The Green Ribbon

Splendid isolationists: The High Tory opposition to the Good Friday Agreement

The publication of a draft withdrawal agreement today will confirm once again the central role which Ireland has assumed in the debate about Brexit. 

 

To some extent, this looks likes opportunism. Theresa May's commitment to the DUP, that there will be no border between Northern Ireland and Great Britain, has become a transmission mechanism, making the Irish question a proxy for the future of the UK as a whole.

 

There is also something deeper at work, however. Attitudes to the European Union and to the Good Friday Agreement are themselves rooted in wider ideas about sovereignty and national identity.

 

In the case of the strand of conservatism now driving Brexit, I would argue that some perspective on those ideas can be gleaned by looking back at the tradition of High Toryism associated with the name of Lord Salisbury, who became Prime Minister three times at the end of the Nineteenth Century. His premierships were characterised by political quietism underpinned by economic hegemony. A policy of 'masterly inactivity' in Europe that David Davis would be proud of, was combined with a privately driven imperialism still commemorated by the bust of Cecil Rhodes in Liam Fox's office.

Army doctor backs whistleblower Fred Holroyd

The BBC is today reporting important developments in relation to Fred Holroyd, a key British Army whistleblower on covert activities in Northern Ireland in the 1970s.

Holroyd is suing the Ministry of Defence over allegations that he was falsely diagnosed with a mental illness in for political reasons. His account is being backed by a former military surgeon, Dr Hugh Thomas, who told the BBC:

The first I knew about it was when a senior physician colleague of mine came into the theatre and sought sanctuary, and he sought sanctuary because he had been ordered to section Fred, and had found that an abhorrent request, which it was.

A number of Holroyd's claims have been verified over the years. back in 2006, I reported on a document uncovered by the Pat Finucane Centre and Justice for the Forgotten at the National Archives in London. The document proved the existence of a covert 'Special Reconnaissance Unit' operating out of Castledillon, Co. Armagh, closing matching a unit described by Holroyd. It also showed that SAS members in the unit had been 're-cap badged' to facilitate denials of an SAS role in Northern Ireland.

 

The new evidence of dirty tricks against Holroyd puts the questions we asked then into sharper focus.

Holroyd claimed that an SAS troop led by Captain Julian Ball and Captain Robert Nairac was operating at Castledillon in Co Armagh under two cover names, 4 Field Survey Troop, Royal Engineers and NITAT.

In response to a question from Ken Livingstone in 1988, ministers denied that the NITAT unit existed, and claimed that records relating to 4 Field Survey Troop were no longer available.

The emergence, two decades later, of records confirming the existence of a unit corresponding closely to the one described by Holroyd raises two questions: was the British Parliament misled? And if Holroyd was right about this unit’s existence, was he also right about its involvement in collusion? (Irish were lied to about SAS, Daily Ireland, 5 June 2006).

The Mitrokhin Playbook - How Cold War smears failed in Italy

Cross-posted from Patreon.

In a couple of posts last week I noted that the Conservative campaign to link Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn to Eastern bloc espionage had long-standing precedents in British politics. Tonight, however, we have entered a phase more reminiscent of events on the continent. The Telegraph reports:

Government ministers questioned the Labour leader’s “patriotism” in agreeing to meet Czech agent Jan Sarkocy during the Cold War.

The Telegraph can reveal that MPs intend to call Mr Sarkocy to give evidence in Parliament about his meetings with several Labour politicians, as part of an inquiry into the influence of foreign powers on British democracy.

This looks very similar to the Mitrokhin Commission set up in Italy in 2002, supposedly to investigate the Italian implications of the testimony of a KGB defector to Britain, Vasily Mitrokhin.

Roundup: Crunch week looms for Brexit and the border

Theresa May at the December summit. Via Flickr.

There have been darker moments in British-Irish relations over the last century. Yet it's hard to think of a time when the Irish question has been such a complex factor in British politics. Not perhaps since the clashes between home rulers in the Commons and Unionists in the Lords chronicled in George Dangerfield's The Strange Death of Liberal England.

 

It is a remarkably many-sided conundrum. The Conservatives are dependent on DUP support at Westminster. They nevertheless need to cajole them into an executive with Sinn Féin at Stormont. The urgency of avoiding direct rule is all the greater because of the same Brexit timetable which raises the premium on DUP parliamentary votes. To cap it all, the DUP and their Tory brexiteer allies have to be kept on board while a deal on the border is negotiated with the EU and the Irish Government.

 

A key point in that exercise will come next week, when the FT reports that the European Commission will table text formalising last December's Withdrawal Agreement.

Talks roundup: The DUP chooses Westminster over Stormont

RTÉ Northern Editor Tommie Gorman on what went wrong and what happens next for Northern Ireland pic.twitter.com/hVUaT7PoJE

— RTÉ News (@rtenews) February 14, 2018

At a debate in Hammersmith earlier this month, the Belfast Newsletter's Sam McBride predicted there would be no imminent deal to restore devolved government in Northern Ireland. After a bout of optimism last weekend, he has been proved right 

On Wednesday, DUP leader Arlene Foster pulled out of talks and called on the British Government to take over direct rule. 

The demise of the process put me in mind of something else that McBride said that night, about the DUP's pro-Brexit stance during the 2016 referendum.

There were people who didn’t want the party to take that clear line, very senior people around Arlene Foster. I think the truth is that even if the DUP leader herself had wanted to take a Remain line as the Ulster Unionists had done, that wouldn’t have been possible, because of the history of the DUP.  

Following this week's events, there are very clear questions over Foster's authority within her party. As RTE's Tommie Gorman reports in this video, the suggestion is that DUP negotiators reached a deal, only for hardliners including MPs to reject it.

Sun doubles down on the Czech connection

Cross-posted from Patreon.

Tonight's Sun doubles down on allegations this morning's attempt to link Jeremy Corbyn to Czech intelligence. I examined the initial story here. There's also a useful account of one of the Sun's sources, Professor Anthony Glees, at Political Scrapbook.

The new element in the follow-up is an intervention from former MI6 chief, Sir Richard Dearlove, arguing that Corbyn was the subject of a 'classic cultivation.'

Such allegations are all too easy to make. Intelligence is about people and information, but so are politics, diplomacy and journalism. What sets intelligence apart from other forms of professional networking, if anything, is its clandestine nature, but there is no evidence that Corbyn betrayed any secrets. Rather, the evidence is consistent with his characteristic openness to all comers.

Corbyn and the Czechs

This morning's Sun leads with a rather odd front page splash claiming Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn met Czech intelligence agents in the mid-1980s.

Professor Anthony Glees told the paper that "These files show there was contact between Corbyn and a Czech intelligence official, even if he did not know it." Yet this would have been true of many MPs of all parties who had contacts with East European diplomats. Indeed, the expansion of such contacts would have been one manifestation of perestroika in what was the early Gorbachev era.

Veteran investigative journalist David Leigh has said of the story, based on Czech intelligence files: ' I would guess this is just about as credible as a Sun expenses claim for 'lunch with contact'.

Leigh ought to know. His 1988 book, The Wilson Plot, documents the long running vendetta of a coterie of British intelligence officers against Labour Prime Minister Harold Wilson. One key source of anti-Labour smears was material provided by former Czech intelligence officer Josef Frolik.

British Intelligence in Ireland: The Colonial Connection

Subscribers will have noticed a few new profiles of intelligence officers on my Patreon recently, most notably Alastair Crooke of MI6, and John Deverell of MI5, both of whom contributed to a tradition of covert diplomacy that formed one strand of the roots of the Irish peace process.

It's a format that I hope shows some of the potential that can be developed in further narrative chapters of British intelligence in Ireland. 

One thing that struck me while researching them is how much the development of a back-channel between the British Government and the republican movement in the early 1990s coincided with the progress of Sir John Stevens' investigation into collusion between the security forces and loyalists. How far was the peace process promoted by the unravelling of a harder-edged alternative?

Another lesson was the strength of the connection between MI5 and the old Colonial Service. Director General Stella Rimington memorably described in her autobiography how intelligence officers were recruited from among the redundant British officials of newly independent colonies in the 1960s, in waves such as ‘the Malayan Mafia or the Sudan Souls’.  

Brexit options for the Irish border (video)

Cross-posted from Patreon: 

Turkey's TRTWorld channel very kindly invited me to appear on their Roundtable discussion programme this morning to discuss Brexit and the Irish border, with presenter David Foster, journalist John Crowley, Tim Skeet of Britain for Europe and Irish Labour's Gerard Howlin. You can see the video above. 

Barnier steps up pressure on UK over Irish border

Cross-posted from Patreon.

The EU's chief Brexit negotiator, Michel Barnier, gave a significant update on the state of play at a press conference in Brussels today. His opening remarks on Ireland are set out below, followed by my analysis. The original video (in French and English) is here. The subsequent Q & A (largely in French, including a question on Ireland at 24.00) is here.