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
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