An insignificant happening: Labour in Northern Ireland (2003)

From the December 2003 issue of the Socialist Standard

For some people in Northern Ireland, this year’s British Labour Party Conference was a momentous event. For those present at the Conference, or the numerous Labour Party branches throughout the UK whose pious resolutions might get an airing before being thrown into the Blair wastepaper basket, the event was utterly inconsequential. On the other hand, for some, not too many, in Northern Ireland, it was the culmination of a whole life’s political effort.

Now for pragmatic people who believe in the immediacy of schemes for conning the workers into the belief that Labour capitalism is better than Tory capitalism, the great event itself was something of a damp squib. It was hardly noticed in the mainstream British media and got no headlines even in Northern Ireland. A neighbour of this writer, not known for socialist sympathies, summed it up rather succinctly when he said, “Both Taigs and Prods here are at least agreed on one thing: Tony Blair and his cohorts are unprincipled, fucking liars; what difference will the addition of some local political stooges make?”

Oh yes, the event? Well, the British Labour Party had at last conceded the right of UK citizens who live in Northern Ireland to become members of the Labour Party. Neither the party leadership, nor the members-at-large had shown any great enthusiasm for the move. It was the big unions, making a meaningless gesture to vociferous elements in Northern Ireland, who engineered the change of attitude. Essentially, as my colourful neighbour significantly hinted, the justification for the move had to do with Taigs and Prods—which is Ulsterspeak for Catholics and Protestants respectively.

Labour, went the argument of the local enthusiasts, will provide a non-sectarian base for both Catholics and Protestants. That nonsense is founded on the notion that sectarianism in Northern Ireland is based on theological differences and it is made by people who either have convenient memories or little knowledge of Labour history in the province. While religion has an input into the problem, tribal sectarianism here is a complex politico-religious mix historically promoted to serve the economic interests of different sections of the propertied class in both Great Britain and Ireland. It is a long and convoluted story that this journal has dealt with many times and here we are concerned only with contemporary effects.

After the formation of the northern statelet in 1921, the Northern Ireland Labour Party (NILP) was formed. Like Labour parties everywhere, the NILP adhered to the simplistic notion that capitalism would serve a universal interest if conservative politicians were replaced with Labour politicians. Unable to offer a class analysis of the historic “Irish Question”, the NILP simply sat on the fence on the ‘Border’ issue. Until 1948, it is probable that Catholic nationalists proportionately outnumbered Protestant unionists in their support of Labour. Labour strategists were inclined to take the support of the former for granted; the problem, as they saw it, was the deep-rooted “Britishness” of workers who were Protestants and these outnumbered their Catholic class brethren by some two to one.

So, in 1948, the NILP got off the fence; “Ulster Labour is British Labour!” they cried. Out came the Union flags and the red, white and blue trappings as Labour went head-to-head with Ulster Unionism in a squalid contest of Britishness. Nothing was said about religion but what Catholic nationalists of the Connolly tradition saw as a rabid rejection of their culture resulted in the great majority of Catholics leaving Labour. Some of these formed an Irish Labour Association and effectively there were two Labour organisations; one for Catholics and one for Protestants.

The NILP did make temporary inroads into Ulster Unionism, having four born-again Christians returned to the Stormont Parliament where they cosied up to the Unionist Government who accepted their proclamations of loyalty enough to make one of them a Minister. When serious political disturbances commenced in the late Sixties, Labour elements of both camps scurried back to their traditional loyalties.

The irony of this latest attempt to raise the standard of British Labour in Northern Ireland is that it is promoted by Labourites who cannot find a political home in the Social and Democratic Labour Party (SDLP). This latter organisation is regarded as a sister party of the British Labour Party and operates within the EU under the same ersatz “socialist” umbrella as both the British and the Irish Labour parties. The policies of all these Labour organisations is essentially the same: they wholly accept capitalism and their essential “practical” strategy is to get career politicians jobs in the governments of capitalism.

Ah, yes, that is all very good but the anti-sectarians who want British Labour here to sort out the problem of sectarianism would have difficulty in associating with the SDLP. Why? Because it is a largely Catholic and pro-nationalist Labour Party!

But the people who have spent lifetimes trying to persuade British Labour to accept them as members were always spoilt for choice. The number of parties and groups that claim affinity with the Left are numerous. Sinn Fein, claims to act in the Connolly tradition; Gerry Adams and his political playmates would welcome Protestants into their organisation, but they are indelibly branded, and correctly so, as sectarians.

The Workers’ Party, on the other hand, are pukka Lefties without religious baggage and, like British Labour, the WP has shown an enthusiasm for espousing any pettifogging reform of capitalism that it thinks might get votes. On the other hand, they have a distant connection, rather like the British Labour Party, with the concept of a united Ireland.

Of course there is Socialism itself. No careers there, no jobs for the boys or the girls, no place whatsoever for aspiring politicians, no nonsense about different religions or flags or patriotism or any of the other crap that is the basis of all sectarianism. All of which make genuine Socialism worth the consideration of the working class.

Richard Montague

Labour loyalists (2009)

Book Review from the June 2009 issue of the Socialist Standard

A History of the Northern Ireland Labour Party: Democratic Socialism and Sectarianism. By Aaron Edwards. Manchester University Press

The reference in the title to ‘Democratic Socialism’ might well have been an acceptable tautology on the part of the author or, as it frequently is, a manifestation of misunderstanding of the meaning of socialism. In the case of this author’s work it was quickly demonstrated not only that he has peculiar ideas as to what represented socialism, but in dealing with the political events in Northern Ireland that are the background to his narrative, he is, also, below par regarding the acceptable nature of what passes for democracy in liberal bourgeois society.

The term ‘socialism’ was first used to define an alternative form of social organisation to capitalism. There already existed alternative political and economic suggestions for treating the myriad problems associated with capitalism but within the consensus of those who used the term ‘socialism’ was the conviction that such suggestions were inadequate or unworkable. What was required was the total dismantling of the system of class monopoly of the means of life and its replacement with a system of common ownership and free access to goods and services.

The more politically coherent elements among the reformers, liberals and trade unionists that formed the British Labour Party in 1906 would have accepted the need to replace capitalism with socialism but they thought they could circumvent the essential need to create a democratic socialist consciousness to achieve that purpose. Instead they would, by an ongoing and gradual process, reform capitalism out of existence. Their error is transparent in the bunch of self-seeking careerists and ruthless authoritarian Labour politicians currently grasping with yet another of the crises of capitalism.

Following the partition of Ireland by the British government in 1921 some disparate elements from a Northern Ireland community deeply divided into forms of conditioned politico-religious hatreds re-energised residual Labour support under the banner of the Northern Ireland Labour Party (NILP). The Party would have attracted the same elements as the British party but would have carried the baggage of political and religious division within its ranks. Contrary to Edwards contention it never made a class analysis of Irish politics; instead it joined the ward-healing process while nervously tip-toeing its way through the minefield of tribal divisions that were the political stock-in-trade of everyday political life in its territory.

Still, those divisions were reflected acutely within the NILP. Catholics, who almost exclusively suffered the tyrannies of the notorious Unionist government’s Special Powers Act (a sort of Complete Dictator’s DIY kit) as well as discrimination in employment and social housing, wanted a determined stand against these evils which would seem good political fodder for a reformist group. In this work the author further betrays his ignorance of socialism as well as his ambivalence to democracy by his sympathy with the NILP leadership’s view that a fulsome condemnation of anti-Catholic practices might alarm potential Protestant voters who supported these evils.

In the late 1940s, having failed to achieve meaningful political kudos from its fence-sitting position the Party openly adopted a Unionist position. Ulster Labour, it proclaimed was British Labour. In a display that would have rivalled that of the National Front, Labour election platforms, in Unionist areas, were festooned with Union flags, which traditionally was the banner carried by the Orange mob. The decision caused a major split in the Party; Catholics, reflecting the same political ignorance as their erstwhile ’comrades’, formed the Irish Labour Association (long since demised) predictably under the banner of the Irish tricolour. Curiously, no mention of this latter happening is found in the book.

In the 1950s the NILP won four seats in the Northern Ireland House of Commons. The new MP’s were all men, proclaimed as good men on the strength of their Protestant fundamentalist faith. Eventually, as traditionalist Nationalist politics went into terminal decline before more strident Catholic demands for the democratisation of the Northern Ireland state, there was an influx of Catholics back into the NILP. Again the Party’s internal unease surfaced: the Catholics more and more favouring direct action against the Stormont regime in which Labour’s four holy men were comfortably ensconced to the extent where one had accepted a white-washing position with the government.

The prelude to open sectarian conflagration in Northern Ireland left the gaping sectarian wounds of the NILP increasingly exposed and finally inflicted their coup de grace on its squalid political corpse. Edwards intones the requiem with the acknowledgement of numbers of its members cosying up to the sectarian murder gangs; a measure of what they had learnt in the NILP. His belated obsequies will find little sympathy with genuine socialists but should serve as a warning for those who put political expediency before principle.

Edwards is a Senior Lecturer in Defence and International Affairs at the Royal Military Academy, Sandhurst.

Richard Montague

NI Labour's sad saga (1969)

From the August 1969 issue of the Socialist Standard

Perhaps more than any other political organisation, the Northern Ireland Labour Party is a casualty of the civil rights campaign and there can be little doubt that, when the mundane activities of everyday political life emerge again from the cauldron of present events, there will be much recrimination in the Labour Party — indeed, the first salvoes of protest have already been fired within the party and the shaping of events augurs little comfort for the Labour leaden. These leaders have one ally in the conflict emerging in the party; experience. For the puny vote-catching reform policies of Labour have given them trouble in the past, as they will in the future.

More than any other political organisation, the NI Labour Party has never spared either dignity or principle in the search for popular support. Until 1948 the party's parliamentary representation owed its seats largely to Catholic, anti-partitionist support despite the fact that the Labour Party officially ‘sat-on-the- fence' on the Irish Partition issue.

In the early flush of Labour's victory in Britain, in 1945, the local Labourites found hope. They imported a British Labour Party professional organiser, took a decision in favour of Partition, and generally began an attempt to out-Unionise the official Unionist Party in protestations of loyalty to the British monarchy and 'the flag'.

The year 1948 found the Party rent asunder by internal conflict. Catholics and anti-Partitionists—including Labour's parliamentary representatives and most of their local council members—left the party. Some of these formed an Irish Labour Association which was later swallowed up by a Northern Area Council of the southern Irish Labour Party. Which council itself later passed away in the wranglings and disputes of the Labour politicians.

Then followed the period when the NI Labour Party, in a feverish effort to win support in traditionally Unionist areas, jettisoned what little principle it had ever had. Bible-thumping candidates preached bread-and-butter Unionism from Union-Jack-bedecked platforms The King and constitution were safe with Labour!

As a second line of local Unionism Labour finally got four MPs elected. Quite undemocratically they pressed for and accepted the title 'Her Majesty's Loyal Opposition’, thus helping the official Unionist Party to establish the fiction that normal parliamentary democracy existed in Northern Ireland.

It is interesting to observe that the Labour Party, which now tries vainly to get a piece of the civil rights cake, was then accepting the Civil Authorities Special Powers Act, one of the leading targets of the present civil rights agitation. One Labour MP of the period declared that his party, if faced with the same circumstances as the Unionists then faced, would use the Act. The same spokesman tried to circumvent parliamentary discussion of the conditions of imprisonment of political internees by an Amendment expressing concern for the poor gaolers! When a correspondent in the Belfast Telegraph expressed concern at the party’s attitude to the Special Powers Act, and tried to elicit a categorical statement from Labour on their attitude to the Act, the present general secretary of the party replied to the effect that the correspondent was obviously trying to ‘embarrass’ his party. Neither he nor any other party spokesman replied to any of the half-dozen letters to the Telegraph from people denouncing Labour’s support of the Act.

No-man's-land

But even as Unionists the Labour Party failed to improve their parliamentary position and a subsequent election sliced the ‘loyal opposition' in half. In the elections of February of this year they maintained their position, losing a seat in Pottinger and winning one in Falls. But even the two seats they now hold are not held on anything like traditionally accepted Labour policies — they are a reward for the ‘ward-healing’ concessions to local ignorance made by the candidates concerned.

Now it is the civil rights movement that is making the running in the anti-government camp. Labour leaders mumble support for the more ‘respectable’ ploys in the campaign for civil rights but they must be aware that the success of the various ‘rights’ bodies puts them again in a political no-man’s-land, distrusted by most and respected by few; trying to stave off the conflict that must inevitably arise in their ranks.

Already, Labour’s storm clouds are gathering. A resolution calling on the party’s executive to resign was defeated by the Newtownabbey branch, but a subsequent meeting of representatives of a number of constituency parties adopted a resolution deploring the party’s failure to pursue ‘socialist ideals’ and blaming this failure for the public rejection of the Labour Party. Some members are demanding a special meeting to discuss the problem and a few are even daring to suggest that the definition of Socialism which they learnt from the World Socialist Party should be accepted by the Labour Party!

Without political vindictiveness, we say that the predicament of the Labour Party brings us no sadness. Indeed, on the contrary, its demise from the political scene would bring us considerable joy. Like its counterparts elsewhere throughout the world, its hope is to improve capitalism; to patch it up with palliatives and win working-class support for the same old rotten product in new political wrapping. But worse: Labour labels the new wrapping ‘Socialism’ and when the stench of the old muck comes through the new wrapping the name on the label is discredited.

Old, failed schemes

To members of the Labour Party we again state the obvious: you cannot have Socialism without socialists and you know as well as we do that your party is not interested in spreading socialist knowledge. It is too busy playing politics with the other parties of capitalism; too preoccupied with all the old, failed schemes of political reform. Only the WSP in Ireland proclaims the case for Socialism and we will certainly welcome you in the struggle for its achievement.

Richard Montague

Violent Belfast (1969)

Book Review from the November 1969 issue of the Socialist Standard

Holy War in Belfast, by Andrew Boyd. Anvil Books 8s. 6d.

Belfast has a tradition of sectarian disturbances which is still alive as the fence the Army has put up between the Protestant and Catholic slums shows. Andrew Boyd gives here a simple blow-by-blow description of major riots that took place in 1857, 1864, 1872 and 1886. He has added a couple of hastily-written chapters which are supposed to bring the position up to date, but his book really ends in 1886.

That was the year Gladstone’s first Home Rule Bill was defeated. It was also the year the Orange Order became respectable. Up till then it was a secret society of poorer Protestants whose parades were nearly always accompanied by disturbances. Their aim seemed to be to provoke the Catholics whenever the occasion arose. As such they were regarded as a nuisance by the government and for many years Orange marches or the display of Orange banners were prohibited. Many of the clashes described by Boyd were between police and Protestants.

The pattern is familiar: raving Presbyterian ministers, gun-fights, mob violence, intimidation, barricades, murder, arson, looting and battles with the police. In nearly every case the aggressors were the Orange extremists. In every case it was the poor, Protestant and Catholic, who suffered the consequences of this violence in terms of death, injury, homelessness and unemployment.

Inflamed by the anti-popery of their preachers, the Protestant workers feared that Home Rule would mean domination by the Catholic majority in the rest of Ireland. The landlords and the rich capitalists knew this was so much nonsense but they had a very real economic interest in encouraging hostility to Home Rule. The landlords wished to protect their right to exploit and oppress the Irish peasants while the capitalists wanted access to the profitable markets of the British Empire. To protect their economic interests they decided, as Churchill’s father Lord Randolph Churchill put it, to play the Orange card. Catholic-baiting and anti-popery became the stock-in-trade of the Unionist Party which emerged in 1886 from the anti-Horne Rule elements in Ireland.

Since 1920 this Party has itself ironically enjoyed a measure of Home Rule over six counties in the North East of Ireland. Lord Craigavon, Northern Ireland’s first Prime Minister, declared that they now had a “Protestant government for a Protestant people”, a statement not calculated to encourage the “loyalty” of the non-Protestants who made up a third of its subjects. To deal with those who were likely to be “disloyal” the government soon passed the notorious Special Powers Act; set up a special para-military police force of which the equally notorious B Specials survive; abolished proportional representation in elections and gerrymandered local council wards—all really needlessly since the Unionists had a built- in majority if they could continue to play the Orange card successfully.

Today, however, this has become an embarrassment — with the need to attract overseas investors and with full free trade between Ireland and Britain (including Northern Ireland) due in 1975—and some Unionists are trying to repudiate their past. But this will not be easy since not only do many of their followers still hold to the bigotry their masters once taught them but the records show that what Paisley says today nearly every leading Unionist—Minister, MP, aristocrat, judge or churchman—said yesterday.

For the record (since the publishers do not disclose this) Boyd is a member of the Northern Ireland Labour Party and is obviously out to discredit the Orange Order and the Ulster Unionist Party. That’s easy, a great deal easier than defending the NILP, which is but a second unionist and loyalist party with an unrivalled record of opportunism including support for the Special Powers Act.

Adam Buick

Dublin Letter (1949)

From the May 1949 issue of the Socialist Standard

It is some weeks now since the world heard the result of the General Election in Northern Ireland—though how much the world really cared about that election result, we, of course, can’t say. The election issue, however, was said to be a clear one. "King or Republic?”—that is, maintenance of the constitutional status quo or incorporation in an all-Ireland Republic. For the King and continued union with Gt. Britain, were the ”Ulster Unionists” (Tories); for the Republic, the Nationalists. Uncomfortably straddling the constitutional fence, swaying, now this side, now that, were the Northern Ireland Labour party, and a few “Independents.” Though the result was never in any doubt—the return to power of the Tories—the utter debacle of the Labour party came about as a complete surprise to most people. Not one of their nine candidates were elected, including three fighting to retain their seats in Belfast; all told, the Labour party lost about 35,000 votes. And McCullough, the one Communist party candidate, only got 688 votes as compared with his 5,802 in 1945—in the same constituency, and against the same opponent. Lord Glentoran, one of the foremost Tory leaders.

To Socialists, the ups and downs of the Tory and Nationalist votes are unimpressive by comparison with the disintegration of the “Leftist and Progressive” ones; for these went, overwhelmingly, to the Tory party. Apologists have said that the supporters of the Labour party and the "Leftist” groups were stampeded. into voting Tory because of the jingoism and sabre-rattling of the Orange (Freemason) Lodges and the alleged threat to their Protestantism, etc., of absorption in a Papist-dominated all-Ireland Republic. Be that as it may, what volumes does it not speak for the Socialist attitude on reformism in general and, to Socialists in Ireland, on the "Partition question” in particular? That one-time adherents of the Labour party can be persuaded that a new national flag is a greater threat to their interests than the continuation of the capitalist economic system constitutes, indeed, a pitiful and sad commentary on the efficacy and worthwhileness of that tragically mis-named party, the Labour Party. But then, what are we to say of the lamentable decline of the alleged "revolutionary” vote, the Communist Party one ? Of McCullough’s [3.9] per cent. depleted vote, can we justifiably attribute it to the same cause? We think so, for no other fits the facts.

So, in this respect, the Northern Ireland elections have afforded one more demonstration of the uselessness of reformist votes as a means of effecting any real change in the worker’s position vis-a-vis the capitalist. Such votes are as easily lost in the next election as they are won in this. Though Hitler won quite a proportion of the Communist and Social Democrat parties’ votes, to a large extent by outdoing their promises of "social betterment,” any analogy between that phase of German history and the recent Tory victory in Northern Ireland would be not only misleading but involve the paying of false compliments to the Labour and "Leftist” parties. For the truth is that Sir Basil Brooke (Tory leader) and his party were under no great pressure to defend existing social and economic conditions in Northern Ireland. When, now and then, they did do so, it was only by way of superficial comparison with Eire, saying: "Look how worse off you’d be in an Irish Republic!” But that all they had to do, for the most part, was to wave the Orange flag and beat the Orange drum, is due to the pusillanimity of the Labour party and others, and their inability, because of their capitalist-reformist base, to point the way out to the Northern Ireland workers.

That the workers there, no less than their fellows down here in Eire, and elsewhere under capitalism, are “getting it in the neck ” all of the time, is ably borne out by an examination of the available social and economic statistics. With a population of 1,330,000, Northern Ireland has, at present, 37,000 men and women on the Unemployment Register. And this unemployment figure is not only proportionately higher than Britain’s—it was two-and-a-half times the British rate in 1947—but higher even than Eire’s, with 83,766 unemployed. This very large and ugly social blot on Northern Ireland is not of recent occurrence either. Except for the war periods, unemployment has always hovered round the 20,000 mark, and in more recent years, between 25,000 and 35,000. As a matter of fact, in March, 1947, it actually reached the 45,000 figure.

Working class housing and health conditions are, in general, no better than they are here in Eire—and that comparison is, indeed, an odious one. The number of houses officially estimated as unfit for habitation in Northern Ireland is 27,000. In Belfast itself (the Northern Ireland capital), where there were over 17,000 applications for houses by January, 1948, the Corporation and Housing Trust had between them built only 322! A survey recently undertaken by the Northern Ireland Council of Social Service (a semi-official body) revealed appalling conditions existing in this area of the "King’s Dominions.” Those conditions are all too graphically detailed in the work embodying the Council’s findings, "Rural Life in Northern Ireland ” (Oxford University Press, 1947).

For instance, taking the Beveridge Report subsistence benefit (and that low enough by any standards) as “ the poverty line,” the Council found that in County Fermanagh, twelve labourers’ households out of twenty-nine fell below this line, as well as nineteen pensioners’ households out of twenty-nine. And in Co. Down, likewise; while in Nth. Antrim, fifty per cent. of the farm labourers exist below this "minimum required to maintain health.” As to housing; not a single labourer’s cottage has been built by any Rural Council in Co. Fermanagh since Northern Ireland became a separate State (1921)! Much the same story is told of the other five counties. Even in Nth. Down, which is claimed to be the "most advanced” area because of its proximity to Belfast, only six per cent. of the houses have a W.C.! Also—and not far from Stormont either, where the "King’s men” legislate in the interests of the linen, brewing and shipbuilding industrialists and big farmers, and rave about the ‘‘prosperity of Ulster and the poverty of Eire”—in Belfast, according to the Council, the main causes of distress in that city were tuberculosis and the housing shortage.

But enough has been said already to show that there are working-class problems in Northern Ireland apart from the capitalist constitutional ones. The solution of these problems, because they are specifically working-class ones, is not to be found in formulae concerned with national boundaries. Neither Statute of Westminster nor Republican Declaration can offer a solution of them. The division which gave birth to these problems—the division of the wealth of the few and the poverty of the many—is, needless to say, conveniently ignored by all of the current publicity devoted to that sorrowing tale, "Divided Ireland.” Even a King and a Republic (and that’s not a piece of Irishry, for through the External Relations Act that was the situation in Eire from 1937 to 1949) holds no hope of the ending of that division. And that Partition is one which will remain until a majority of the workers decide to end the capitalist system—complete with all its Republican and Monarchical paraphernalia—and establish Socialism.

Chris Walsh

(Dublin Socialist Group).