Welcome to `Stack on the Back'. If you have never read this column before let me explain that you are reading a column so brilliant it renders the writings of Shakespeare irrelevant. An extraordinary claim I know, but why not? After all, at the Tory Party conference Brian Mawhinney went out of his way to introduce John Major as a man of great integrity and honesty. Had he added the word stupidity this might have been all the more convincing.
I have no intention of using this column to cast doubts on the integrity and honesty of our prime minister, but if he is all that Mawhinney claims he must also be incredibly stupid. For he has overseen what is easily the most dishonest, corrupt and sleazy government Britain has enjoyed since the days of Lloyd George.
Still, making fantastic claims is now stock in trade for the Tories. Part of honest John's speech at the conference was a `scathing' attack on Gerry Adams.
Major apparently doesn't believe Adams when he says he wants peace. Yet this is the same Gerry Adams who delivered a historic IRA ceasefire and spent two years desperately trying to copperfasten it by getting in to talks. It was honest John and his government that kept putting new conditions on the IRA before he would give Adams the sort of credibility that may have allowed the ceasefire to continue.
It was also this so called man of integrity who bent to the Orange bigotry of the likes of Paisley and Trimble, and allowed the Orange march at Portadown to go ahead which has heightened sectarian tensions ever since.
Meanwhile Patrick Mayhew is now constantly on our screens explaining why his government will not talk to Sinn Fein, whilst heaping praise on the tolerance of the Loyalist paramilitaries, and claiming they have the moral high ground.
Now of course nobody wishes to see an end to the Loyalist ceasefire, just as the IRA abandoning theirs has to be seen as a tragic mistake. But I for one find it impossible to grant the moral high ground to Loyalist paramilitaries.
First of all there is the fact that Loyalist paramilitaries have been involved in wide scale intimidation of Catholics ever since Portadown. Indeed one of their number was responsible for the murder of a Catholic at the time.
Imagine if during the IRA ceasefire they had shot a soldier, policeman or ordinary Protestant. We would have had Sinn Fein members being grilled on our television screens, whilst Unionists and Tories denounced the ceasefire as a sham. The Loyalist killing has been treated very differently.
Similarly the IRA was constantly condemned for punishment beatings, yet Loyalist ones seem to go unnoticed. None of this comes as much of a surprise. The British establishment has always had a different attitude to Loyalists as opposed to the IRA.
At the extreme end of that difference stand those shady parts of the British establishment spy community who have provided Loyalists with guns, explosives and volunteers. At the moderate end stands mainstream establishment opinion which does not like the Loyalists, is willing to act against them, yet can never quite work up the same fury or hatred against them as it does for the IRA.
This applies to all sections of the establishment, including the Labour Party. One only has to contrast the vitriol heaped upon Jeremy Corbyn for agreeing to talk to Gerry Adams with Mo Mowlam's cosy chats to Loyalist prisoners.
The most common explanation is, `Of course we condemn the Loyalist violence, but it only exists in response to the IRA. If the IRA didn't exist neither would the Loyalists.'
This amazing piece of logic stands everything on its head. The IRA exists precisely because the state which the Loyalists support has systematically denied Catholics their civil rights and has violently attacked all attempts at peaceful change. In other words, if the sectarian Northern Irish state did not exist neither would the IRA. From this very basic fact flows another important difference. The IRA was fighting to bring about change, the Loyalists to preserve the status quo, and if possible turn the clock of history back.
To a large degree this also determined the way they waged their struggles. The IRA waged a military struggle which at times went horribly wrong, in which many innocent working class people were killed, but which nevertheless was directed against Britain and the British presence, not against individual Protestants.
The Loyalists had a different role. Their state was being defended by the RUC and the British Army they were part of Britain. Their aim could only be to terrorise the Catholic population into submission. Therefore they targetted individual Catholics and bars full of Catholics, carrying out random sectarian assassination. Brutal and depraved torture and execution also fitted the bill.
If they end their ceasefire they may decide to launch bombing campaigns in the South of Ireland. But to what purpose? There are no Irish soldiers on their streets or Southern Irish policemen arresting them in their homes. Such attacks will simply be more sectarian murder.
As I have said, it is to be hoped they'll keep up the ceasefire. But as to the moral high ground, they deserve it about as much as John Major does to be praised for his honesty and integrity, or I do to be hailed the new Shakespeare.