Republican News · Thursday 27 June 2002

New cap badge, same old story

"The stench is now starting to suffocate," SDLP leader Mark Durkan said last week.

The stench he spoke of, of course, is the collusion between loyalist death squads and their British Intelligence and RUC handlers, but what he did not say was that his party has, in effect, colluded in this cover up since agreeing John Reid's proposals on policing in August last year.

Applauded by unionists and the British government alike, the specious argument of the SDLP that joining the Policing Board was the best way of securing the Patten proposals (which it was never designed to deliver) has become one the greatest barriers to policing reform in the Six Counties.

SDLP policy gives the impression that real reform is underway, thus making it more difficult for nationalists to press for redress in areas that patently demonstrate the flawed nature of the current dispensation.

Since the SDLP accepted 'half a loaf' on policing, they have colluded with the British and Dublin governments, the Catholic bishops, sections of the media (most notably the Irish News) and unionism in rounding on Sinn Féin's refusal to engage with the Policing Board.

Faced with flagging support, the SDLP may have hoped that allying itself with everyone else would work to the detriment of Sinn Féin. But its tactics over principles approach didn't count on the reemergence of that suffocating stink.

On the same day the SDLP unveiled the new RUC/PSNI symbol, William Stobie, a former RUC agent in the UDA, whose former handlers now faced the risk of exposure, was shot dead. Ken Barrett, Stobie's associate, then disappeared, making his spectacular reappearance on last week's Panorama programme.

Nuala O'Loan then released her damning critique of the RUC's handling of the Omagh bombing warnings. It also emerged that the outgoing Police Authority had decided to buy enough plastic bullets to last the force another ten years - a decision the SDLP's Policing Board was unable, and unwilling to overturn.

The 'new police service' still fires plastic bullets, still refuses to take an oath on the upholding of human rights, cedes the power to block judicial inquiries to the British Secretary of State and the RUC Chief Constable, and is based on a abstruse implementation plan which is not to be set in train until the end of 2002.

On the streets, its response to an escalating loyalist onslaught on vulnerable nationalist areas has been to attack those trying to defend their lives and property. Nothing but the same old story.

The SDLP's new logo is designed to symbolise a new beginning based on pluralism and non-sectarianism, but actions speak loudest, and in continuing to offer support to a fundamentally flawed policing system, it is failing those most at risk from state and loyalist sectarianism.