengthy legal battle in the High Court. 

Campaigners, who claim an environmental crime is being committed following the claims there are great crested newts on the site, camped at the entrance to site for almost two months to delay progress on the development. The firm started working the land last week, before the creation of the access road. 

Police, who have arrested 16 people during the ongoing protests, arrested a 23-year-old woman outside County Hall, during the demonstration on Wednesday. She was arrested on suspicion of breaching court-imposed bail conditions by returning to the Banks’ opencast site on Tuesday. 

Stuart Timmiss, head of planning at Durham County Council, has said the ‘necessary monitoring and scrutiny’ had been carried out by the authority to make sure the firm met the obligations necessary to implement the planning permission. 

 Lewis Stokes, community relations manager at The Banks Group, says: “Work at the Bradley surface mine is being progressed in strict accordance with the requirements of its planning permission, and all pre-commencement conditions set out therein have now been discharged.”

Still Unanswered Questions

Mary Dejevsky writes: 

80 days after being found with her father, collapsed on a bench near a Salisbury shopping centre, Yulia Skripal has made a near-miraculous reappearance. She was filmed at an anonymous park-like location, reading a handwritten statement about her plight. In substance, what she said added almost nothing to the two statements issued by the Metropolitan Police in her name before. But the whole short recording was crucial in the messages it was designed to send – to the British, Russian and international public. 

It was designed, first, to reiterate the official British version of what happened, at a time when that version has started to fray rather badly. So, she said, she and her father had been the victims of a nerve agent attack; she had been in a coma for 20 days; the medical treatment had been extremely unpleasant in many respects – her tracheotomy scar was visible evidence. She was now much better, but still recovering. She did not wish to “avail herself” of the assistance offered by the Russian embassy.

But there were also conspicuous differences from the official British version. There was no blaming of Russia. There was no naming of the nerve agent. And Yulia Skripal gave no indication that she envisaged her long-term future anywhere other than Russia (contrary to an earlier British official “leak” that she and her father were to be given new identities and resettled in a third country). 

Her appearance seemed, second, intended to quash some of the more extreme speculation flourishing mostly in the social media – that the Skripals were dead; that there had been no nerve agent attack, and that even if the pair were alive, they would never, ever be seen again. 

And, third, there was a message addressed specifically to Russia, countering its charges that the UK had “kidnapped” one of its citizens and was unlawfully refusing consular access. Here was Yulia Skripal – well, let’s presume it was not a hi-tech confection or a “double” – saying, on camera, that she did not wish to meet Russian diplomats, at least not now. 

What we have here, it seems to me, is an attempt by the UK to limit the damage to its own reputation – damage perhaps it never envisaged, because it assumed everyone would “buy” the “wicked Russia” story. And the reason this had to be done, now, or at all, was that the UK’s silence – media blackout? – about the Skripals had become embarrassing; it invited unwelcome questions, and perhaps it also risked the UK’s “triumph” in orchestrating a collective Western expulsion of Russian diplomats. It is worth noting that some of the more persistent questions have come from journalists not in Britain, but in Italy, Germany and elsewhere. 

At least one of the UK’s opening assertions – that Russia was the only country to have manufactured the nerve agent in question – was challenged early, by the head of the government’s own defence research establishment at Porton Down. Since then, it has been shown that the formula was in the public domain from the mid-1990s and that both the Czechs and the Germans had access to the substance and shared the expertise with their western allies. So the presumption of Russian provenance, let alone Kremlin guilt, was always flawed. 

Questions also surround the actual findings of the chemical weapons watchdog, the OPCW, which sent samples for testing. Not only were aspersions cast on procedures and some actual laboratory findings, but the watchdog hardly enhanced its authority when its head vastly overestimated the quantity of nerve agent supposedly used in a statement that was subsequently corrected.

It is not just details so basic as the nature of the substance, its provenance and the quantity that are still in doubt, however, but a great deal else. Either that, of the information is being deliberately withheld. 

Here are just some of the many other still unanswered questions. 

Precisely where and when were the Skripals poisoned? Sowing confusion is often seen as a typically Russian technique to blindside and divert the enemy. But the Russians have hardly needed to sow any chaos here, because the British have helpfully done it for them. Was the nerve agent a substance or a spray? Was it in their car, in Yulia’s suitcase, in a packet of Russian cereal brought by a friend, or smeared on the front-door handle? What did a Salisbury hospital consultant mean when he wrote to The Times, saying that “no patients have experienced symptoms of nerve agent poisoning” and only three had suffered “significant poisoning”? 

What could have been the motive for such an attack? Why would the Kremlin (or an aggrieved Russian colleague) have waited eight years to hunt down a traitor who – the Russians are on record as saying – had served his time? Why would the Kremlin have risked staging such an atrocity three months before hosting the World Cup? What of the convention that swapped spies are left alone by the country they betrayed so as not to jeopardise further exchanges in future?

Why the on-off searches and decontamination of parts of Salisbury? Why was the policeman, Det Sergeant Nick Bailey, affected, but not the doctor who administered first aid? Why has nothing been heard from either? Did the policeman, as some have hazarded, belong to Special Branch and was his task to tail the Skripals? Where were they when their GPS was switched off that morning?

Why is there no suspect, beyond “Russia”? Why was there no national or international hunt for the culprit? There was a fleeting suggestion that an individual might have fled on the same plane he arrived on; then a flicker of an intelligence intercept from Switzerland that was so general as to mean nothing. Then silence. When the national security adviser, Sir Mark Sedwill, appeared before MPs three weeks ago, he said there were as yet no suspects. That is an extraordinary – hardly credible – admission. So high-profile an attack, such an international rumpus, and still no one, no one, in the frame?

What had Sergei Skripal been doing with his time in Salisbury, aside from joining the Railway Club? Had he done something to upset the Russians, or, indeed, British security? Had he perhaps – and this is the conspiracists’ favourite theory – maintained any connection with his former MI6 handler and neighbour? More to the point, did he have any connection, via his handler, with the ex-MI6 agent, Chris Steele, his Orbis security consultancy and the anti-Trump dossier?

Nearly three months on, and still so many questions and so few answers. Through these clouds of uncertainty let me hazard just three considerations. First, the Kremlin was not involved: the Russians were as surprised by what happened as anyone; Moscow was on something of a charm offensive in advance of the World Cup. There was no Russian interest in spoiling the international atmosphere. Could it have been a security or rogue Russian operator? Who knows.

Second, Yulia, because of her security connections (via her fiancé) in Moscow and her regular travel to and fro, may have been a tempting target for recruitment by MI5/MI6. Was an attempt made? Did it go wrong? At least, it would seem from Yulia’s reappearance this week, that making a visiting Russian disappear forever is, thankfully, a step too far for UK intelligence today. Holding her against her will, however, could be another matter.

And third, I rather suspect that both the UK and Russia know more than they have told. This would help to explain both the relatively mild diplomatic response from Moscow in the last few weeks and the recent summary halt to the UK’s anti-Russian invective. Alas, we may be no closer to the truth than this.

2020 Visions

If you believe Toby Young's "two letters" story, then you will believe absolutely anything. It ranks alongside the laughable account of how Sedgefield selected Tony Blair that appears in both of the official hagiographies and in his own so-called memoirs. Young did not have the grades for Oxford, but his achingly well-connected father made a phone call, so he got in. That's it. That is the whole story.

Now, if you need Toby Young to defend you against a charge of racism, then you are in very serious trouble. He, of course, is a stalwart of the London Conference on Intelligence, along with the circle around the Ulster Institute for Social Research and the Mankind Quarterly, and along with Emil Kirkegaard, that advocate of the rape of drugged children.

Young himself is a published eugenicist, as well as being a self-confessed sexual assailant and supplier of Class A drugs. Since his media friends are trying to worm him back into public life, it is time to revisit the possibility of his prosecution for sexual and drug-related offences.

Today, David Lammy tweets that, "A lucrative market worth £6bn a year is worth fighting over. Simon Kempton @PFEW_HQ is right to draw the direct link between middle-class people buying cocaine and young, poor foot soldiers dying in turf wars in places like Tottenham. The truth hurts."

Add that to his work on Grenfell Tower, on which he is right; on Windrush, on which he is right; and on university admissions, on which he is so much more right than wrong that the other side has been has been reduced to wheeling out Toby Young; and Lammy's bid for Mayor of London is coming along nicely.

But what's this? On this week's Sputnik will be none other Ken Livingstone, by some distance the most successful Mayor of London to date, and once again free of all party constraint. Will he be making The Announcement?

Of course, just as it was perfectly possible to give a first preference vote to George Galloway and a second preference to Sadiq Khan (although Lammy or Diane Abbott would have been better), so it would be perfectly possible to give a first preference vote either to Livingstone or to Lammy, and a second preference to the other.

A contest in which each needed to win the second preferences of the other's supporters is a contest that London needs to have for its own sake, for the sake of the country, and for the sake of the world.

House of Hypocrites?

If it is hypocritical for Labour people to accept peerages, then it has been hypocritical for Conservatives to do so for longer,  since their party has been in favour of an elected second chamber for more than 20 years now, whereas Tony Blair used to pour scorn on the very idea of such a thing.

The Liberal Democrats, who maintain a very considerable presence in the House of Lords, have only ever been in favour of an elected second chamber, as the SDP was throughout its existence, and as the Liberal Party was throughout the twentieth century.

In any case, wanting to abolish something is not the same as pretending that it does not exist. While the House of Lords is there, then someone is going to be in it. Make sure that it is the right people.

Tony Benn said that you could have the House of Lords, or you could have Brexit, but you could never have both. He is being proved right. People invest the pre-Blair House of Lords with the mythology with which they also invest the monarchy.

They should snap out of it by joining the call for the lieutenancy areas to be made the basis of a new second chamber, to which the powers of the House of Lords would be transferred, with remuneration fixed at that of the Commons. In each of those areas, each of us would vote for one candidate, and the top six would be elected, giving 594 Senators in all. Ministers would no longer be drawn from the second chamber; instead, all of them, including the Prime Minister, would appear before it regularly. Its term of office would be six years, while that of the Commons would go back down to four.

But in the meantime, Her Majesty knows where I am.