“Crime is crime is crime”

“Crime is crime is crime” was Margaret Thatcher’s concise declaration that republican violence would be treated as criminal rather than political. Spoken amid the dirty protest at Long Kesh, the phrase distilled her refusal to compromise over political status into a stark, repeated formula.

Context and Meaning

By the time Thatcher took office, several hundred men at Long Kesh were participating in the dirty protest. Tensions were already high, and the Provos had begun targeting and killing off-duty prison officers. The prisoners’ protest, meanwhile, demanded a response to their treatment and status. Against this backdrop, Thatcher echoed the hard line of her predecessor, Roy Mason, who had ended internment and special category status in 1976 and described IRA prisoners as “thugs and gangsters.”

Thatcher stated, “There is no such thing as political murder, political bombing, or political violence,” and followed that categorical rejection with “We will not compromise on this. There will be no political status.” The phrase “Crime is crime is crime” compressed these claims into a memorable refrain: repetition made the boundary sound absolute, leaving no room in its wording for distinctions between ordinary criminality and violence undertaken for political ends.

Use and Political Force

Thatcher made the longer statement in a speech in Belfast on 5 March 1981. She repeated the shorter formulation at a press conference in Riyadh on 21 April 1981, giving it circulation beyond the immediate prison dispute. Its clipped syntax and insistence on repetition made it more than a description of policy: it was a public statement of the terms on which the government would recognize the prisoners’ actions, while refusing their claim to political status.

The phrase appeared as the prison confrontation escalated. In the autumn of 1980, Brendan Hughes announced plans for a hunger strike and asked for volunteers; a team of seven was selected, with Hughes among them. The prisoners’ protest and the government’s refusal to recognize political status thus stood in direct opposition. Thatcher’s formula supplied the clearest verbal expression of that refusal, while the hunger strike showed that the dispute over status would continue in a more dangerous form.