Let the Great and the Good cry Hallelujah, Corinthians 13 has been rewritten for the millennium:

"Though I have the gift of prophecy and understand all mysteries and all knowledge and have all faith so that I could remove mountains and have not `spin', I am nothing."

Tony Blair has been credited with making one of the greatest speeches of the century simply by reading Corinthians 13 at Princess Diana's funeral. It is not the content of the story that matters but as the comedian says, "It's the way I tell them". Spin maketh the man, especially if he feels the hand of history placed upon him by Alistair Campbell, the Prime Minister's press secretary.

With the millennium we enter a brave new world of political illusion. Technology enables virtual reality to masquerade as truth and the gullible to buy the con, because they have been spun into desperately wanting it to be true. No difference of principle, no conflict of faith or ideology, no confrontation of good and evil or of democracy and terror remains insoluble to the practitioner of spin.

Compromise, blindfolded like justice, holds the scales equally between the fireman and arsonist. Their views must be given equal weight by millennium man. The new learning of this politically-correct renaissance requires the democrat to lie down with the terrorist. The fact that he will shortly be eaten must not deter him, for everyone except the terrorist is required under this new dispensation to take a risk for peace.

In any event, the illusionists can give the terrorists lamb-like features so that the victim may be spared the unpleasant business of anticipating his untimely end.

The resolution of the decommissioning issue would represent a triumph for this new philosophy. The difficulties, if surmounted, are so truly awesome that they bear recall. On the one hand stand the somewhat dog-eared principles of representative democracy and the rule of law, things that have evolved via reason and experience but which seem to the spin doctors to be the antiquated notion that minority groups should not be allowed by the use of violence and terror to impose their views and policies upon the law-abiding people.

Perhaps so, say the spin doctors, but if you want the prize of peace just look at the cost of maintaining these principles; is it not much simpler to compromise and persuade the law-abiding majority that what the violent minority wants would be best for it in the long run? After all, the techniques and technology of persuasion have become highly sophisticated and their use by an alliance of government and the media is bound to guarantee success.

In the opposite corner the advocates of "justifiable political violence" have armed themselves with profound spin doctors of their own. Representative democracy and the rule of law have little to offer a minority party which wants change, when the change its members wish for is not how they are to be governed but who will govern them.

There is little point in offering guarantees that every human and civil right enjoyed by the majority will be shared by them.

There will simply be no end to the campaign of violence until the majority is governed by an all-Ireland socialist republic. Only the British government can meet this demand and it is therefore to social and economic targets on the mainland that the force of violent terror has to be directed.

The dilemma for the British political establishment has once again crystallised into that which faced it in 1938 over Czechoslovakia. The choice once again is having bombs in London or sacrificing the principles of democracy as they affect either a far-off country of which they knew little or some half-alien dependency in Ireland that is only half in the United Kingdom and in which it has no longer any selfish, strategic or economic reason for remaining.

Can it be that terrorists can be bombed in Kosovo only because such terrorists cannot in response bomb London?

As at Munich, so it is at Belfast. England's peace is to be bought at the cost of appeasing violence. Like Hitler, the IRA has for the present no further ambitions but is it not possible that the Republic itself could become their Poland?

The primary object of British policy for Northern Ireland is generally recognised as one of disengagement. The factor driving the policy is the need for conflict resolution with Sinn Fein/ IRA. That requirement renders every other party to the Belfast Agreement ultimately redundant, while Sinn Fein remains indispensable to the process. If the agreement is what Sinn Fein claims it to be, namely a transitional phase and not a political settlement, the IRA's capacity to wage war is necessary to keep it in movement until at least its current objectives are achieved. Without this capacity Sinn Fein/IRA carries no more political clout than any other minority party in a democracy.

The decommissioning issue is central to the entire process. The IRA cannot be certain that Britain will continue the process towards Irish unity, unless the goad of real or threatened violence is retained. The unionists will not agree to the transitional arrangements including seats in the executive until the democratic process is guaranteed by the removal of the means of using or threatening violence.

THE crux of the problem is that more and more unionists have come to realise that their essential interests are being sacrificed for the preservation of mainland security. It is the overwhelming importance of London's security that dominates the role of the British Prime Minister. It is to Tony Blair that Gerry Adams constantly refers as the person who can break the unionists because Adams is aware that the conflict that must be resolved for Blair is not the political debate between nationalism and unionism but the war between Sinn Fein/IRA and the British state.

The Blair technique is simple. First, saturate the electorate with the message. Hurry the legislation through parliament before the implications of the policy are fully understood and leave the voters to think about it afterwards when it is a fait accompli.

It has only partially worked in Northern Ireland, where delay may allow time for reflection. For Blair, the only criteria for adopting a policy are whether expediency requires it and whether it can be sold by appropriate packaging. The peace process undoubtedly fulfils the former and so far the spinners have succeeded in selling it, but there is the sinking feeling that the present state of the process is rather like that of the man who jumped from the top of the skyscraper; as he passed the 25th floor he was heard to mutter: "So Far, So Good!"

Robert McCartney MP is leader of the UK Unionist Party.