I agree with that Nanny

yes Reynard

Treetop, but they didn't

The paras have form for shooting real British people, corbyn got off lite

That is my personal choice...mobody is obliged to agree with me

This is complicated

We must go back over 100 years to 1917, ' The Balfour Declaration', half of Palestine would become Israel,

and we make our own decision, do we think this was right or wrong?

I consider it wrong, because we had no moral right to give half of someone else's country away


Other people must make their own decisions

But is it possible to both support the Palestinians and swallow the semenism?

Is that your own fingers?

That Jack renshaw ex bnp/edl member and national action hated jews called them vermin was planning to kill jews in a synagogue,luckily hope not hate saved another labour mp from being murdered,thats the right scumbags at the moment plenty of them..
The right riddled with anti semitism and anyone from different ethnicity,hiding behind some mainstram partys..

Much like a muslim then.

The constition would be secular...and would never to be able to be changed.

That ensures one or the other don't get a majority in their parliament and change things things to suit their own side.

MOD need to get a sense of humour imo
So do Scandi and SF. Maybe asking a bit much.

it's also unprovoked, childlike sniping on a thread where we've not conversed once.

^Ditto.

The soldiers were probably upset by Momentum's disgusting behaviour at Labour's Liverpool conference.

Also, anyone who claims Corbyn is or was not an IRA supporter is either a lying fool or utterly deluded by political bias.

Corbyn attended and spoke at official republican commemorations to honour dead IRA terrorists, IRA “prisoners of war” and the active “soldiers of the IRA.” The official programme for the 1988 event, held one week after the IRA murdered three British servicemen in the Netherlands, states that “force of arms is the only method capable of bringing about a free and united Socialist Ireland.” Corbyn used the event to attack the Anglo-Irish Agreement, the precursor of the peace process.

He said it had resulted in no improvement in the lives of the people of Northern Ireland, adding: “It strengthens rather than weakens the border between the 6 and the 26 counties, and those of us who wish to see a united Ireland oppose the agreement for that reason.”

The editorial board of a hard-Left magazine, of which Corbyn was a member, wrote an article praising the Brighton bombing. In its article on the IRA attack, which almost wiped out Margaret Thatcher’s Cabinet, the editorial board of London Labour Briefing said the atrocity showed that “the British only sit up and take notice when they are bombed into it.”

Corbyn was general secretary of that editorial board. He wrote the front-page story in that same issue of Briefing, which also carried a reader’s letter praising the “audacity” of the IRA attack and included the sick joke: “What do you call four dead Tories? A start.” It also mocked Norman Tebbit, the trade secretary who was dug out of the rubble of the Grand Hotel, saying: “Try riding your bike now, Norman.”

Jeremy Corbyn nows claim to have promoted the peace process. The truth is he opposed a precursor to the peace process, the Anglo-Irish Agreement, and John McDonnell opposed the talks that led to the Good Friday Agreement, as obstacles to a united Ireland. Both men were closely associated with groups vitriolically hostile to the peaceful, constitutional nationalists of the SDLP
 

In his groveling apology on Question Time McDonnell, the shadow chancellor, incredibly claimed he only was only trying promote the peace process. In fact, however, McDonnell told the IRA’s official newspaper that he opposed the peace process negotiations to create a power-sharing assembly in what became the Good Friday Agreement. He said: “An assembly is not what people have laid down their lives for over thirty years…the settlement must be for a united Ireland.”

The new revelations were greeted with shock and disgust by victims and opponents of the IRA. Lord Tebbit, whose wife, Margaret, was permanently crippled by the Brighton bomb, said: "It’s hard to think how Corbyn could sink any lower. It’s the classic definition of the snake’s belly. He betrays his hatred of democracy and his love of violence, which survives to this day.”

Nigel Dodds, the Democratic Unionist MP for North Belfast, said: “Jeremy Corbyn and John McDonnell speak about honest politics and straight talking, but they should stop trying to pretend and tell lies that they were pro-peace. They were pro-terrorism. They were enemies of the peace process. They had a clear choice between the IRA and peaceful nationalism and they chose the IRA.”

Between 1986 and 1992, Corbyn attended and spoke each year at the annual “Connolly/Sands” commemoration in London to honour dead IRA terrorists and support imprisoned IRA “prisoners of war.” Programmes for the events have been obtained by the Telegraph. The programme for the 1987 event, on May 16 of that year, praises the “soldiers of the IRA,” saying: “We are proud of our people and the revolutionaries who are an integral part of that people.”

The programme for the 1988 event, on May 8 of that year, states that “in this, the conclusive phase in the war to rid Ireland of the scourge of British imperialism… force of arms is the only method capable of bringing this about.” The event took place the day after the funerals of the service personnel killed by the IRA in the Netherlands.

Each programme includes a list of IRA “prisoners of war” who are to be honoured that year, including the Brighton bomber, Patrick Magee, and sectarian murderers. The lists include their prisons and birthdays, with IRA supporters in the UK encouraged to send them birthday cards in jail.

Corbyn typically spoke alongside senior figures from Sinn Fein, including Gerry Adams at the 1991 event, at which he attacked “British imperialism” and praised Bobby Sands, the IRA terrorist who died on hunger-strike.

Corbyn was also active in the Labour Committee on Ireland, another explicitly pro-republican pressure group, speaking at its Labour conference fringe meetings and signing LCI’s statement of objectives in 1984. LCI regarded Northern Ireland as a colony and the Loyalist majority as a construct which should be ignored. It campaigned vitriolically against the peaceful, constitutional nationalist party, the SDLP, whose supporters it described as “cannon-fodder…manipulated and directed by a sophisticated management caucus.”

Much of the autumn 1985 edition of the LCI journal, Labour and Ireland, is devoted to a six-page personal attack on John Hume, the then SDLP leader, Nobel Peace Prize winner and key architect of the peace process. The journal described him as “dogmatic, insecure, and suffering from a deeply-rooted need for adulation and recognition as an international statesman.”

Diane Abbott, the shadow home secretary was also a strong supporter of LCI. In a 1984 interview with Labour and Ireland, she attacked the Unionist population of Northern Ireland as an “enclave of white supremacist ideology” comparable to white settlers in Zimbabwe.

However, it is the explicit support for the Brighton bombing in London Labour Briefing magazine that may prove the most controversial.

The board said it “reaffirmed its support for, and solidarity with, the Irish republican movement” and added that “the British only sit up and take notice [of Ireland] when they are bombed into it.”Alongside its editorial, the board reprinted a speech by Gerry Adams describing the bombing as a "blow for democracy" and the "inevitable result of the British presence in [Ireland]." Briefing earlier stated: “We refuse to parrot the ritual condemnation of ‘violence’ because we insist on placing responsibility where it lies…. Let our ‘Iron Lady’ know this: those who live by the sword shall die by the sword.

Quite a powerful summary that torque,thnx

Indeed who can believe or trust the words of dodds and his fellow  henchmen who supported and colluded with the security forces and the loyalists deaths squads , not a paragon of virtue thats for sure , and to think these idiots hold the balance of power in parliament

On the night of 10 November 1986, more than 2,000 men descended on Ulster Hall, a grand Victorian concert venue in the centre of Belfast, for an invitation-only event organised by the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP). They had been bussed into the city from across Northern Ireland to protest against the Anglo-Irish agreement, a treaty that gave Dublin an advisory role in the government of the north.

Inside the hall, a lone piper led a parade of flag-bearing men in red berets and matching military-style uniforms. Those assembled then sang a hymn, O God, Our Help in Ages Past, which they described as “Ulster’s battle hymn”.

Presiding over the rally was the DUP lord mayor of Belfast, Sammy Wilson. Among those present were the DUP leader, Ian Paisley, and his deputy, Peter Robinson. Paisley warned his audience that some of them “would not see the end of the campaign which was just beginning”.

Journalists arrived at Ulster Hall, after hearing that the rally was being convened to mobilise what the next day’s newspapers described as a “secret army”. They were refused entry, but a young DUP press officer called Nigel Dodds emerged to hand out leaflets. These explained that a body called Ulster Resistance was being formed as an “organised and disciplined force, which will neither bend nor budge” until the Anglo-Irish agreement was destroyed.

Over the coming days and weeks, there were more rallies and marches across Northern Ireland. Paisley and Robinson appeared wearing the bright red berets of Ulster Resistance. Paisley declared: “Every Ulsterman must be recruited to resist – by whatever means the situation demands – those who would drive us against our wills into an all-Ireland republic.”

An Ulster Resistance Rally in Ballymena in 1986.
An Ulster Resistance Rally in Ballymena in 1986. Photograph: Pacemaker
The following year, Ulster Resistance joined forces with the two established loyalist paramilitary groups, the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF) and Ulster Defence Association (UDA), to smuggle an enormous arsenal of weapons into the province, including about 200 Czech-made assault rifles called VZ58s and tens of thousands of rounds of ammunition.

Over the next 17 years, these VZ58s would be used in the murder or attempted murder of about 70 people in Northern Ireland. In the early 90s, they were used in three massacres: gunmen stood at the doors of a bookmaker’s shop and two bars, and simply sprayed the room. Nineteen people died and 27 were wounded.

Today, the DUP is a party that prides itself on its robust approach to law-and-order issues; the criminal justice section of its website declares that “there must be no amnesty for wrongdoers; there must be no rewriting of the past”. On Monday it completed its deal to prop up the minority Conservative government in return for £1bn of extra funding for Northern Ireland.

But the party continues to be haunted by the role that its hierarchy played in setting up Ulster Resistance, and the way in which this group helped to illegally import the deadly haul of VZ58s. Sammy Wilson is now the DUP MP for East Antrim. Nigel Dodds is now MP for Belfast North and leader of the party’s 10 Westminster MPs.

Emma Little-Pengelly after being elected as the MP for South Belfast in June.
Emma Little-Pengelly after being elected as the MP for South Belfast in June. Photograph: Niall Carson/PA
Perhaps even more uncomfortable for the DUP are the lingering questions about any role that a man called Noel Little may have played as an Ulster Resistance gun-runner. Little’s daughter, Emma Little-Pengelly, is a newly elected DUP MP. One of the VZ58 massacres, in February 1992, in which four Catholic men and a child were shot dead and nine people were injured, took place at a betting shop on the Lower Ormeau Road, in the heart of her Belfast South constituency.

It is not unusual for politicians in Northern Ireland to have been involved in political violence during the Troubles, of course, and many have been far more intricately involved than members of the DUP.

Sinn Féin’s Martin McGuinness, the deputy first minister until he resigned last January, bringing about the collapse of power-sharing, was probably the province’s best-known paramilitary turned politician. But Sinn Féin’s ministers and committee chairs at that time included a number of former members of the IRA, including a couple of convicted bombers.

This has not prevented the DUP and Sinn Féin sharing power for almost a decade, working together because they needed to. But the DUP is particularly sensitive about the role Ulster Resistance played in fuelling the violence in the late 80s and 90s.

In June last year, the police ombudsman for Northern Ireland, Michael Maguire, published a report on another of the VZ58 massacres, in which six people were shot dead and five wounded while watching football inside a tiny a bar in the County Down village of Loughinisland in June 1994.

Maguire had agreed to re-examine those murders after years of complaints – well founded, he concluded – that the lack of progress in the police investigation pointed to collusion between some police officers and the killers. Two retired police officers have since launched a legal challenge to the report, arguing that Maguire exceeded his powers.

Maguire also investigated the provenance of the VZ58 used at Loughinisland. “My investigators have seen police intelligence that in December 1986 senior members of the UDA, UVF and Ulster Resistance met to discuss the purchase and importation of arms with funds jointly raised by the three organisations,” Maguire reported.

The weapons were to be purchased with the proceeds of a bank robbery which the UDA staged in County Armagh the following July.

The next month, the police had intelligence that the weapons were being procured by three men, including one whom Maguire identified as Person D, from Ulster Resistance.

The weapons – including the VZ58s, hand grenades and rocket launchers – were smuggled into Belfast, via Liverpool, in a shipping container said to hold floor tiles, and then taken to a farmhouse in County Armagh, to be divided among the three groups.

The UDA lost its share of the cache almost immediately, when a convoy of cars stuffed with rifles and ammunition was halted at a police roadblock. The man in command of the convoy, a leading UDA figure called Davy Payne, was later jailed for 19 years.

By this time, according to intelligence reports, Person D had already taken the Ulster Resistance share of the weapons. About half of the weapons that the UVF took away from the farmhouse were also recovered, after a tipoff led police to a house in north Belfast, but the rest remained under the group’s control.

During the following weeks, Person D was arrested but denied all knowledge of the arms importation and was released without charge, the ombudsman reported. “The arrest of Person D appears to have been linked to his telephone number being found on [Payne].”

In November 1988, 10 people were arrested after the discovery of one of Ulster Resistance’s arms dumps near Markethill in County Armagh. Police found three of the VZ58s, an RPG-7 rocket launcher and five rockets, as well as more than 12,000 rounds of ammunition. They also discovered parts of a Javelin ground-to-air missile system, stolen from an arms factory in Belfast. The haul was put on show for the press, along with a number of red berets bearing Ulster Resistance badges which had been found with the weapons.

At this point, the DUP could not disown Ulster Resistance quickly enough. Wilson told reporters that, though the party had given the organisation “political cover and political sponsorship”, and that members did not need to apologise for attending its rallies, he had not had contact with it since the launch at Ulster Hall.

The DUP issued a statement, saying it had already severed all links. “While not members of the organisation, we openly and publicly encouraged recruitment and canvassed support for the organisation and its aims,” the statement said. “Some time later we were informed the organisation was put on ice, and our association and contact was terminated. At no time during our association was anything done outside the law and no member was ever charged with any offence.”

Ulster Resistance had not been put on ice, however. Five months after the Markethill find, Noel Little – who lived in Markethill – was arrested in Paris, along with two other men, James King and Samuel Quinn. The three had been caught red-handed while attempting to procure more weapons.

The VZ58s had been acquired in Beirut with the assistance of Armscor, a defence procurement agency that the South African government had established to evade a UN arms embargo. This time, Ulster Resistance was offering not cash in return for weapons, but technology: the South Africans were eager to develop a new portable ground-to-air missile, and Little and his two friends were hoping to trade stolen parts from the British Starstreak missile that was under development at the same factory from which parts of the Javelin missile had been stolen.

The three were arrested by officers of the French security agency, Direction de la Surveillance du Territoire (DST), which burst into the room at the Paris Hilton, where they were meeting a South African intelligence officer who called himself Daniel Storm. At exactly the same moment, Armscor’s European agent, an American called Douglas Bernhardt, was grabbed in the foyer of the Hotel George V, and carried out of the building to a waiting car.

Storm was set free after claiming diplomatic immunity. The others were interrogated in the basement of the DST’s headquarters. “I was slapped about a little,” Little recalled later. “But not too much.”

After eight months on remand, the four men were brought to court charged with arms trafficking, handling stolen goods and terrorism-related conspiracy. Bernhardt told the court that he had helped supply loyalists with the VZ58s from Lebanon in 1987. They were sentenced to time served and fined between 20,000 and 100,000 francs which, at that time, was equivalent to between £2,000 and £10,000.

But the VZ58s that had already been smuggled into Northern Ireland were quite enough to send the loyalist killing rate through the roof. “There’s no doubt that shipment did change things,” Little said. He believed those weapons “tipped the balance against the IRA and eventually forced them to sue for peace”. And while he said he deplored the murder of innocent people, he added: “Innocent bystanders are killed in every war.”

Little has continued to deny he was involved in the importation of the VZ58s from Beirut in 1987. But when interviewed by the Guardian in 2012 he used a curious form of words to issue that denial. “My position is that I wasn’t involved,” he said, adding: “I would deny it even if I was.”

He also said that many of Ulster Resistance’s share of the weapons had not been decommissioned as part of the peace process in Northern Ireland. “As far as I know they are still stockpiled.”

Little also said that he had been arrested in Northern Ireland in early 1988 after his telephone number was found written on the back of Payne’s hand. It had been given to Payne, Little explained, “in case he got into any trouble in Armagh”.

You should have started that with Once Upon A Time.