Comment: Britain uses terror when it suits
If the British government continues in this way they may be sure that the last shreds of the mask of liberalism will be torn from their faces.
- Marx, MacDonnell and Milner on ‘police terrorism in Ireland’ in 1872
There’s little enough to meaningfully separate how Keir Starmer, the human rights lawyer with the knighthood and the Oxford law degree and the London townhouse, and Brian Nelson, the loyalist and arms importer and British state agent from the Shankill Road, view terror and its use. They have different accents and etiquettes and would be welcome in different sorts of establishments, but they’re two men who respect, who engage in and who defer to savagery when it benefits the state they serve, two men representative of the character of the nation they claim.
Britain didn’t proscribe Nelson’s UDA till 1992. It will ban Palestine Action as a terrorist organisation. Didn’t take long. It was only founded in 2020. One embarrassing attack on an RAF base and empire lashes out. The haste to ban Palestine Action compared to the indulgence afforded the UDA might seem incoherent. It’s not. That difference in treatment is necessary, in each instance, to advance British interests. And sure Starmer would say she, like Israel, has a right to advance her interests.
When Britain considered the UDA lawful its intelligence agent Nelson was importing guns from apartheid South Africa. The RUC gave one of these guns to a UFF gunman to use in the Sean Graham bookmakers’ killings of five people. The UDA also assassinated solicitor Pat Finucane, again with Nelson colluding with the British state, though collusion shouldn’t be considered the appropriate term – how do you collude with yourself, how were the state and the paramilitary significantly distinct in aspirations and values? The state managed to resist a public inquiry into Finucane’s murder till late last year.
That resistance – as well as its fight of a court order to hold an inquiry into its assassination of Sean Brown, abducted outside his GAA clubhouse in Bellaghy by the LVF with the help of British state agents – isn’t about protecting loyalist paramilitaries. It’s about defending the British state, its ongoing use and support of terror.
In October 2023 Starmer said Israel can do whatever it likes. “Israel has the right to do everything it can to get those hostages back safe and sound,” including, in remarks he’s since tried to retract, the right to cut off water and energy to Gaza, a war crime. His RAF espionage planes have conducted more than 500 flights over Gaza, in “collusion with what has been called a crime against humanity”, said former South African foreign minister Naledi Pandor. And he has allowed British companies to keep sending munitions to Israel despite an export ban. This is terror he recognises serves him and his state.
Palestine Action are the terrorists though. This use of anti-terror legislation, how nation states treat those they considers threats, isn’t anomalous. It’s written into the histories of the west and the states that lead it.
'They laid the ground for one of the most dramatic operations carried out by MK'
“When the plant blew up, we were so excited,” wrote Kader Asmal in his memoir, speaking of the 1980 bombing of an oil refinery in South Africa. Asmal, who would serve as South Africa’s education minister after the apartheid regime fell, was a lecturer in Trinity College at the time and had co-founded the peaceful Irish Anti-Apartheid Movement. He’d also asked the Provisional IRA to help Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK), the military wing of Nelson Mandela’s ANC party, bomb Sasolburg’s oil refinery.
Asmal through a friend in the Irish Communist Party made contact with Gerry Adams “and it was arranged” that two IRA volunteers would meet two South African counterparts in Dublin to take them for a fortnight’s training, wrote Asmal. Other IRA volunteers carried out the reconnaissance work on the plant. “Though I no longer recall the names of the persons who volunteered, if indeed I ever knew them, they laid the ground for one of the most dramatic operations carried out by MK personnel,” he wrote, an operation that brought him and his wife Louise, their movement, great joy. “The propaganda value and its effect on the morale of the liberation movement were inestimable. Yet only Louise and I knew the attack on Sasolburg was the result of reconnaissance carried out by members of the IRA,” he wrote.
There’s an irony to the Free State liberals like Mick Clifford who love claiming two things: that we need to reclaim our tricolour from the far right, to return it to the people proud of our “nation’s record in helping the world’s most downtrodden”; and that we need to resist “the rewriting of that past”, the shared history of the northern conflict, that we mustn’t glorify the likes of the IRA volunteers who travelled to South Africa, under the tricolour, to attack the apartheid state. (And they’ll never forgive a Ballymurphy man's participation in the guard of honour at a South African funeral.)
Aside from the obvious, the IRA and ANC shared something: Britain used consider them terrorist organisations. “When the ANC says that they will target British companies, this shows what a typical terrorist organisation it is. I fought terrorism all my life and if more people fought it, and we were all more successful, we should not have it and I hope that everyone in this hall will think it is right to go on fighting terrorism,” said Margaret Thatcher in 1987 press conference in which she, helpfully, drew equivalences among the ANC, IRA and PLO.
For Thatcher the “typical terrorist organisation” was one that targeted British companies, British interests. For Starmer and his government Palestine Action is to be banned for its “disgraceful” action at an RAF base where activists claimed to have put refuelling tankers “out of service". They did it because, “Despite publicly condemning the Israeli government, Britain continues to send military cargo, fly spy planes over Gaza and refuel US and Israeli fighter jets," said a Palestine Action spokesperson.
'What they’re doing is working'
They have an Irish branch. I went to one of their members’ court appearances.
I’m not a serious journalist. A serious journalist attending court to write about proceedings wouldn’t stand on the court steps afterwards in solidarity with the accused as they read a defiant statement. But it was the least – the least – I could do when I was down in Ennis District Court at a sitting dealing with the activists' attempted inspections of warplanes planes at Shannon Airport. "I’m doing what is necessary to save innocent lives because when I am older I want to be able look back and say I did everything I could to stop this genocide. Saoirse don Phailaistín,” said one of the actvists at the time.
Israel’s ongoing genocide in Palestine isn’t about us. Though we don’t directly experience its depravity it asks questions of us. What will you accept? What are you OK with? Have you surrendered to self interest? Have you maintained your compassion? Will you shut up and give up? If nothing else, beyond the ethics of extending solidarity to others, your answers to these questions will inform the way you live your life, the value and worth you will hold in your brothers and sisters, for however long you have. Only the most arrogant, or wilfully self anaesthetised, among us can believe otherwise.
The activists – proscribed in Britain and prosecuted in Ireland – are punished for answering these questions in ways their respective ruling classes don’t want. They weren’t obedient, but, “Our problem is that people are obedient all over the world, in the face of poverty and starvation and stupidity, and war and cruelty. Our problem is that people are obedient while the jails are full of petty thieves, and all the while the grand thieves are running the country,” said historian Howard Zinn in a speech after his arrest at an anti-Vietnam war protest in 1970.
And though frustration with the desecration of whatever’s left of western rule of law is understandable, the acceptance that this is how it’s always been is more helpful a realisation.
“How do we know that law does not bring order? Look around us. We live under the rules of law. Notice how much order we have? People say we have to worry about civil disobedience because it will lead to anarchy. Take a look at the present world in which the rule of law obtains. This is the closest to what is called anarchy in the popular mind – confusion, chaos, international banditry,” said Zinn in the same speech.
The men in loyalist paramilitaries, those one-time assets, and their friends in the Orange Order and DUP, they embarrass the British elite, which doesn’t like its reflection. That Elizabeth II considered the Orange Order with disdain, according to state papers published after her death that had her referring to the order’s “silly marching season”, should elicit more contempt for the monarch than (the understandable) derision for those she considered beneath her. DUP co-founder Wallace Thompson has, belatedly, realised, “We’re not wanted by Britain; we’re strangers in our own land.” He’s partly right – they were never wanted but were needed to divide Irish working people.
My anger at these British proxies in the north, those subsumed into Britain, will never equal that which I have upwards at the structures of the state itself. I think that’s common. It’s why, after a few pints, republicans sing songs about surface to air missiles in the sky, directed at the might of the British military, rather than civilians murdered long after the conflict, who happen to have been born on the other side.
I don’t celebrate Palestine Action’s proscription nor the prosecutions of Palestine Action Éire members. But I do recognise, as I hope they do too, what Britain and the Free State’s treatment of them says: that what they’re doing is working.