The UDA’s Antifascist Feud: More than Meets the Eye?

Political and institutional loyalism never operates more than a stone’s throw away from the UK security apparatus. Ever since Carson loaded rifles on the Larne right through to decades of collusion and contemporary spats between narco gangs in East Belfast, the sons of Ulster having operated as either an auxiliary to the British state or pawn in wider power games.

For that reason news the attempted snuffing out of the neofascist fringes of North Antrim loyalism must be contextualised after UDA members shot at the home of activist Mark Brown. Part of the leadership of One Northern Ireland Voice (ONIV) which has mobilised loyalists around the topic of mass migration, Brown a convicted domestic abuser and former leading light of the British National Front was set upon by UDA heavies alongside ONIV co-founder Dan Grundle. 

Organising rallies in Portrush against asylum seeker accommodation under the ONIV it is speculated (perhaps with good justification) that the actions of Grundle and Brown has elicited the anger of UDA networks in Antrim aggrieved at the added attention brought to them by the open embrace of far right politics.

Operating like a protection racket at the best of times the day to day activities of the UDA includes narco trafficking with an orange veneer often surviving off a mixture of state grants laundered through community partnership. Ideology bring attention, not just from the media but from the PSNI and assorted agencies amid a wider Yookay crackdown against the far right.

UDA feuds since the Good Friday Agreement are notorious affairs often playing out in the tabloid press with spooks hiding in the background which lends itself to speculation about the role of HM’s government in North Antrim’s recent schism.

Historically used as contra gangs against republicanism and the Catholic community it is not impossible that the British state would very much like to see the likes of ONIV ground into the dirt. The British state would be more than happy for low level thugs like Brown to target their enemies-overtly opposing mass migration is another matter.

Whatever the truth loyalism regardless of its opinions of mass migration has the highest density of political informants this side of the German DDR with the recent downfall of Jeffery Donaldson and the role of MI5 entirely vindicating paranoia about where and how the British state operates to cull and contain fringe militancy.

For all its talk of defiance, loyalism remains less a movement against the state than one of its more unruly subcontractors.