Lobster on the British State Supporting Loyalist Terrorism in Northern Ireland

Last week, the Torygraph, Scum and Heil all tried smearing Jeremy Corbyn as a supporter of terrorism and the IRA in Northern Ireland. This was due to his sincere efforts to find a peaceful solution to the Troubles, and release people he believed had been wrongfully convicted.

Mike and Eoin Clarke have effectively demolished this smear, as I pointed out in a post yesterday. You can read what Mike and Eoin have to say at http://voxpoliticalonline.com/2017/05/27/dont-believe-the-warmongers-on-jeremy-corbyn-get-your-story-straight/

However, the Conservative party and the British state certainly supported terrorism in Ulster, Loyalist terrorism. They gave intelligence information on the IRA and other Republican organisations to Loyalist paramilitaries, effectively using them as death squads for a series of ‘extra-judicial executions’. Or what is usually called assassinations.

This came out very strongly in a documentary series broadcast in 1999, Loyalists, which featured a series of interviews with Ulster Loyalist terrorists and politicians. This was discussed in an article on the British state’s dirty little war in Northern Ireland by the editor, Robin Ramsay, ‘Northern Ireland Redux’ in Lobster, 38, Winter 1999: 23-25. This stated

Peter Taylor has made more TV programmes about Northern Ireland since 1969 than any British journalist. His most recent was the documentary, Loyalists, earlier this year, a series of interviews with Loyalist paramilitaries and politicians. This was followed by a book, Loyalists (Bloomsbury, 1999), which contained some of the interviews in that programme. Like the TV programme, this is fascinating stuff for anyone interested in events in Northern Ireland. But the book and TV programme are not identical. The most striking section of the TV programme was an interview with a UDA? UFF? member (I didn’t tape it and can’t remember the details) who described the torrent of official information they were receiving from their British military and intelligence connections in the late 1980s – more material than he knew what to do with, he said. This section is missing from the book. It’s not that Taylor actually tries to avoid this area: it just doesn’t get its due. the biggest story, the most important development, in our knowledge of the Loyalist paramilitaries in the past ten – may be twenty – years gets three and a bit pages from Taylor.

After recounting how in 1989 the UDA/UFF were getting official, classified intelligence material from the security forces, he writes

“To republicans and nationalists it was clear evidence of collusion between members of the security forces and the loyalist paramilitaries’ (emphasis added).

Not so: it was clear evidence to anyone.

Taylor describes how, using state intelligence, the UDA’s ‘targeting’ of the Nationalist community improved: fewer Catholics were murdered at random, more IRA members. Another way of describing these events would be this: the British Army was running the UDA’s assassins against the IRA – and successfully, too. In effect, in the late 1980s the British state decided that while they could not kill the IRA openly (the late Alan Clark MP’s solution: let the SAS loose), they could get the Prods to do it for them. A case can be made that part of the reason we have an IRA cease-fire at present is the inroads made into the IRA’s ranks by this joint Army-UDA assassination programme. (P. 23).

Any positive benefits that may have resulted from this – few innocents killed, the IRA being brought round to the bargaining table – have to be set against the fact that under Thatcher, the British state was supporting terrorism and had overturned the rule of law in Northern Ireland.

This adds a whole new dimension to Tory hypocrisy.

At the same time they were demonising the Labour party for openly stating that negotiations needed to be held with the Republicans, if peace was ever to be achieved in Northern Ireland, the Tory party and Thatcher were secretly holding such talks.

Just as the Tories were also using Loyalist terrorists as their death squads.

Tags: 'Loyalists' (TV Series), 'The Telegraph', Alan Clark, Armed Forces, Assassinations, British Intelligence, Daily Mail, Eoin Clarke, IRA, Jeremy Corbyn, Lobster, Margaret Thatcher, Northern Ireland, Paramilitaries, Peter Taylor, Robin Ramsay, SAS, The Sun, UDA, UFF, Ulster Loyalists, Vox Political