Gerry Adams, Martin McGuinness and Ken Livingstone will be among the key speakers at TUC Congress House on Saturday, where Sinn Féin is organising a conference on Irish unity.

Both Adams and Livingstone have alluded to the roots of the event in the dialogue which began back in 1982, shortly after Sinn Féin won its first seats in that year’s Assembly elections.

As GLC leader, Livingstone invited the party’s leaders to London only for them to be banned by Home Secretary Willie Whitelaw under the Prevention of Terrorism Act.

That invitation has played a central role in the right’s charge sheet against Livingstone ever since, but it is often forgotten that on his subsequent visit to Belfast in February 1983, he told republicans that “every time a bomb goes off in London or innocent civilians are killed in Northern Ireland it visibly puts back the cause of a united Ireland.”

The contacts established then went on to play a significant role in the peace process, with Livingstone acting as a key intermediary between Sinn Fein and Mo Mowlam in the mid-1990s.

The debates about Ireland in the 1980s raised issues that have resonated in more recent conflicts.
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Over at the Yorkshire Ranter, Alex Harrowell comments on the ongoing story of Glen Jenvey, who featured as an anti-terrorist ‘expert’ in a Sun story about threats, which it now appears he posted himself, against public figures on a Muslim web forum.

It’s a very good question just how many terrorism stories (especially ones that have the “Internet” flag set – it means “stuff I don’t understand” to a lot of editors) are the work of these people, whether the upscale, Decent version or Jenvey’s Comedy Gladio.

There are indeed some interesting connections between the kind of right-wing “CounterJihad” networks represented by Jenvey and the so-called “decent left“.
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