Now, I grant you, there is a modicum of counter-intuition in that distinction. However, that is the distinction that there is. The army’s role is to defend against external threats (and, lest we forget, to parade outside Horse Guards and Buckingham Palace to lure in Japanese tourists). That is the responsibility that we vest in them, and that is the only reason that we ought to tolerate them holding the power that they do. If we were made aware that the state had fully discretionary power of deploying soldiers to deal with US, there is no way that I could tolerate them spending tens of billions of pounds on increasingly-advanced weaponry to deploy against me, and I’m sure the same is true of most libertarians.

The police being here to stay is a red herring, because so too is the army. If the army is given carte blanche to deal with domestic threats, it might as well be deployed on the streets all the time. In the naval tradition, the concept of a ‘Fleet in Being’ deters other countries from using the sea for its own purposes. Similarly, the concept of an ‘Army in Being’ deters the people from using their own country for their own purposes. Unless the rules are very well defined, and constitutionally bound as tightly as possible, that Army in Being can only prevent legitimate protest and civil disobedience against the presumptive authority of the state. The state’s actions become, as libertarians must always fear they are, backed up by the power of the gun.

The first point, I believe, is just a matter of semantics, and, by unravelling that, ties in neatly with the distinction between internal and external threats. ‘British people’ doesn’t mean ethnicity (I have no time for nationalism, as no true libertarian can), but the state under which those people must live. Unlike the government of the Republic of Ireland (which, until the Good Friday Agreement, laid claim to Northern Ireland under its constitution), the government of the United Kingdom considers the people of the province to be British, and have the same rights as other Britons.

If that is the case, they must, afford them the rights that they would grant people in Berkshire or Perthshire, by recognising the distinction between internal and external threats. This, in turn, ties to the point made in the previous comment of mine. If the state informs us of the rules by which it acts and governs, and they are tolerable, they develop a certain obligation to uphold them. The state cannot justify maintaining army by citing the existence of uppity, vertically-challenged, Corsicans, and then use them to fight the same people that gave their consent to the original justification.

The Troubles are also a slightly unusual case when it comes to defining “the British people”. The people the army spent most of their time fighting absolutely insisted that they were not British — and, indeed, the Irish Government regard the Northern Irish as entitled to Irish passports. The British state said that they were British. When you define them as “fellow Britons”, you are forcing the ascendancy of the state’s definition of them over their own.

> The Troubles ought to have been countered by the Royal Ulster Constabulary

It’s very easy to say that, but just what sort of death rate do you think a modern police force should put up with? Bearing in mind that police officers are citizens too, and they didn’t sign up to be part of a war, what right do you think the state have to send them into one?

Of course, one of the advantages of calling in the army is that they can one day leave again, as they just have. The police are with us to stay. To win the Troubles, the RUC would have needed exactly what the army had: tanks, machine guns, deep-cover spies, assassins, combat-zone training, utter ruthlessness. If you think that a police force, having got all those things, is likely to give them, you have a lot more faith in the benevolence of the state than I do.

The legality or otherwise of their presence is somewhat irrelevant to my argument. Since, under the principle of Parliamentary sovereignty, the organ that deems actions legal or otherwise is Parliament. Parliament is an organ of the state, and is not therefore in a fit position to determine whether the actions of the state itself are legitimate, even if it is fit to determine whether they are legal.

It is also true that Magna Carta and the Bill of Rights were issued by the state. Therefore, you argue, I must deem *them* to be illegitimate as well. However, I am a minarchist, not an anarchist (I would argue that anarcho-capitalisists are living with a false understanding of what it means to develop a system of morality, but that’s a story for another day). The result is that I do recognise that there are actions by the state that are legitimate.

However, the state’s insistence that it can grant rights is not such an action. The Bill of Rights does not grant British (or, rather, English) people the right not to have an army kept in their midst. What they do is act as monuments to the state’s recognition of those rights, and to the state’s recognition of its role in protecting those rights.

I use Magna Carta and the Bill of Rights in my attack, because the state has been hypocritical. Not because the state’s original statement of our rights was benevolent, honestly-derived, or well-observed (which it wasn’t), but because the state made it clear that there were lines that it would not cross. Similarly, it doesn’t matter that most parts of Magna Carta and the Bill of Rights don’t apply in law any more, because the the state has recognised its own folly, and any retraction of such a statement is no more a legitimisation than simply to make a statement of action at all.

When the state recognises its own illegitimacy in such actions, it is beheld by all, and serves as a monument that can never be allowed to be demolished. The fact that, for 38 years, British soldiers were deployed against fellow Britons proves that that monument has been eroded, and the principles of state action within this country eroded.

The part of the Magna Carta that you quote makes clear that the suberversion of the law of the country was occassioned by the keeping of a standing army in a time of peace without the consent of Parliament. But you then appear to admit (implicitly) that Parliament did give such consent in the case of Northern Ireland, but that that consent was illegitimate based on natural law/positive rights grounds.

But Magna Carta itself is a document issued by the Monarch (State) and identifies the legitimacy of actions as conditional upon the consent of the (same) State (or the absence of any prohibition), not by reference to some abstract principle of natural law . Logically, you can’t use the Magna Carta as the very basis for your attack on the stationing of troops in Northern Ireland and then dismiss the very legal reasoning on which the Magna Carta is based.

(This leaves aside of course the fact that Magna Carta is not the law of the land any more and so in principle irrelevant to the question of the legality of the troops’ presence).