En Passant

I have decided that instead of going to the doctor I will have two beers and a few cigarettes instead. That will save the Government on the pension too. I won’t make 70.

According to the Guardian this is what Hockey said about the $7 co-payment to go to the doctor:

“One of the things that quite astounds me is some people are screaming about [the] $7 co-payment,” the treasurer said.

“One packet of cigarettes costs $22; that gives you three visits to the doctor. You can spend just over $3 on a middy of beer so that’s two middies of beer to go to the doctor. Let’s have some perspective about the costs of taking care of our health, and is a parent really going to deny their sick child a visit to the doctor which would be the equivalent payment of a couple of beers or one third of a packet of cigarettes?”

And what about a 27 year old sacked from their job who is denied unemployment benefits for the first six months?

“I would expect you’d be in a job. That would be the starting point, you’d be in a job, and we need you to work … Everything we are doing is about lifting the tide so that we can get more people into jobs.”

Not even close Joe, but still no cigar. I guess for someone on almost $400000 a year with a lifetime sinecure courtesy of the rich burghers of North Sydney $7 is nothing. To someone on no income it is a fortune. And a job? What’s that? young people are asking.

It is just not Hockey who is out of touch. The Deputy Prime Minster, Warren Truss, attacked superannuants and pensioners. He is reported by Tony Moore in the Sydney Morning Herald as saying:

“Increasingly the lifestyle – and the savings for superannuation – are being seen as the opportunity to enjoy a few cruises and the luxuries of life for a few years until it runs out and then people wish to fall back on the aged pension.”

According to the OECD, Australia has one of the lowest level of pensions in the OECD, and 35% of Australian pensioners live in poverty.

It is not just that these representatives are out of touch. Of course they are. They are the ignorant bigot faction of capital who have no idea what it is like to be poor or a pensioner. They are the born to rule who only mix with other born-to-rulers.

‘Let them eat cake’ can’t be too far away.

It is not just brutal out of touch Tories doing this for fun, although Joe Hockey dancing with his wife to the best day of your life might indicate it was laughs as he reduced many Australians to tears.

The Government is planning among other things to dismantle the social wage. Why? To shift the ‘savings’ into the pockets of the likes of Gina Rinehart to offset falling profit rates.

On top of that they will introduce more and more of the market into health, education and other public goods until only the rich can afford proper health care and education.

We can resist the ruling class attacks. It is time to stop work to stop the bosses’ Budget.

This is Graeme Innes. He is Australia’s Disability Discrimination Commissioner. In last night’s budget the Abbott Government abolished his job.

Sack Tim Wilson, not Graeme Innes.

The unemployed are one of the key targets in the Abbott Hockey Budget. According to the Budget papers:

Young jobseeker reforms

The Government believes that assistance to the unemployed should help them move into employment, rather than encouraging them to remain on welfare.

In order to reach their full potential, all young Australians who can work should be earning, learning or participating in Work for the Dole.

Income support eligibility changes

From 1 January 2015, new jobseekers up to 30 years of age applying for Newstart or Youth Allowance (Other) (YA(O)) will participate in job search and employment services activities which are funded by the Government for six months before receiving the payment.

Current recipients of Newstart and YA(O) up to 30 years of age will also be covered by the same requirements from 1 July 2015.
Young people who do not have a full capacity to work (i.e. their capacity is less than 30 hours), are in education or training, or have a significant disability will all be exempt from these requirements, as will those with parenting responsibilities.

The papers go on to say:

After six months, the jobseeker will be required to participate in at least 25 hours per week of Work for the Dole activities and will be eligible to receive income support for six months.

And then there is this lovely piece of bureaucratise:

Reinforcing the need for young Australians to either earn or learn, from 1 January 2015, young people aged 22 to 24 years may be eligible for YA(O) instead of Newstart.

In other words you won’t get the dole if you are unemployed and aged between 22 and 24. However if you take up study you might get Youth Allowance for studying full time.

So why is the government forcing those less than 30 years old who are on the dole into poverty, starvation and homelessness? Think I am exaggerating? How do you buy food and pay the rent without any government support while unemployed? You don’t. You might steal or prostitute yourself or run drugs to survive.

One answer to the question of why the government is attacking the unemployed is that it panders to the prejudices of the ruling class and their hangers on. It’s all the fault of the unemployed…

Another possible reason may be that it reduces the number of unemployed and so cuts the official unemployment rate without actually reducing unemployment.

The Treasurer predicted unemployment would increase to 6.25% and remain there for the next two years. Roy Morgan surveys show the real level of unemployment is over 11 percent and underemployment around 8 percent.

Forcing people off the dole for six months and so fiddling with the unemployment figures may hide part of the increase.
The Abbott government and its sick parrots also believe that people choose to be unemployed. Not true. Capitalism can’t provide enough jobs for working age people. Hence dole bludger rhetoric or its new ‘nicer’ variant – earn or learn.

Another reason is that one usual capitalist response to economic crisis is to cut wages. Having 200000 people under the lash of starvation might force many of them to accept any job at any pay. The pay of course will be low, drawing other workers into the downward wages spiral. Even though minimum wages are set by a Tribunal, in the market they will be under threat, and so too wages dependent on them.

With the systemic crisis of falling profit rates in North America and Europe showing little signs of fundamentally reversing, and the slowdown in Asia, especially China, gathering pace, and showing signs of coming to Australia soon, the demands across the globe and in Australia to cut wages will not disappear.

Forcing the unemployed into extreme poverty is an important part of the Australian government’s wage cutting strategy. It is time for our unions to defend the unemployed and hence their own members.

Stop work to stop the bosses’ Budget.
______________

Forthcoming activities:

The Victorian Trades Hall Council has called a meeting of all union MEMBERS for 6pm Tuesday 20 May 2014 in the New Council Chambers, Trades Hall (54 Victoria St) to discuss a response to the Budget. It says:

Tony Abbott and Joe Hockey have handed down the most brutal budget in recent history. It cannot go unanswered by our movement.

There will be an All Unions General Meeting – 6pm Tuesday 20 May 2014 in the New Council Chambers, Trades Hall (54 Victoria St South Carlton) to discuss the movement’s response.

All union members are welcome to attend.

Please share among your networks

This is a good first step and members in other states and territories should start lobbying their trade unions and trade union councils to do the same.

In Melbourne there will be a March in May to Bust the Budget from 2 pm on Sunday 18 May at the State Library

On 21 May there will demonstrations across Australia in defence of education.

This is the link to my pre-Budget 30 minute interview on Tuesday 13 May with Sharon Firebrace on Razor Sharp. I basically argue this will be a Budget of the rich, by the rich, for the rich. And that is how it has turned out.

We are all in this together. A person on $250,000 will pay an extra $1400 in tax for a few years. A 24 year old unemployed person will lose $2500 a year.

For the rich person it might mean they cut back on their cigars or their Grange. For the young unemployed person the choice may well be between lunch and dinner.

Capital of course bears no burden. Hockey argued that they are doing the heavy lifting because big business is missing out on a tax cut. I am missing out on a tax cut too Joe, so why all the extra heavy lifting for me but not the rich and powerful?

And tell me Joe, how are the 50% of big businesses which pay no income tax bearing any burden even under your warped logic?

My 85 year old father wants to know if the $5 Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme increase will apply to his $6.00 prescriptions. You know, the ones that keep him alive. While I will pay an extra $5 for mine,so it will be around $42 a month for each of my five prescriptions.  Dad’s will increase from $6.00 to $6.80 for each of his. Meanwhile Fortescue Metals Group hasn’t paid any income tax for the last 18 years. Seems fair. FMG pays no tax and my Dad gets slugged an extra $15% in his life saving medicines. We sure are all in this together.

For patients who need lots of medicines the PBS safety net will increase to $1597.80 from next January, an increase of $150. This means they can’t get subsidised medicines until they spend another $150.

Every time my Dad goes to the Doctor for prescription renewals and other matters he’ll pay a $7 co-payment. Too right that bludgers like him (extreme sarcasm) start paying their way. Who needs a universal health scheme when there is profit to be made? The wealthy will get gold star medical treatment and the rest of us can see the snake oil salesmen.

Blood tests and X-Rays will now also include the $7 co-payment. Dad has regular tests.

The Medicare refund for people like me who pay shitloads to see their family doctor, who doesn’t bulk bill because we have barely modest incomes, will be cut by $5.

My son is a great guitarist, currently unemployed. He is under 30. He will have to work 15 hours for the dole from 1 July if he doesn’t get some music work. Work for the dole is a way of undermining the pitiful minimum wage. The hours will increase to 25 hours a week from 1 July next year.

My son could end up as part of Abbott’s direct action green army. Left, right, left, right, don’t think, pick up rubbish to give the impression of work. Plant a few trees to give the impression of addressing climate change. Put your finger in that environmental dyke young boy.

Even worse, people under 30 will have to wait six months before getting the dole for the first time. And when they do they too will have to work for it. So what do they live on before then? Stealing? Prostitution? Drug dealing? Begging? This is not sa one off.For every year a person is unemployed there will be six months off the dole and then six months on.

The government will deregulate University fees.  The loan repayments will kick in at a lower rate, just over $50,000 in income. Students undertaking higher degrees by research will now be expected to pay almost $4000 a year towards the cost of their degrees. Oh, and the government will also cut funding for Uni courses by 20%. derugalted fees and competition between isntiutiosn willd rive higher and higher fees. $100,000  courses are on the agenda. There’s gold in them thar campuses. 

Every time you fill up the car, Joe Hockey will be there with his hand in your pocket. The reintroduction of fuel excise indexation will hit poor people and people who live in regional areas the most. It will increase basic consumption costs since much of the supermarket supplies are shipped by road.

Labor put in train increases in the pension age to 67 by 2017. The Liberals will continue this logic and increase the age to 70 by 2035. Meanwhile the $15 billion in revenue forgone through superannuation tax concessions to the top five percent of income earners remains untouched. Oh, but if we get rid of that they’ll just go into negative gearing. OK. Limit negative gearing losses to rental income. Pretty simple really.

The mining boom investment stage has ended and is moving into the production stage. So the government that is so opposed to government ‘interference’ will spend tens of billions on roads, rail, ports and airports as part of an infrastructure program. This is welfare for the mining companies to be able to get their resources to port cheaper. And where the money is spent on roads for we plebs, it is just what we need - more roads for more cars at higher cost petrol for more greenhouse gas emissions.  Public transport anyone? A very fast freight and passenger service down the Eastern seaboard anyone?

This government has all the vision of Mr Magoo, the Mr Magoo of 2020 vision only for the rich. They are blind to the rest of us.

Scrooge and co are also going to cut school and hospital funding  by $80 billion over the enxt decade and ask the States and Territories to pick up the slack. , nay demand, a broadening of the GST base and an increase in its rate. The likelihood is that they won’t have the money to bridge the gap so public schools and hospitals will be left to rot. And since the States have few revenue opportunities, they will ask for, nay demand, a broadening of the GST base and an increase in its rate.

Sole parents and families with one parent at home will lose their Family Tax Benefit B payment when their youngest child turns six, instead of 18. Those same groups with incomes between $100,000 and $150,000 will lose Family Tax Benefit B. Family tax benefit A+B payments will be frozen for two years. These changes will save $8 billion over 4 years. They will also cut the living standards of millions of Australians.

And the party of creating jobs (irony alert) will sack 16500 public servants. This will throw up to 50,000 people – the employees and their families – into chaos and possible poverty. It will also deliver worse services from an already overworked, understaffed and underfunded public service.

There is more, much more of these bliztkreig attacks. I’ll talk in detail about them tomorrow.

Hockey tells us the pain is necessary for future gain. You’ll get pie in the sky when you die too. Even the government predicts unemployment will rise to 6.25% and stay there for the next two years. Real unemployment is much higher.

The silence of the trade union leadership lambs condemns them. Where is the call to action? If they gave one, rather than just urging us to vote Labor, many workers would respond. They could call us out to shut down the country to protect jobs, wages and the social wage. They won’t because the culture of class collaboration and trickledown economics is now so embedded in their thinking that, with a few exceptions, struggle is a thing of the past.

Meanwhile the bosses’ class war not only continues but is accelerating.

This is a budget of the rich, by the rich and for the rich. Only class war by our side can stop the attacks now and into the future on our jobs, wages, health care, education and other elements of the social wage.

Like all posts on this blog comments – hit the link under the heading – close after 7 days.

Me in the ANU student newspaper Woroni online today.

‘It is not every day you get labelled a violent anti-Semite. But that is effectively what Woroni called me and other socialists when it published a piece called Anti-Semitism at the ANU on 11 March this year.’

Click here for my article.

Henrique Sanchez in Socialist Worker UK says big business will be the real winner of the World Cup—while ordinary Brazilians are losing their homes

A meeting in Belo Horizonte, Brazil, organised by the National Articulation of Popular Committees asks “Who loses with mega-events?” (Pic: Agência Brasil)

This year’s World Cup and the 2016 Olympics are at the centre of a battle to reshape Brazil’s cities.

Firstly this means the removal of families in poor working class neighbourhoods. A recent study estimated that 250,000 people have been thrown out of their homes.

The process of ethnic cleansing and gentrification—pushing many poor and working people to more distant areas—aims to deepen a reorganisation of cities already underway.

New areas have been allocated for real estate speculation and large planned business districts where market interests prevail.

The anger at being denied the right to the city fuelled huge protests against rising public transport costs last year.

When Brazil was chosen to host these events, politicians and football officials promised that no public money would be used to build stadiums.

They said investments for the events would meet demands for public services, especially public transport.

But people quickly realised that hosting the World Cup was nothing more than big business, largely financed by public resources.

Emergency laws were approved that grant tax exemption to international football governing body, Fifa, and define exclusive sale and access areas for its sponsors.

This chases out informal workers and merchants, and denies the basic constitutional right to come and go.

The Fifa Local Organising Committee includes football officials who were involved in corruption scandals.

The World Cup also served as an excuse to privatise airports.

Construction

Major construction firms greatly benefited from building and renovating stadiums in 12 host cities—again financed with tax exemptions and state loans at preferential interest rates.

There have now been around 25 strikes of construction workers in World Cup stadiums demanding decent pay and conditions.

Several strikes occurred spontaneously without the support of the unions. In some the bosses asked for police repression—and they got it.

The World Cup revealed to the world the reality faced by Brazilian workers, especially in the construction industry.

As well as complaints of bullying bosses and disrespect of labour laws, eight workers died building stadiums after of a lack of safety measures.

Fifa has been given more public resources amid pressure over unfinished stadiums.

Even a local governor in the ruling Workers’ Party (PT) complained that “accepting the conditions imposed by Fifa was a trap”.

But the federal government—which the PT has run since 2003—and state governments run by right-wing opposition parties have acted as agents for Fifa.

There have been several demonstrations against the impacts of the football competition.

One of the most important movements in this struggle is the National Articulation of Popular Committees.

This is a national coalition of activists against the World Cup’s social impacts.

It has opposed emergency laws and defended housing, freedom of protest and the right to the city.

Actions and demonstrations are planned before and during the World Cup, including a national day of protest on 15 May.

With one month to go, the only certainty we have about the World Cup is that it will see much struggle in Brazil.

And international solidarity can help the fight.

Henrique Sanchez is a socialist based in São Paulo

The Abbott Government’s Budget next Tuesday will attack pensioners, the sick, the disabled, the poor and the working class. There will be token tax increases on the top income earners, but so small as to not even impact on their cigar smoking.

The Thacherite attacks will basically increase poverty and misery and cut workers’ living standards.

The sacking of 25000 public servants, about 18% of all public servants, will consign many to the scrap heap of unemployment for years. The latest leak is that 3000 of those will be from Hockey’s own portfolio, in this case the Tax Office.

It would be a mistake to imagine that the destruction of jobs in the public service will only be a one off this year.

Take the Tax Office as an example. Given the KPMG accountancy firm background of the current Commissioner of Taxation and the apparent need for the Treasurer to be tough on his own portfolio, my guess is that the mooted 3000 sackings from the ATO in the Budget this year are just the beginning. It could for example be that the Commissioner’s 2020 Vision (get the joke?) is for an ATO of 13000 staff, just under half the size it currently is, in 6 years time.

To do that would require sacking a net 1500 staff every year for the next 6 years on top of the mooted 3000 by October. Thus if the Office were to recruit 500 people in one year (graduates and people with particular skills the Office desperately needs) that would require sacking 2000 other staff that year. Government revenue would plummet as the rich lurks and perks men rape the fisc.

Isn’t it time the Community and Public Sector Union organised its members to strike to stop the jobs massacre in the ATO and elsewhere across the public service? If not, then the best thing Abbott and Hockey have going for them is CPSU leader Nadine Flood.

The Abbott government has decided on a new Dad’s Army to ‘protect’ Australia’s border from asylum seekers and drug runners. The Australian Border Force is a farce, militarising the immigration and customs functions. It is part of a wider us and them circling of the wagons to protect profits in a declining economy, an economy which may go into reverse after the Budget.

The Education Action Group protest on Q&A in Sydney (with students from Socialist Alternative prominent) has raised questions about the nature of our democracy. It is in good hands.  In a Herald poll on the issue, 55 percent of the 28000 who responded supported them.

Even better, well almost 70 percent of those polled in a Fairfax survey oppose the government’s plans to raise the pension age to 70.

As a generalisation the population is well to the left of both parties on most issues. To build a socialist organisation expressing that political reality is one task for socialists today, as part of building a revolutionary oation to help worker overthrow capitalism.

I am thinking about going up to Bondi to bash a billionaire. I reckon it will be the best $500 I have ever spent.  Because surely we are all equal before the law and all I will cop is a criminal infringement notice and $500 fine like Packer and Gyngell.  Surely there’s not one law for the rich and one law for the rest of us.

I thought Derek from Gundagai summed it up perfectly:

In Nigeria Boko Haram has kidnapped hundreds of Christian schoolgirls. I have no truck with Boko Haram but imagining the butchers from the US or the Uk are really about helping them is madness. Even if they do, let’s start a campaign in memory of the girls and young women Barack Obama has killed and to stop him killing more. Wouldn’t want to be hypocrites now would we?

“Michelle Obama spared a moment between lavish tax-victim-funded vacations and celebrity outings to join this year’s version of the Kony campaign, which seeks military action in Nigeria to liberate 276 Christian schoolgirls who were abducted by Muslim militants.

“Mrs. Obama’s Twitter photo was revised and corrected by a revolutionary socialist group in Detroit to reflect the hideous reality behind the administration’s humanitarian posturing,” says William Norman Grigg.

In light of the justified concern of many Australians for the safety of the kidnapped girls, let me ask a few questions.

Where were all those Australians so concerned about the welfare of kids when their Australian government was stealing Aboriginal children as an act of genocide (the words of the bringing them home report, not mine)? Where are they now when the Intervention is doing the same?

Where are all those Australians so concerned about the welfare of children when their current government has locked up 1000 kids in concentration camps on Manus Island and Nauru? The current Abbott government, and the previous Gillard/Rudd governments, were and are as big a threat to some kids as Boko Haram.

To have your say or see what others are saying, hit the comments link under the heading. Like all posts on this blog comments close after 7 days.

Looking back more than forty years later it is almost impossible to fathom the pain that such atrocities inflicted on families and friends. And yet the conflict in the North brought misery without end in the early seventies— 15 civilians were killed in the UVF bombing of McGurk’s Bar in Belfast in late 1971; British Army massacres in Belfast the same year and in Derry in January 1972 took 11 and 14 lives respectively; and a devastating IRA bombing at Claudy just a few months before McConville’s abduction left 9 dead—and these were but the worst in a long string of staggering atrocities that accompanied the outbreak of war in the North.

Jean McConville—a Protestant in a mixed marraige—had moved to Divis in the Lower Falls area after she and her husband were driven out of East Belfast by loyalists. After her abduction by the IRA, McConville’s surviving family was broken up and her children scattered, some of them taken into care. Her son Michael insists that the RUC had information on the 32 year-old’s disappearance within two days, yet the police never attempted to find her.

Although the British government have gone to extraordinary lengths to resurrect the case over the past couple of years—pouring huge resources into bringing a high-profile court case in the US to win access to interview transcripts and, in the last few weeks, arresting high profile veteran republicans, including most recently Sinn Féin president Gerry Adams—the fact is they never even opened a file on McConville until forced to do so by her family in 1995, almost a quarter century after her death.

While there are few who will not sympathise with the McConvilles in their search for the truth, many are understandably cynical about the British government’s motivation in bringing a case now, within weeks of Tory NI Secretary of State Teresa Villier’s announcement of a “fresh approach” to the past that will focus on “the wrongdoing of paramilitaries” and away from reckoning with the “activities of the state.”

On one level there is nothing “fresh” or new in this: David Cameron’s rejection of the call for an independent inquiry into the murder of Belfast solicitor Pat Finucane is only the most well-known attempt to bury the story of the state’s deep complicity in sectarian murder, and the notion that state forces have come under some special scrutiny in recent years is delusional. The new turn is a flagrant attempt to draw a line under investigations into state terror, though Villiers reserves the power to prosecute republicans and loyalists as the needs of the ‘peace process’ dictate.

Facing “dozens of inquests” into Troubles-related killings and with a string of High Court cases “by victims alleging state collusion in murder,” London is looking for a way to shut down the search for truth, not to expand it. It is the convergence of interests between the British state and the most backward elements in Unionism—exposed for their scuppering of the recent Haass talks—that explains Villiers’s declaration.

Villiers’ announcement just a day before Adams’ arrest that she would block an independent review into the 1972 murder by British paratroopers of 11 unarmed civilians—including a mother of eight—in Ballymurphy provides clear evidence of the double standards at play.

“When you will stop harbouring murderers in the ranks of the British Army?” John Teggart, speaking for their families, asked of David Cameron. “Never” would be Cameron’s response if he were speaking honestly, and in this he has the full backing of the British and Irish establishments.

All of this comes within days of the grand hooley at the Queen’s residence in London, after all, when the Irish elite of all political stripes—including Sinn Féin—fell over themselves in begging London’s forgiveness for having once intruded on imperial prerogatives. In the aftermath of Villiers announcement that there would be no review of the Ballymurphy murders, Enda Kenny expressed his “disappointment” with the decision.

Such a feeble response is to be expected from the head of a state which has never pressed the British government to release its files on the 1974 Dublin-Monaghan bombings, the worst single atrocity of the Troubles—in which 34 civilians were killed and more than 300 injured in an operation described by an Oireachtas committee as “an act of international terrorism colluded in by British Security Forces.”

The southern establishment also has a stake in seeing Adams and Sinn Féin taken down. They face an electoral upheaval as a huge sentiment of disgust with the Troika parties of Fianna Fail, Fine Gael and Labour unfolds. Up to now Sinn Fein has been the main beneficiary, topping two out of the three Euro seat polls.

A surge to Sinn Fein would not de-stabilise the state in itself and some of the more perceptive establishment figures know that they can be eventually co-opted into a coalition with Fianna Fail and neutered. But the break-up of the cosy political club that has dominated Irish politics since the foundation of the state would still create a major problem.

It would raise the expectations of working people and help remove the thick cloud of fatalism that has demobilised them. If FF, FG and Labour were destroyed at the polls, the confidence to fight water charges and spread the example of resistance from Cork would grow. Enda Kenny and the entire establishment will gloat over Adams’ arrest not because they feel any particular sympathy for the McConvilles, but because it diminishes the threat of an electoral thrashing they so richly deserve.

Villiers’ call for a “proportionate” focus on paramilitaries reinforces Unionist complaints that too much attention has been paid to state violence, but this represents an obscene distortion of the record. For more than a quarter century the full power of the state was applied to suppressing what was, in effect, a popular nationalist insurgency in the North. In the process tens of thousands of young men and women were jailed and interned, and substantial numbers of them tortured or killed, in an effort to crush resistance and shore up a repressive, sectarian state.

The state response to the IRA’s horrific 1978 bombing of the La Mon hotel (in which 12 people died and dozens suffered severe burns) stands in sharp contrast, for example, to the official response to Bloody Sunday. In the immediate aftermath of the La Mon atrocity the RUC assigned a team of 100 detectives to the case; 25 Republicans were rounded up for questioning in the days afterward, including Adams. Two were charged and one individual was sentenced to twelve life sentences.

By contrast, not a single soldier has ever been identified, let alone prosecuted for the murder of 11 unarmed civilians in Ballymurphy in 1971 or 14 in Derry early the following year. In some cases Army officers who presided over the slaughter or who have been proven to have lied through their teeth were decorated and promoted, and went on to serve out long careers overseeing counterinsurgency in Iraq and elsewhere.

In many cases involving allegations of RUC collusion, important files have been burned or gone missing, while veterans of the sectarian force have found their way back into paid employment in the ‘reformed’ PSNI—even as ‘investigators’ on cases going back to the period of their tenure in the RUC. The British state’s selective approach to the past is not just about maintaining its control over a staggering peace process that requires permanent life support in order to survive.

The kind of stability that they seek to preside over for Northern Ireland requires a rendering of the past that casts them as a neutral party presiding over warring tribes, and in many ways it is Sinn Féin’s complicity in this charade that has allowed them to get away with it. If all of this is now coming back to bite Adams and the SF leadership, they can hardly claim to be shocked that the state they now help to administer has reverted to a familiar routine.

McGuinness now complains about ‘dark forces’ in the PSNI, but they did not suddenly appear this week.

The sharp contest over what sparked thirty years of war and over who will be prosecuted and who will be given a free pass for atrocities committed during the Troubles is not only about embedding a particular rendering of the recent conflict that exonerates the state. It is also about who will shape the future.

Regardless of whether the McConvilles get the answers they deserve over the coming months, the chances of getting a full and honest accounting of the recent past through a process overseen by a British government up to its neck in perpetrating violence are nil. That will only come in the course of a fundamental challenge to the establishment north and south.