Nobody believes that the UFF and the UDA are distinct organisations...

A newly-discovered declassified document contains a paper prepared by the NIO on 17 July 1992. It discusses the fact that the UFF was in fact the UDA, which was proscribed less than a month later. The fact is they always knew that the UFF, since it emerged on 9 June 1973, was never a separate organisation. The document reads:

The main argument for early action is that proscription is a long overdue step against an organisation which is essentially a criminal conspiracy aimed at killing, often indiscriminately, members of the minority community. Similar organisations (the IRA, UVF, INLA et al) are already proscribed.

Any credibility our current policy may have depends on the proposition that it is the UFF which does the killing but nobody in Northern Ireland or the Republic now believes that the UFF and the UDA are distinct organisations. Nor do we.

On that basis the sooner the UDA is banned the sooner the Government will gain more credibility, particularly with the UDA's main victims, the nationalist part of the community, when it asserts that it has an even-handed approach to paramilitary violence.