FROM AFAR the jailing of mad dog Johnny Adair and the ousting of the Adair faction from the leadership of Adair's 'C' company of the UDA and from the loyalist heartland of Belfast's Shankill Road must seem like a significant step towards a civic society and an end to the sectarian nightmare in the North of Ireland.
However the role of the invisible third party in the loyalist feud - the British state itself - means that all is not as it seems.
Billy Hutchinson of the Progressive Unionist Party (PUP), voice.of the Loyalist killers of the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF) was the first to point the finger of blame at the third party in the feud.
He alleged that the British state forces were an active player, running cover for Mad Dog Adair's gunmen when they went on runs and obstructing the rest of the UDA when they tried to organise hits.
We should take Billy seriously on this. He knows what he's talking about. In a previous feud. between the UVF and UDA the numerically weaker UVF were able to hold their own because of this surreptitious support from the state.
The reasons in both cases are the same. In the various feuds the British are keen to support the 'peace' wing of loyalism. In the previous feud this was seen to be the UVE For most of the recent feud the Mad Dog was seen as the dove.
Of course all of this is the purest nonsense. There is no peace wing to loyalism. Loyalists, and their feuds, are in equal measure about who is the biggest bigot and who controls drugs, protection and prostitution (much of which is child prostitution).
They only indirectly mirror political division within unionism in that the UDA is seen as muscle for the Paisleyite DUP and the UVF as muscle for Official unionists.
Within days of the ending of the UDA -UVF feud, Hutchinson, who likes to describe himself as a socialist, was on the front line of the offensive against the primary school children of Holy Cross. Even less believable than the idea of a UVF peace wing was the idea of Mad Dog Adair as a peacenik - that would make a horse laugh.
The British are anxious to save Loyalism from itself and retain it as an instrument in the negotiations as an extra element of pressure forcing even greater concessions from Sinn Fein.
At a more general level the loyalists act to make clear the limits to what Catholic workers can expect in a Northern state.
How did Mad Dog Adair become the peace dove? He had been returned to jail under quasi-internment regulations for sparking the initial turf war with the UVE. On his release he immediately set about attempting to set himself up as supremo of the conglomeration of local criminal gangs that make up the UDA.
The release came after British attempts to call a halt to the horrendous sectarian onslaught at Holy Cross primary school with a major campaign of appeasement of loyalism. Locally this meant 'conflict resolution' that conceded to demands for apartheid through a system of 'peace walls' sealing off the Catholic ghettoes.
More generally it meant Secretary of State Reid declaring that Northern Ireland had become 'a cold house for Protestants' and signalling a willingness to further tweak the Good Friday Agreement to the right.
Adair began to look like a gift to the British, signalling a willingness to pay lip service to the Good Friday agreement while projecting himself as the man who could control the UDA and bring order to the anarchic sectarianism of the organisation.
Reid endorsed Adair's project at an 'accidental meeting in East Belfast, followed by a respectful interview on British radio where Mad Dog's new claims to be a peaceful champion of Protestant workers seeking a political perspective were accepted without comment.
The most bizarre moment came when Adair joined the gravy train himself, being accepted as a prisoner rehabilitation officer with peace funding!
Alas, it was all built on sand. The one thing all the warlords have in common is resistance to a supremo. After early success in North Belfast, where the local warlord was replaced by henchman Andre Soukri and successful infiltration into south Belfast, Adair ran into trouble in the East.
He reacted by forming an alliance with the drug barons of Portadown's LVF and the attempted killing of the local UDA leader led to outright war.
When Soukri jumped ship Adair was doomed. The British resignedly put him back in the slammer, making it clear to the other warlords that the fun was over.
When Adair's followers continued the war, the rest of the UDA were able to enter Adair's small estate en masse under the eye of British guns and physically eject the Adair faction - the RUC/PSNI intervened against those actually firing guns but ignored knives and hatchets.
Immediately afterwards the British announced £3 million in 'community development - another gravy train for the loyalist paramilitaries. The UVF announced that it was co-operating with the UDA to build a new superloyalist alliance
The British support the new alliances. For them, stable rule in Ireland means supporting sectarian privilege.
The weird tale shows yet again the falsity of the idea that the criminal gangs are the voice of the Protestant working class. They are convenient tools of the British state, and the British go to great trouble to preserve them.
The voice is the voice of loyalism. The hand is the hand of Britain, telling us how the British government want it to be in the grim sectarian hellhole we inhabit in the North of Ireland.
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With Home Secretary David Blunkett seeking ever-more reactionary ways and means to stem the Britain, which tion of asylum seekers in detention centres or prisons while the Home Office considered their claim, and denied homeless accommodation to asylum-seekers if they could stay anywhere (such as a church floor) "however temporary
The Asylum and Immigration Act 1996 introduced the "white list" of contries which the Home Office alleged did not pose any serious risks of persecution.
It imposed very tight time limits for abroad. Interestingly a recent case against people alleged to have carried out banned activities in support of the PKK (which technically no longer exists) collapsed because the jury could not reach a verdict. asylum claims for example by Turkish Kurds: claims have been refused on grounds that political activists are terrorists; while if refugees are too vague when making their claim, they are refused as economic clalist r ice March 2003 9