Many thanks to Diarmuid Breatnach for posting this article, which takes an unusually interesting line on the recent death of Queen Elizabeth II and Sinn Fein’s response. Thanks to RS for sending it to me. You can read it here: https://rebelbreeze.com/2022/09/13/sinn-fein-becoming-what-they-imitate/

I am told that the organisers of Queen Elizabeth’s funeral are bracing themselves for trouble over the Northern Ireland invitation list which apparently lays down the rule that the local political parties can only send one representative to the ceremony. The problem, apparently, is that both of Sinn Fein’s leaders, Michelle O’Neill in the North and Mary Lou McDonald in the South, would like to go but as things stand that is just not on. Maybe Gerry should give his buddy Charles a bell? Anyway, watch this space.

Thanks to HM for the tip…..

Richard O’Rawe reviews ‘The Yank: The True Story of a Former US Marine in the Irish Republican Army’ by John Crawley

Sometimes a book comes along that stops you in its tracks. John Crawley’s The Yank is such a book. Why? Because it’s different and not just from anything we have had before relating to the IRA’s fight for Irish freedom. For a start, the central character in this fascinating book, John Crawley, is a real-life Yank, but not just any old Yank … he had been a proud member of the United States Marine Corps, and not just any old Marine, he had been a member of the Corps elite ‘Recon’ unit, and a sergeant who taught other Marines into the bargain.

Crawley was born in Long Island, New York, in 1957, the son of a Co. Roscommon father and a Co. Kerry mother. Two years later the family moved to Chicago and, in 1972, John moved to the town of Castlerea, Co Roscommon, to live with an aunt. He notes in his book, with what I suspect is a degree of pride, that his great-uncle, Tom Crawley, shot dead RIC Sergeant James King, in Castlerea on 11 July 1921, and that the King incident saw the last shots being fired in the Irish war of independence.
Eager to join the fight for Irish freedom, Crawley left the Marines after four years and flew to Ireland in May 1979, where he set about enlisting in the IRA.

On arrival in Ireland, Crawley brought with him, ‘Semper Fidelis’ (Always Faithful), the credo of the Marine Corps, which he adopted as a life motto. He had always been proud of, and faithful to the American Republic and, after becoming a member of the IRA, he remained equally faithful to the Irish Republic that had been declared on Easter Monday, 1916.

But what prompted this former special forces Marine to abandon a potentially glittering career in the U.S. military, to becoming a particularly active member of the IRA? What were the forces that led him to becoming an Irish revolutionary?

In his book, he brings us back to his school days as a kid in Chicago where, every morning, along with the rest of the class he would recite the Pledge of Allegiance … ‘Those words weren’t mindlessly recited. They would resonate with me my entire life.’ Crawley writes of how he would hear the words… ‘the Republic for which it stands … one nation … indivisible, with liberty and justice for all,’ and he kept comparing the American Revolution with the on-going Irish Revolution and he could not see much difference between the two.

He also takes us to Dublin, where he is living with his parents. He writes of becoming increasingly aware of the conflict that was raging throughout Ireland and particularly in the North, which was being militarily propped-up by the British army.

When he eventually did join the IRA, Crawley found himself, not in the professional army unit of his expectations, but in an army of largely well-intentioned patriots. His first operation was, ‘…what the Marine Corps would call a “complete clusterfuck” from start to finish’. Crawley was armed with an M60 machinegun and was accompanied by other volunteers.

They had positioned themselves in a thicket where they could attack the enemy, walking or driving along the road. Suddenly a Gazelle, a light helicopter hovered over their position and Crawley was urged to ‘Get down! Get down! Get down!’ He couldn’t understand why he could not open fire on the Gazelle, which was only thirty feet above them. He was later told by an IRA officer that a Gazelle was bulletproof. Crawley knew differently; he had often flown in helicopters and believed you could practically put your fist through the fuselage.

The former Marine had been trained to lie camouflaged and low in ambush position for days, if needs be, until a target presented itself. When, one volunteer alongside him excused himself and announced he had to leave the ambush location because he had to ‘milk his cows’, and a second volunteer soon followed because he had to ‘work the next day’, there must have been quite a frown on Crawley’s face as he watched his comrades go about their civilian business.

It did not take Crawley long to find out that there was a world of difference between Marine Corps training and that of the IRA. He writes of the IRA’s training regime, ‘They were poorly trained, badly trained and mis-trained in relation to their weapons and also seriously misinformed about enemy equipment and capabilities’. In training camps, south of the border, volunteers would be taught the basics about equipment i.e., where to insert a magazine and flick the safety switch on a rifle, etc, but they were given practically no live-firing experience and were not properly instructed on marksmanship techniques such as breathing and sighting targets.

Crawley brought up these points with Northern Commander, Martin McGuinness, and advocated the setting-up of dedicated, well-trained sniping units in every battalion area. He wanted all snipers to have their own rifles with telescopic sights that would be sighted-in to the shooter’s eye. To Crawley’s dismay, McGuinness dismissed his suggestions out-of-hand.

In 1984, Crawley’s IRA career took him to Boston, where the notorious gangster, ‘Whitey’ Bulger, helped him buy arms. The mission ended off the Irish coast, when Crawley and other IRA volunteers were arrested on board the arms ship, the Marita Ann. For that endeavour, Crawley would serve a full ten years in prison.

He would later be sentenced at the Old Bailey in May 1996 to thirty-five years for conspiring to blow up the electrical grid that fed south-east England and was released from a British prison on 22 May 2000, as a consequence of the Good Friday Agreement. In all, Crawley would spend fourteen years in prison for his IRA beliefs.

This is a fantastic book, one that I read in a single sitting. What struck me most about it was that, had Crawley been given his head and allowed to bring about a more professionally trained IRA, the outcome of the war might have been different, certainly, the British casualty rate would have multiplied. But life is what it is, and Crawley pulls no punches about how unhappy he is with the outcome of the war and the reality of the Good Friday Agreement, which he regards as a betrayal of the Republic that was proclaimed in 1916. He puts up a cogent republican argument that, basically, the Gerry Adams/Martin McGuinness leadership sold out Irish republicanism, saying, ‘I did not learn until it was far too late that my goals as an Irish republican, and their electoral ambitions as political careerists, would increasingly lead our paths to diverge’.

John Crawley, elite Marine Corps soldier, IRA volunteer, takes no prisoners in this unputdownable book. My only fault line is that he did not reveal more of the many operations in which I suspect he was involved but, hopefully, that’s for another day.

You can watch him here……

If, like me, you watched the Chelsea vs Spurs Premier League match yesterday you couldn’t help but notice the deep animosity of the home fans to Spurs and its supporters.

The commentators could hardly ignore it – the hostility of Chelsea’s fans to those who support Spurs is a regular feature of games between the teams at Stamford Bridge – but explaining it was a different matter, since to do so honestly would be to admit that there is something rotten at the heart of this part of the Premier League.

Conveniently the two managers, Spurs’ Conte and Chelsea’s Tuchel, were both awarded red cards at the final whistle as one celebrated the result (Conte) and the other (Tuchel) lamented it, so the behaviour of the Chelsea fans could be assumed to be an extension of that rivalry. No need then to dig deeper to explain the special, deep hatred so many Chelsea fans have for their north London neighbours.

Except there is another explanation and it can be found by typing the following words into the Google search bar: ‘Chelsea’, ‘Fans’ and ‘anti-Semitism’.

If you do, you are likely to discover stories that have opening paragraphs like this: ‘Shocking footage has emerged of Chelsea fans giving Nazi salutes, singing anti-Semitic songs and hissing to mimic the noise of a gas chamber.’

Or this: ‘A Chelsea fan who posted antisemitic and racist tweets aimed at fans of rival London soccer club Tottenham — including photos of Auschwitz and a man doing a Nazi salute — was Friday jailed for eight weeks’.

And this: ‘Shocking new footage has emerged of Chelsea fans performing Nazi salutes, singing anti-Semitic songs and mimicking the noise of a gas chamber. The explosive revelations feature in new BBC Three film Shame In The Game, which examines the devastating impact of football racism in the UK after a year which saw hate crimes at professional games soar by 66 per cent in England and Wales.’

These three examples of Chelsea fans’ anti-semitism are notable on two counts – they happened very recently and are a small sample of scores of similar incidents involving Chelsea’s fan base that can be found on the internet.

The former owner of Chelsea FC, Russian zillionaire, Roman Abramovich, who is himself Jewish, but was forced to sell the club following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, owned the club for nearly two decades but only recently made any effort to tackle this bigotry.

As the US television network, NBC attempts to popularise British soccer on American cable television this aspect of the game is not something the station’s executives want to explain or even highlight to their viewers. Like nearly everyone else involved in the sport, it’s best to pretend it’s not happening.

Watch NBC’s coverage of the Chelsea vs Spurs game yesterday and you will not be able to find any explanation of the anti-semitic basis of the Chelsea fan base’s hostility to Tottenham Hotspur. Isn’t that how the holocaust itself happened? Pretend it is not happening until it is too late?

Fair play to the Dublin-based media for keeping a wary eye on Sinn Fein’s rightward lurch as a general election in the South gets closer. It is encouraging to see the press at least doing its job – although none of what is happening will surprise this writer or the more devoted of his readers – and the latest to join the business of hard-nosed Shinner watching is The Irish Examiner’s political editor Daniel McConnell in this piece published today.

Here is the article for those unable to link to the Examiner‘s site:

Tue, 09 Aug, 2022 – 07:00

Daniel McConnell,  Political Editor

News that Sinn Féin’s Pearse Doherty and other senior party members have been increasingly interacting with major businesses and employers may not be surprising, in light of their current poll ratings.

But, given its history and its previous anti-wealth policies, it is, on another level, truly remarkable how normal it is sounding these days.

By normal, I mean not radical.

For example, the cornerstone of its 2011 election manifesto was the introduction of a third 48% rate of tax on all incomes over €100,000 and a 1% wealth tax on high earners with assets over €1m, including family homes.

This was from the party who at the time made its TDs only take the average industrial wage and surrender the rest to the party coffers.

Such noble stances have since been dispensed with and pragmatism now reigns.

The party’s current tax policies are far more temperate, with the party now saying it wants to remove tax credits on a tapered basis on individual incomes above €100,000.

It does still want to introduce a 3% solidarity tax on individual incomes above €140,000 but has made clear it is only on the portion of the salary over €140,000 and not the whole lot. 

It says it also wants to end the corporation tax break for the bailed-out banks.

But what Sinn Féin has been saying to big tech firms is really interesting.

Firstly, it is interesting that such firms see Sinn Féin as likely holders of ministerial office after the next election and wanted to see the whites of the eyes of those who they need to lobby.

Second, the response back from Doherty and co was fascinating.

“We have stated our commitment to a high-wage economy and sustainable tax base,” the party confirmed to me.

Sinn Féin is sounding and looking more and more like a party of the centre, one that will end up adhering to the status quo. Picture: Gareth Chaney/Collins Photos

“That includes increasing research and development through changes to the tax system, implementing the OECD international tax agreement and maintaining the current 12.5% rate, and protecting Ireland’s competitiveness by tackling long-run failures in housing and childcare,” it said.

This is some transformation and combined with its abandonment of its opposition to the Special Criminal Court, Sinn Féin is sounding and looking more and more like a party of the centre, one that will end up adhering to the status quo.

But Doherty and co will want their pound of flesh in some form to prove their change credentials.

They have chosen to focus in on the Special Assignee Relief Programme (Sarp), which was established in 2012 to entice entrepreneurs and social innovators into Ireland by providing additional tax relief on high incomes for up to five years.

Doherty and co detest it, or at least they say they do.

They have argued that the party does not support such a tax break that in one year gave 55 millionaires tax breaks worth more than €111,000 each.

Sarp was introduced by Fine Gael and has been highly controversial, as those on the left have argued that school teachers and nurses have ended up paying more tax than multi-millionaires.

Tax breaks

Such tax breaks are much beloved of the big tech firms, which clearly do not want to see them abolished.

Gerard Brady, IBEC head of national policy and chief economist said abolishing Sarp “would risk damaging Ireland’s ability to compete for highly skilled staff”.

Brady said highly skilled and increasingly mobile workers are the key to competitiveness in an age where knowledge and intangible capital are driving global growth.

The truth is that this tax break is not just for a handful of people but hundreds who are able to offset large portions of their income.

According to the most recent data, 50 executives earning between €1m and €3m benefited from Sarp in 2019, with significant tax write-offs available on a large chunk of their income.

The scheme also allows write-offs of private schooling fees up to €5,000 and the cost of a return trip home once per year, if paid for by the person’s employer.

In 2019, a total of 1,574 people were enrolled on Sarp, with 433 in finance and insurance, 337 in technology, and 258 in wholesale or retail trades.

Should Sinn Féin’s poll ratings continue to remain where they are, such meetings with big business and big industry will not only reoccur, they will intensify.

Comes courtesy of Harry McGee in The Irish Times today (Sat, Aug 7):

For those without a subscription, here it is:

For Sinn Féin, the reality of government won’t be change, it will be compromise

Sinn Féin’s rhetoric is populist but is not achievable in government

By Harry McGee

In the early 1990s, a representative of one of the ratings agencies arrived in Dublin to meet experts and academics while reporting on how Ireland was performing economically. Among those he met was a senior political journalist. A general election was imminent and the opinion polls were suggesting that the Labour Party would do well.

The ratings agency guy said it seemed to him from the election rhetoric that a Labour-influenced government would fundamentally alter the course of Irish economic policy. The journalist dismissed the suggestion out of hand. “Labour is not going to change anything. No matter who is in power, it will all remain the same.”

The reply might have had more than a sprinkle of cynicism but the net point was strong. Reinventing the wheel is not a regular occurrence in settled democracies. New governments – even those with a radical change agenda – find that the faster they try to go, the faster their wheels spin in the mud. The superstructure of the Irish State budges haltingly and slowly.

There’s been a long history in Irish politics of new brushes sweeping suspiciously like the old brush. When it looked like the radical new party Fianna Fáil could gain power in 1932, the government party Cumann na nGaedheal went full throttle with negative campaigning.

“The gunmen are voting Fianna Fáil, the communists are voting Fianna Fáil,” read one of its posters. Another focusing on Eamon de Valera, read: “Devvy’s Circus, absolutely the greatest road show in Ireland today – Señor de Valera, world famous illusionist, oath swallower and escapologist. See his renowned act. Escaping from the straitjacket of the Republic. Frank F Aiken, fearsome fire-eater. Shaunty O’Kelly, the man in dress clothes. Monsieur Lemass, famous tightrope performer, see him cross from the Treaty to the Republic every night.”

The scare tactics did not work and failed to halt the Fianna Fáil juggernaut. The fears stoked were unfounded. Fianna Fáil had new policies – especially on housing provision – but little that could be classified as revolutionary in the context of the age.

And so it is with Sinn Féin. The next general election is not due to take place until 2025. Before that are the local elections and the European elections in 2024.

Before a vote is cast Sinn Féin is on a winner. It had dismal showings in both polls in 2019. It saw its number of council seats halved from 159 to 81, and garnered only 9.5 per cent of the vote, a 5.7 per cent fall from 2014.

The party also lost two of its three European Parliament seats. It was that poor performance that influenced its decision to run a reduced slate in the 2020 election hardly six months later, unaware of the extraordinary windfall that was about to come its way.

So, starting from a low base in 2024, it is highly likely that Sinn Féin will be the big winner in those two elections, taking votes – and seats – from Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael. Even returning to the status quo ante will give it momentum going into the 2025 general election. Of course, second-tier elections are not a direct indicator of performance in general elections (as many, including me, painfully found out in 2020) but in this instance, Sinn Féin will be able to galvanise a growing view among the public that it can be trusted by the electorate to govern the country.

We are coming close to that point now. Bertie Ahern, always an astute reader of emerging trends, did an interview in 2005 when he said that Sinn Féin in the south was not ready for government and would need a period of time to transition, as happened with the evolution of Sinn Féin The Workers’ Party. He predicted it would take two decades.

It looks like he was on the money. Many in the older generation view the prospect of a Sinn Féin government with horror, given its bloody legacy. For anybody under the age of 30, that does not register.

The party has adopted a left-leaning and populist agenda in opposition and has gained traction with the young, especially with its housing policies.

Some of those grand promises, especially in health and housing, will take years to be realised, if ever

The party’s policy offerings in some areas are thin. Its climate change policies have little credibility. It supports the targets but has no thought-out ideas on how to achieve them other than to oppose the key policies of the current Government including the carbon tax. Its own alternative budget last year had the cheek to include a sucker payment for cows and sheep (€124 million) as a “climate change” measure (when such a payment would lead to increased emissions).

Its promises will leave a good few hostages to fortune – 20,000 social and affordable homes in a year, full redress for Mica and pyrite homes, the pension age reduced to 65, no increases in carbon tax, rent relief, welfare increases, VAT reductions on fuel and energy prices, abolition of property tax, reductions in creche fees, State-run childcare facilities, large increases in health spending and provision (including €250 million to tackle waiting lists). As against that, it promises to balance the books by increasing the tax take from those who earn more than €100,000, and by targeting more punitive taxes on the perceived villains of the housing and economic crisis (banks, speculators, vulture funds, data centres).

Some of those grand promises (especially in health and housing) will take years to be realised, if ever. In interviews earlier this year Mary Lou McDonald sounded like she was tempering expectations of what the party can achieve in a first term in government. She is right. The biggest reality for any new government isn’t change. It is compromise. Sinn Féin, if it gains power, will be no different from any other party in that respect.

Great piece on the who’s and why’s of Trump’s declining fortunes by Molly Jong Fast in The Atlantic magazine. You can read it here…..

Freddie Scappaticci, one of the most effective and notorious British spies to infiltrate the IRA during the Irish Troubles, was, according to well-placed republican sources, drummed out of the IRA in 1993, a year before the first IRA ceasefire, after the IRA’s spy-catchers, the Internal Security Unit (ISU), demanded that the then Chief of Staff allow them to investigate the seven-man Army Council for evidence of treachery.

Both Gerry Adams and the late Martin McGuinness were members of the Council at this time and stirring up internal turmoil as such an investigation surely would have, could only seriously complicate the journey to peace they had started, which would culminate with the Good Friday Agreement, the winding down of the IRA and the decommissioning of the bulk of its weapons.

But the IRA’s military leader, Kevin McKenna, enraged by the ultimatum, called the ISU’s bluff and sacked the entire spy catcher unit, including Scappaticci, thus ending the career of Britain’s most valuable double agent during the Troubles.

One IRA source described the Chief of Staff’s furious reaction to the demand: ‘McKenna was incandescent with rage’, he said. which suggests that whoever had devised the plan had badly misread their quarry.

The effort to investigate the Army Council bore the hallmarks of a classic deception operation put together by Scappaticci’s British Army handlers which would have been designed to divide, confuse and weaken the IRA leadership. But for McKenna it might well have worked, although the consequences for the infant peace process might have been disastrous.

Once fired from the IRA, Scappaticci, known widely as ‘Scap’, then retired to a home in Andersonstown, West Belfast until he was outed by a former British soldier, ironically a disillusioned ex-member of the intelligence unit that ran ‘Scap’, and an Irish journalist.

After a brief effort to protest his innocence, ‘Scap’ – whose family roots were in Italy – essentially disappeared from public view, re-emerging only when he was charged with bestiality by detectives led by Jon Boutcher, the former Bedfordshire Chief Constable whose ‘Operation Kenova’ is probing ‘Scap’s’ part in the murder of nearly twenty victims.

‘Scap’s’ victims invariably ended their lives on country roads trussed like Christmas turkeys and riddled with bullets. He is said to have specialised in torturing his victims, sometimes suspending them from the ceiling by their heels until they confessed. He also used drugs to render them unconscious before transporting them to isolated cottages on the southern side of the Border for interrogation. These sessions invariably ended with an admission of guilt and a bullet behind the ear.

What role ‘Scap’s’ British Army handlers played in the effort to destabilise the Army Council remains a mystery although common sense suggests they may well have devised the plan, a classic piece of disinformation designed to confuse and divide the IRA leadership. If so, the question of whether political approval from Whitehall was sought or given assumes great importance.

Such operations are not uncommon in the murky world of intelligence and are designed to create mutual suspicion and division in enemy ranks, in this case as the IRA tried to navigate its way through the peace process towards a ceasefire and decommissioning, a fraught enough endeavour as it was.

All of ‘Scap’s’ dealings with the British were with the military; he hated the Northern Irish police force, the Royal Ulster Constabulary and refused to do business with them, but he was ready and willing to work for British military intelligence, then led by an outfit called the Force Research Unit (FRU). This is the same unit that was at the centre of the controversy surrounding the assassination of Belfast lawyer, Pat Finucane.

But what, aside from ‘Scap’s’ loyalty, led the FRU to think that Chief of Staff, Kevin McKenna would open up the Army Council to a level of scrutiny that would be bound to cause anger and discord?

The former IRA chief, who succeeded Ivor Bell in the top job, was the longest serving IRA leader during the Troubles, holding the Chief of Staff rank from 1983 to 1997; he was also known to be a loyal supporter of Gerry Adams, unlike Bell.

After Adams survived a challenge from opponents of the peace process in 1996 and his allies reasserted command of the IRA, calling a second ceasefire which led eventually to the Good Friday Agreement, McKenna was put in charge of decommissioning the organisation’s weaponry, a measure of the trust the Adams’ camp had in him.

McKenna died in 2019 aged 74 and a tribute to him was published on the internet by Gerry Adams who called him: ‘An honest decent republican who saw off Thatcher and her ilk and brought the British government to the negotiating table’, adding, ‘It is in the nature of these things that the part played by republicans like Kevin during the long years of war will never be known.’

Freddie Scappaticci was among those sacked by McKenna and his loss must have been a heavy blow to British intelligence. As a double agent his treachery had given the British an unprecedented insight into IRA attitudes, internal rivalries and membership.

Scappaticci, known universally as ‘Scap’, had the codename ‘Steaknife’, but when the British Ministry of Defence sought and secured a court injunction forbidding the media from publishing the name, journalists instead called him Stakeknife’, at which point the mandarins of Whitehall appear to have decided to call it quits.

‘Scap’ is currently being investigated by a team of British detectives led by Jon Boutcher, the former chief constable of Bedfordshire. He has already been charged with bestiality, a fondness for sex with animals, and could well have faced murder charges arising from his spy-catcher activities.

The clumsy and apparently ill-thought out effort to wrong foot the Army Council, if such it was, happened in 1993 and came as IRA leaders sought to win internal support for a peace process and the demilitarisation efforts that would accompany it. Less than a year after the ISU leadership was ousted, the IRA called a ceasefire and began a journey into constitutional politics.

The fact that Scappaticci’s handlers seen to have allowed him to be part of the attempted putsch raises an obvious question: was the attempt to destabilise the Army Council ultimately FRU’s idea and did other agencies, such as MI5, have a hand in events? What was the level of political knowledge in Westminster?

‘Scap’ was handled by the British Army’s then intelligence wing in Northern Ireland, the Force Research Unit (FRU) but had always refused to work with or for the old RUC Special Branch. Like many Northern Catholics he trusted the British Army more than the RUC.

One incident spoke to the importance with which the British Army regarded ‘Scap’. Worried about his security, he sought and got a face-to-face meeting with General Sir John Wilsey, who was British Army commander in Northern Ireland from 1990 to 1993, to discuss his concerns.

‘Scap’ faces an uncertain future but thanks to British prime minister Boris Johnson, he may never serve a day in jail for the many murders he was involved in.

Faced with growing Tory grassroots anger at the sight of elderly, former British soldiers being brought before the courts over distant events such as ‘Bloody Sunday’ in Derry, the Johnson government introduced a proposed Act of Parliament last May to deal with the problem.

Now widely known as ‘the Legacy Bill’, the new law would grant immunity from prosecution to anyone accused of committing Troubles-related offences as long as they agreed to co-operate with the process of investigating the charges against them. An irrevocable pledge of immunity will be granted to individuals who give an account of their offences judged to be ‘true to the best of (their) knowledge and belief’.

The legislation is strongly opposed by civil libertarians and human rights lawyers and has caused deep concern amongst victims’ groups and those, like Jon Boutcher, the former Chief Constable of Bedfordshire, who leads the so-called Kenova team investigating Scappaticci’s many alleged offences. The PSNI was never consulted about the law and nor were victims’ groups, notably the Human Rights Commission, which is charged with advising and overseeing human rights in Northern Ireland.

The Kenova investigation of ‘Scap’, which began with Jon Boutcher’s appointment as its head in 2016, is probing no less than 18 murders linked to the former IRA double agent. The investigation is, according to informed sources, based on the notion that many of the factual and disturbing aspects of ‘Scap’s’ IRA career – information long sought by his victims’ families – are best aired or can only be aired in the context of a criminal trial. As things stand now, it appears as if neither ‘Scap’ nor any other perpetrator will be exposed to the level of scrutiny best provided by that sort of process.

Thanks to Boris Johnson’s government the families of ‘Scap’s’ victims look as if once again they will be the losers and that the peace of mind promised when the Boutcher probe began will be denied to them.

(ends)