Quote Originally Posted by Furunculus View Post
oh i agree, there was lots of empathising and hand-wringing over hard fought compromise positions, and that it had nothing to do with the fact that by the end of the eighties the british secret services had the IRA compromised to the point where:

> their head of internal security was a stooge who set up good and loyal car-bombers in order to protect other British agents,
> their weapons caches were sabotaged and/or booby-trapped,
> their operations were known in advance often resulting in murderous ambushes,
> they had trouble saying anything to anybody without it being recorded in triplicate,

as said earlier, states can't win but they can lose, well we managed to persuade the IRA they could not win while demonstrating that we weren't going to lose either.
So nothing to do with the Docklands bombing and the increased targetting of the City of London, combined with the insurers saying that they would no longer pay out on damage from terrorist attacks? The UK govt didn't have all the cards as you are suggesting. They IRA had occassional access to one testicle (the City) which they could squeeze and induce a fair amount of panic.