THAT there are still people naive enough to believe that the Labour Party will depart from British state orthodoxy on the past never fails to surprise those of us who have paid attention to the party’s record in power down through the years.
From Wilson through to Callaghan, on to Blair and up to the incumbent Andy Burnham, Labour leaders have been as assiduous and ruthless in prioritising the interests of the British establishment as the most far-right and jingoistic Tory sabre-rattlers.
The changes to the Legacy Bill currently being rammed through parliament are as egregious an insult to our dead, our dignity and our intelligence than anything cooked up during the notorious reign of Roy Mason – the underwhelming little Labour Secretary of State with the overdeveloped superiority and aggression.
Make no mistake about it, what we are seeing here is a bare-faced attempt to wrest away from local courts what little control of legacy matters they currently possess. It’s hard to recall a more startling instance of arrogance than Chris Bryant parroting his NIO-supplied lines about accountability and consistency while people from both sides of the political aisle here watch and listen in open-mouthed astonishment.
The Bill accords full responsibility for decisions to prosecute in “serious” cases to the English Attorney General and strips our Public Prosecution Service of any input. With a straight face Mr Bryant denies that this humiliation of the PPS is an attempt to protect British army veterans by placing their fates in the hands of a non-Irish authority. Perhaps Mr Bryant is naive enough to believe the yarn he’s been instructed to spin – he’s certainly inexperienced enough in the ways of the NIO. If so, time will tell, and if Mr Bryant is still in office when the first controversial decisions come to be made by the English Attorney General, he will find out in short order just what the priorities are – and have always been – when it comes to dishing out justice to the Irish.
There is a certain grim humour to be extracted from a political environment in which the most pressing and shocking item on the agenda is summary offences in relation to alleged road-blocking by Sinn Féin members on the Garvaghy Road, while at the same time and with little or no fuss or attention, this Burnham government is piling misery upon misery, hurt upon hurt, on the families of those murdered by agents of the state.
Let no-one forget that the new UK Attorney General is, like every Attorney General before her, a purely political appointment. It may be that Ellie Reeves KC MP will surprise us all and prioritise justice for victims and their families over the baying benches of the House of Commons. We await her decisions with great interest. But, laden with the grim weight of 50 years experience of British soldiers and the British justice system, we await with a sense of deep trepidation rather than with hope.
