Criminalising Terrorism- A Thought

The death of Margaret Thatcher has brought the IRA hunger strikes back into the news, with a lot on the far left of British politics and the far right of Irish politics blaming her for their deaths.

What the hunger strikers wanted was to be granted political status- not to be treated simply as common criminals.

Yet when after 9/11 the United States refused to treat captured terrorists as criminals but instead granted them a special status- in Guantanamo Bay- many people were outraged, and that includes almost all those on the far left who blamed Thatcher for letting the hunger strikers do the decent thing.

Dead Terrorist Still Dead.

I see that an investigation into the murder of Pat Finucane has found that he was murdered on the encouragement of someone within the security forces.

If so that is terribly wrong but it does not change the facts that Pat Finucane was not a "human rights lawyer", he was a member of the IRA and was therefore a supporter of murdering people. If he was killed by the flames he fanned that is not a tragedy.

Most of his family seem to have been in the IRA as well, so it is hard to take the portrayal of them as brave fighters for justice very seriously.

Blaming The Victims

Just in case anyone doubted that Northern Ireland's Parades Commission is simply a sop to terrorists and the people who love them.

Water, Water Everywhere (Except In The Taps).

Northern Ireland is suffering water shortages despite being the wettest part of the UK. This old post by Tim Worstall about the difference in water standards in the UK is worth looking at again:

England got for profit private companies, Wales a not for profit mutual, Scotland a government run company and Northern Ireland direct government supply. In terms of cheapness of supply, higher purity of that supply and lower environmental damage from that supply a decade later the best to worst in order was England, Wales, Scotland, Northern Ireland.

It probably isn't so surprising that Northern Ireland is the place having trouble.

Saville

After spending over a hundred million pounds to reach a pre-determined verdict the Saville Inquiry is being treated as though it actually uncovered any new information.

We know now what we knew before, that the soldiers claim to have believed that they were under attack before they shot the protesters whereas the protesters say that the paras fired without provocation.

Nothing has changed as a result of Lord Saville declaring that he believes the latter version of events.

All the talk about whether the soldiers involved will be prosecuted ignores the fact that whilst the Saville Report is portrayed as being definitive and unarguable, it is extremely unlikely that the evidence could be considered to prove the guilt of anyone beyond reasonable doubt.

In fact official inquiries are a useful way of throwing the authority of the law behind a particular version of history without actually subjecting it to the rigour the law usually requires.

See also.

Peter Robinson Ousted.

David Vance from the 'A Tangled Web' blog, was standing against Peter Robinson in East Belfast for the TUV. His vote tally of 1800 odd, is slightly greater than Robinson's margin of defeat to the Alliance candidate.

Awesome!

Peter Robinson is now going to spend more time with his family.

Poor bugger.

So Here's To You Mrs Robinson.....

The ongoing Iris Robinson train wreck in Northern Ireland looks as if it will make her husband's position as First Minister untenable. The fact that she had an affair with someone 40 years her junior and then proceeded to give him financial favours looks corrupt and the fact that her husband helped her to conceal it after the fact is bad (though understandable). It also makes the 19 year old look like a gigalo.

In 2007 Peter Robinson's predecessor as DUP leader and First Minister, Ian Paisley, resigned after months of controversey about his son's involvement in property deals. To lose two leaders over the sleazy behaviour of their families ought to persuade the DUP to stop acting like a family business run by two clans and to actually become a normal political party.

I Wish It Could Be Christmas Everyday.

Christmas time is that special day when a bearded man sneaks into childrens' rooms to empty his sack. Unless of course you are in the Gerry Adams household when it is pretty much a daily occurance.

Bea Does Belfast

Beatrix Campbell OBE, diverts her attention away from uncovering ritual abuse to look at Northern Ireland.

The coverage of the Independent Monitoring Commission's (IMC's) 22nd report on paramilitary activities, vindicates that tradition. Shootings by dissident republican sects at war with both the British and Sinn Féin defined the news. A month ago when US secretary of state Hillary Clinton visited Northern Ireland it was the same story: new threat from republicans. So, is peace in Northern Ireland still threatened by the republicans?

No, says the IMC.

As useless as the IMC are it does seem unlikely that in a year which has seen three murders and several foiled car bombings they would say that there was no threat from republicans. Sure enough on pages 11-14 of the IMC report that she links to it goes into detail about a great number of attacks by the Real IRA. This has been pointed out in the comments of the article by someone.

She continues:

In fact, the Provisional IRA has disarmed and disbanded.

First of all the PIRA has not disbanded, the IMC believes they have disarmed though. Secondly she was talking about "dissident republicans", which are those not in Sinn Fein or the PIRA.

She then indulges in a bit of unsourced allegations:

The sovereign government finally established at Stormont was wrecked not by republicans but Peter Mandelson's undiplomatic and undignified endorsement of a unionist agenda and by MI5's messing about with spooks at Stormont.

Peter Mandelson, whom in most respects I can't stand, was probably the best Northern Ireland secretary since Roy Mason. So who is Campbell referring to when she talks about "the sovereign government" and where is their evidence of this great plot? She doesn't even provide a link that flatly contradicts her claim as she did earlier, evidence is not needed.

Jumping forward a bit Bea adds:

These figures indicate some very worrying trends: loyalist gangsterism is rife, dangerous and productive, and dissident sects have murdered members of the security forces

This is evidence that she is mendacious rather than simply stupid. Reading the sentence is clearly supposed to give the impression that the "dissident sects" who have murdered members of the security forces were loyalist gangsters rather than the republican gangsters who she is trying to airbrush out of the picture.

Is there anyone else who is so consistently wrong about so many issues as Beatrix Campbell?

Law & Orde

January 2007- Chief of the Police Service of Northern Ireland, Hugh Orde, welcomes Sinn Fein's decision to participate in policing:

"I have always said that no ideology or individual should stand between the public and that service and that the community is entitled to have their public representatives hold this police service to account."

September 2009- Head of the Association of Chief Police Officers, Hugh Orde, condemns the idea of allowing people to elect police commissioners because of the dangers of extremists:

Asked whether he feared that a BNP or far-right candidate could seize upon this, Sir Hugh replied: "Yes, that is a risk. If you have a system whereby anyone can stand to be elected as the local police commissioner, you could have any Tom, Dick or Harriet standing. If they can muster enough support against a backdrop of public apathy, then of course it is a risk."

I guess some people aren't entitled to have their public representatives hold the police service to account after all.

Incidentally the chances of the BNP having a representative elected to be a police commissioner is trivial. As it is they gain seats in proportional representation systems because they only need 10% or so of the vote. The idea that they could win an election to a single office is absurd. They do very badly in council elections under FPTP because if voters can vote against the BNP they generally do. They could no more win an election in large constituency for one office than they could win a parliamentary constituency.

Then again ACPO is the Chief Constables' trade union so it is fairly obvious that they will oppose any move to diminish their power.

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It's Completely Unacceptable, Except When It Isn't

As I understand it for a contemporary politician to praise a dead politician who made some controversial remarks about ethnic relations 40 years ago means that he should be ostracised and must lose the whip.

However when a contemporary politician praises a dead politician who made some controversial remarks about ethnic relations 40 years ago then that's fine.

I must be missing something. Labour calls for Daniel Hannan to be disciplined for praising Enoch Powell, even though it was quite clearly not in relation to Powell's record on immigration and even the ludicrous 'dog whistle' argument doesn't stand up to much scrutiny given the forum in which he made the remarks.

The predictions made in Powell's "Rivers of Blood" speech were incorrect and it is not unreasonable to argue that they inflamed racial tensions in a most unhelpful way. The late W.F. Deedes has argued that Powell's speech made it much harder for later politicians to even address immigration.

However he never argued for mass ethnic cleansing as the recently deceased Ted Kennedy did when in the context of Northern Ireland he said that protestants " should be given a decent opportunity to go back to Britain". Kennedy's remarks were made in the context of the murderous atmosphere of early 1970s Ulster where the rivers were already "foaming with much blood" even before this crass ignorant intervention. It was a much more dangerous arena for political demagoguery than peaceful mainland Britain.

Yet Gordon Brown's praise of this man is acceptable whereas Hannan's praise of Powell is beyond the pale and Brown specifically praises Kennedy in relation to Northern Ireland whereas Hannan specifically disagrees with Powell comments on immigration! If instead of warning of the dangers of mass immigration (however inaccurately), Enoch Powell had waited for several hundred years before demanding that the descendents of those immigrants be given an opportunity to leave then that would it be okay to praise him?

More Than Meets The Eye?

Does anyone else think that something seems a little bit odd here:

Around 20 families were helped by police to evacuate their homes in the Lisburn Road area of south Belfast and seek safety on Tuesday night.

115 people, 20 families decide in unison to seek sanctuary. That seems somewhat over the top, there have been flare ups of racial violence in other cities over the years but have never culminated in the mass exodus of one community, even in situations where more severe violence has occurred.

I don't want to impugn the motives of the victims here but I get the strong impression that there is something that isn't being reported whether that is what is the background to the tensions or whether any paramilitary groups are involved.

Why Gordon Brown Has Struggled.

I'm not going to say too much more about the Prime Minister (at the time of writing) Gordon Brown partly because I think it is getting a bit boring and partly because I'm beginning to feel sorry for him. I don't believe, as some people do, that he is mad but he is clearly under a great deal of stress and there is no obvious relief coming.

His 'Obama Beach' gaffe is vaguely reminiscent of former Canadian Prime Minister Paul Martin repeatedly referring to the allied invasion of Norway in a speech about D-Day a couple of years ago. The Brown/Martin comparison has often been made but it's worth going over: both men came to power as finance ministers in centre left governments after routing their Tory opposition, both men served in that role for a long time as their Prime Minister amassed multiple election victories, both men had leadership ambitions and ultimately derailed their leader and finally both men led their once invincible parties to defeat and the verge of electoral oblivion. Critically both of them were widely hailed in the media as being substantial figures who would bring renewal to their respective parties after a decade in power under formally popular PMs who had lost their lustre.

I think the reason that they disappointed their followers so much when they actually took office is because of "Overrated Finance Minister Syndrome". The world underwent a sustained period of growth from the early 1990s onwards because of the end of the Cold War, the opening of previously closed markets like China & India, the advent of the internet and just the economic cycle. This led people in various countries to attribute the economic success to the man lucky enough to be sitting in the hotseat when the boom was in full swing. Proclaiming a Chancellor as a political titan because he happens to be in office during an economic upswing is akin to declaring that a Defence Secretary is a genius because our army could invade Luxembourg.

As well as Brown and Martin, Brian Cowen in Ireland is an example of the same kind of thing as was Paul Keating of Australia in the 1990s (somewhat earlier than the others it must be said). When they actually took power and had to rely on their abilities to deal with multi faceted problems where their input actually mattered voters soon realised that they weren't particularly brilliant and in fact had been posted to the finance brief because they were fairly awkward figures who were not necessarily suited to roles that involve prolonged exposure to the public.

The question should not be why Gordon Brown is struggling as Prime Minister but why so many people were convinced he would do well given that he had never occupied a role which tested the qualities required to be Prime Minister.

Inappropriate Campaign Slogans.

If you were an MEP seeking a 5th consecutive term to take your tenure in Strasbourg and Brussels to a quarter of a century what would be a particularly absurd slogan to use? Ulster Unionist MEP Jim Nicholson thinks that- Vote For Change- isn't a call to vote himself out.

Department Of Made Up Statistics.

You may remember the great slapfight in the left section of the blogosphere over Amnesty's abuse of the data to make the claim that 1 in 10 women suffer from rape and violence each year, when as more numerate bloggers this was completely unsupported by any data.

Anyway one of Northern Ireland's hundreds of human rights quangos has produced a report claiming that 1 in 4 men in the province physically abuse their partners each year, because evidently 1 in 10 wasn't ludicrous enough. The actual evidence suggests that even the lifetime rate of abuse is substantially lower than that.

What is the motivation behind the absurd abuse of statistics to try and make out that violence against women is endemic? The actual figures suggest that it is a serious enough problem, but when they produce numbers that purport to prove that domestic violence is endemic within society they achieve three things- demonise all men, make domestic violence seem almost normal rather than deviant behaviour and to make sensible people sceptical of all claims made by the organisations that tell such big lies.

Reverting To Type.

I was going to post something about the murders perpetrated by the provisional, continuity, I can't believe it's not the, Real IRA but other people have pretty much said what I was going to say.

Can we stop flattering them with the term 'dissidents' though? It gives the impression that they are some kind of Ulster Solzhenitsyn's bravely standing up to oppression.

It's a shame that over the last decade the government, media and ultimately the public have already shown that they are willing to reward terrorism in Northern Ireland.

Moral Cretinism.

The government is to be asked to pay £12,000 to the families of all those killed during the Troubles - including members of paramilitary groups.

This is like extending Holocaust victims compensation to the families of Auschwitz guards who died when they fell out of their turrets.

More on the same story at ATW, Mr Eugenides and Obnoxio.

Cultural Continuity.

It this day and age isn't it good to see that some communities are keeping old traditions thriving.

Community Work.

I've just been reading something about sectarian divisions in Northern Ireland and how they have worsened in recent years. I realise that this probably makes me a very bad person, but one of the reasons given for increased tensions strikes me as being extremely funny:

Of 214 kids who had attacked children of the other religion, 158 said they recognised them from cross-community schemes.'

Labour Sabateurs Keep Up Good Work

After Labour's last bye-election disaster, by which I mean their most recent not their final one, in Henley I only half jokingly speculated that Harriet Harman might have been secretly trying to undermine the Labour Party in the build up to the election by pushing wildly unpopular policies right before the election. I don't think Harperson is acting alone, in the run up to the bye election in the heavily Roman Catholic constituency Glasgow East, several Labour MPs led by Diane Abbott decided it would be a brilliant time to put forwards a bill to make abortion legal in Northern Ireland, against the wishes of all the local parties in the province (although Sinn Fein are happy to practice post-natal abortion). Naturally they couldn't have waited until after the votes had been cast. Another brilliant move by the Labour sisterhood to sabotage the party from within.