Watch this video, courtesy of The Daily Telegraph, the morning newspaper read by the British Army officer class, and if you have to pinch yourself my guess is you would not be alone…….I have written a whole book trying to explain how and why the guy who features in the second video below became the guy in the Telegraph video above, and I think I understand it but it still blows my mind away….

Hi ‘Woy’, meet your political equivalent, ‘Boris’.

In the wake of the Brexit vote a number of prominent observers have rushed to print with dire predictions of the consequences of the referendum, while Sinn Fein’s Martin McGuinness has demanded an all-Ireland Border poll on the grounds that the North, like Scotland, voted for ‘Remain’ while the English & Welsh plumped for ‘Leave’.

I can understand McGuinness’ call more so than the journalistic Cassandras. It was a clever piece of opportunism, jumping on the Scots’ bandwagon to independence but Martin’s little ruse also smacked more than a little of someone making an unreasonable demand confident in the knowledge that it was never going to be granted.

First there was no way Enda Kenny’s ‘coalition-government-with-FF-in-all-but-name’ was going to agree to such a thing. The Good Friday Agreement is where Dublin politicians of all stripes wish to see the North parked for the foreseeable future and beyond, and they will do nothing to endanger it.

Which leaves a Northern Ireland-only Border poll which Martin McGuinness knows full well a) would not be granted by Cruella or whoever succeeds her in Stormont House and b) would be won by the Unionists, probably handily – and does he really want to see that happen? I think not.

But as meaningless ploys go it was a successful p.r. exercise. Even The New York Times and The New Yorker picked it up.

Which leaves the journalistic prophets of doom. Prime amongst them was Fintan O’Toole who in this piece, provocatively headlined, ‘The English have placed a bomb under the Irish peace process’, published first in The Guardian and then in his own Irish Times, argued, as a sub-heading put it:

‘Brexit unthinkingly jeopardises the Good Friday Agreement, the greatest modern achievement of British diplomacy (and is) an insult to Ireland.’

Prime amongst the dire consequences of Brexit – and threats to the peace process – in O’Toole’s mind was that the old Border will come back, which would be primarily an immigration border which would have to be policed.

Perhaps, but what this argument, the central plank of his case, rests upon turns out to be, after a moment or two’s reflection, a foundation full of nothingness.

Not only was the old Border as porous as a kitchen colander but O’Toole’s implied assumption that the Troubles in the North were about the Border, that, to borrow his own example, the IRA drew angry recruits from the Catholic community because the Dublin-Belfast train stopped at Newry for passport controls, is fundamentally flawed.

The reason for the Troubles had nothing to do with the Border but everything to do with Catholics’ very real sense of injustice in the North – and because of Unionism’s obdurate refusal to ameliorate their anger, the consequent Nationalist conviction that if the Northern Ireland State was irreformable then it had to be brought down, by force of arms if necessary.

The Troubles were, to quote a sage of my acquaintance, a civil rights struggle that got out of control. But they were not about removing the Border or even softening it.

In that sense the Provisional IRA’s campaign was a bit of a con trick. It was fought nominally to get rid of the Border but was really an expression of Nationalist anger and frustration that the Unionists wouldn’t allow the Catholic community a fair and rightful swig of the jug.

This explains why, except for a few ideological Republicans, the Sinn Fein leadership was so easily able to bring its base along the journey to the Good Friday Agreement, an accord which embraced accepting the consent principle and the destruction of the IRA armoury.

And if the consent principle was not about accepting the Border, then I do not know what it was about. Decommissioning the IRA’s guns, meanwhile, was a statement saying that if Nationalists got their slice of the cake they would no longer be needed.

The conclusion of all this is simple. As long as the post-Brexit arrangements leave in place the defining features of the Good Friday Agreement, which are primarily about according Northern Catholics their political place in the sun, then the recent EU referendum will not fundamentally challenge the post-1998 peace. No matter what greets the traveler as he or she reaches the Irish Border.

Chris Bray takes a caustic look at the latest extraordinary turns in the Boston College case:

I’ve been arguing for years that the Belfast Project subpoenas aren’t an example of a police investigation, but rather offer proof that police in Northern Ireland are engaged in a theatrical performance and refusing to perform real detective work. Events in Belfast courts this week prove the point.

First, in a hearing regarding an American subpoena requested by the PSNI for Belfast Project interviews conducted with Anthony McIntyre, lawyers for McIntyre argued that the International Letter of Request (ILOR) sent by the British government to the U.S. government was “replete with errors, and that’s putting it mildly.” Among the errors alleged by McIntyre’s lawyers were claims made in the ILOR that McIntyre had previously been convicted for offenses for which he had actually been acquitted or never charged.

You can read the rest of Chris Bray’s post here.

Remember this?

Upper class clown Boris Johnson is well placed to succeed David Cameron as British prime minister. The two first met at Oxford where they were members of the loutish Bullingdon Society, a group which invited only the scions of the very wealthy as members and which delighted in trashing restaurants.

Here they are pictured with other hooligan toffs:

Cameron is standing, second from left; Jonhson is seated, far right (appropriately)

Below is an entertaining film about Johnson and Cameron’s days at Oxford, ‘When Boris met Dave’. Enjoy:

The British, or rather the English, voted for Brexit not because of over-regulation or dissatisfaction with the economy or because European bankers screwed Greece and Ireland and would do the same to the Brits, but because they hate foreigners and believe they are superior to continental Europeans.

Not all of them mind you but an awful lot, some 17 million of them who plumped for the Leave campaign in the referendum. (It would be interesting to see just how the English vote went but I’d bet the Brexit margin was a good deal larger than the overall result)

That they loathe the French, Germans and Italians and look down on the minor European countries, when they bother even to notice them, has been a feature of  English culture – frequently expressed in TV comedies, invariably set during World War II and full of excruciating racial sterotypes – all my life.

That racism is, of course, not confined to the European continent. Ask the Irish, Scots and even the Welsh about that. But at least they are white and, more or less, speak the same language.

But what sharpened all those horrible emotions was the influx of stranger Europeans, like Poles and Romanians whose language, food and culture was, to the English, utterly alien.

And I suspect the promised/threatened influx of Turks tipped the balance in Thursday’s vote.

The idea that much of English economic life would be decided in part by Germans and French was bad enough but having to share their cities and towns with Turks, Poles and Romanians was too much for the English to bear.

When the Leave campaign complained about immigration it was to this base and reactionary emotion they were appealing to. The execrable Nigel Farage – surely Denis Thatcher reborn – is their leader. Meanwhile in France, English soccer fans gave all this an uglier but in its way more honest shape.

None, or very little of this, will feature in the Brexit post-mortems. That’s a pity, not least for those remaining in the EU. They might conclude that Europe is better off without such people in their midst.

1. England are shit and always were, always will be;

2. ‘Woy’ is a wanker;

3; Wilshire is a useless Arsenal thug;

4. I could be a football manager;

5. Ciaran O’Connor is whistling up his arse about Jimmy Greaves!

6. Bale was worth more than 100 million whatevers!

Sometimes you have got to admire the bare-cheeked audacity of the British establishment when it comes to dealing with scandals that threaten their own.

A classic example has presented itself in the shape of the Boutcher inquiry into Freddie Scappaticci and his handlers. The scandal is so huge, affecting not just British military intelligence, who ran Scap, but also MI5 and the former RUC Special Branch, who both shared his intelligence, especially MI5, and via the Tactical Co-ordinating Group structure (TCG), helped run him.

All three branches of British intelligence are thus implicated in the central allegation, viz that Scappaticci was allowed to kill by his handlers to preserve his cover and his immense value to the British government in its war against the IRA.

So serious is the allegation, implicating the State in murder, that it can’t entirely be brushed under the carpet. The classic British response in these situations is to set up an inquiry headed by a safe pair of hands. They don’t always pick the right guy, e.g. John Stalker, but one can only assume they have done their homework on Mr Boutcher.

So, now, no-one can criticise the British for not doing anything about the Scappaticci scandal. But the the truth is that we are very unlikely ever to see the full report, which will be said to be so sensitive that its contents won’t be divulged. We’ll be lucky even to see a short, sanitised summary.

That’s what happened to the Stalker report, to the Sampson report which took over from Stalker when Jack Hermon nobbled him, and it is what has happened to the various Steven’s reports, although we did get one half-decent summary from Stevens.

So a secret inquiry, held in private will produce a report which we’ll never get to read but the British will be able to say that they did something about the Scappaticci scandal.

There’s a kicker though, Apparently the PSNI and/or John Boutcher are briefing that his report will take five years to produce. That’s nearly as long as World War II.

By 2021 or even 2022, Scappaticci will be a distant memory. The man himself may even have departed for the big Internal Security Unit in the sky by then. The odds are that many people won’t care a toss about Scap by that time.

But the British will be able to say that they did something about the scandal.