`What did you expect?" Chris Patten's response to unionist fury at his commission's recommendation that the Royal Ulster Constabulary lose its title and symbolism was blunt. Patten believed his report was the logical working out of the principles of the Good Friday agreement. If only it was.
Chris Patten agreed to chair the independent commission only on the assumption of a Yes vote at the referendum. It seems reasonable that Patten and his team should have taken as their brief not only the section of the agreement devoted to policing but the pledges by the Prime Minister that helped to secure that Yes vote as well. Chief among those was Tony Blair's promise of April 18th, 1998, that there would be "no local policing".
It should have come as no surprise to nationalists and republicans, therefore, that the Secretary of State in his initial response to the report should have diluted the powers of Patten's district police partnership boards. The SDLP's plan for several regional police forces in Northern Ireland had always carried with it the danger of Balkanisation - a Catholic police force for a Catholic people and a Protestant police force for a Protestant people.
Northern Ireland being part of the United Kingdom and not an independent country, Peter Mandelson was attuned to the dangers of such principles being applied to London's patchwork of ethnic communities.
Patten's report was, of course, due to arrive on the Secretary of State's desk in the context of decommissioning already being well under way. It wasn't and isn't. If it had been and if it had opened with an explicit acknowledgment of the sacrifice of 302 Catholic and Protestant policemen and women murdered during the Troubles, it might have been possible for pragmatic unionism to make an argument for its implementation.
Plenty of unionists knew the RUC would have to change in a new context, and that change would be painful. Provided there was no apparent moral equivalence between terrorists and the occasionally flawed protectors of the public good, and provided there was a commitment to the principles of professional policing, things could have been very different. Acceptance might have been possible if the report was based on a degree of moral seriousness. Instead, the report was so shoddy that it was killed
UNIONISTS have been preoccupied with ensuring that the RUC not be seen to have been disbanded, hence the campaign to "incorporate" the current name in the Police Bill. However, the SDLP has pinpointed 44 changes from Patten in the Bill. Many, if not most, of these have not been as a result of the British government "playing the Orange card", as nationalists would like to believe, but because the Home Office decided that whatever Patten was a blueprint for, it was not a police force.
To answer Patten's question, unionists were expecting that Seamus Mallon's proposal on the name issue during the talks - Royal Northern Ireland Police Service - would have been taken up. While unionists will probably have to accept the loss of the royal title in everyday usage, nationalists will have to accept those changes from Patten designed to ensure that the new force is both effective and efficient.
The Patten commission's essential fault was to take a completely unhistorical view of policing in Northern Ireland. It fell into the trap of believing - as many misguided loyalists do - that the RUC was the armed wing of unionism. It never was.
Not only was the Flags and Emblems Act adopted in the face of opposition from the RUC inspector-general, Sir Richard Pim, but when the unionist government in 1922 tried to impose new insignia on the force, incorporating the crown and the Red Hand of Ulster, the rank and file, substantially Catholic in its makeup at that time, revolted.
They were very happy with the combination of British and Irish symbolism which, accidentally, so beautifully reflects the logic of the agreement. Yes, there is a crown but when the agreement explicitly leaves Northern Ireland in the United Kingdom, that should be no great surprise.
Unionist objections to Patten have nothing to do with sectarianism. Quite the contrary. Even the notorious home affairs minister, Dawson Bates, suffering loyalist charges that Catholic policemen were receiving preferential treatment, wrote to J.M. Andrews: "And do they think a police force could be carried on without Roman Catholics?"
However, the religious imbalance in the force is not due to "discouragement" - to use Patten's weasel word - but to the systematic policy of the IRA to target Catholic policemen for assassination.
Patten said that in writing his report he had to please four people: Ronnie Flanagan, Gerry Adams, David Trimble and Seamus Mallon. He failed with David Trimble but he failed with Gerry Adams too. Mr Adams received much publicity when he said that he could not encourage republicans to join the police force envisaged by the Police Bill currently before the Westminster parliament. But, while it suits him to create a grievance that Patten is not being fully implemented, he never gave such a commitment to encourage republicans to join the force originally envisaged by Patten, either. Nor did John Hume, for that matter. If they had, the contours of the current debate would be radically different.
The SDLP will present amendments to the Police Bill to reflect more closely Patten's report as the last stand of parliamentary nationalism. On the basis of recent election results - both after the suspension of the institutions and since - which have seen enormous swings from the SDLP to Sinn Fein, preserving the SDLP's dominance might be a lost cause. If that is the case, it is all the more essential that Northern Ireland has a police service that is acceptable to both major sections of the community, unionist as well as nationalist. The hopes for the agreement depend on it.
Steven King is a member of the Ulster Unionist Party