A reluctant decision by the Wilson government to use the army to break the loyalist control of petrol and oil supplies, largely at the insistence of executive members, made things worse. In a petulant television broadcast known thereafter as the ‘spongers speech’, Wilson referred to loyalists as ‘people who spend their lives sponging on Westminster and British democracy and then systematically assault democratic methods’. He asked contemptuously: ‘Who do they think they are?’ The description infuriated almost all Unionists, one senior assembly official describing it as ‘catastrophically
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