03.09.2026

Taking unity off the table

Andy Burnham has made it abundantly clear, whatever the Irish people want there will be no border poll. For those, and not only in Sinn Féin, who have fostered illusions in the Good Friday Agreement, this is a strategic body blow. For communists it comes as no surprise, writes Carl Collins

There is a darkly humorous anecdote from Northern Ireland. A Catholic asks a Protestant: “How will you stop us winning a border poll, when there are more of us than you?” The reply: “Shoot some of you.”

The joke captures two features of the Irish question. First, it treats demography as destiny, assuming that Catholics will continue to outbreed Protestants, and that means it is only a matter of time before a reunited Ireland is realised. The second part of the joke works because the sectarian antagonisms remain a defining feature of politics in Northern Ireland.

Against this backdrop, many were surprised by Andy Burnham’s categorical declaration that a border poll was “off the table”. He justified this by referring to the divisions associated with the 2016 referendum on Brexit and the 2014 referendum on Scottish independence. Instead he wants people to concentrate on ‘bread and butter’ issues such as the cost of living and public services.

His comments are politically significant. As well as reigniting debate about the nature of the 1998 Good Friday Agreement, the history of British colonialism, Irish self-determination, nationalism and unionism, not to mention the class nature of democracy and nation-states, they do mark a definite shift. Louise Haigh, deputy PM, had previously stated in 2021 that it was not up to the Labour Party “to be a persuader for the Union”. Of course, she added that the constitutional future rests on the principle of consent by the people of Northern Ireland.¹ Burnham does not want to be outdone by the Tories and Reform when it comes to UK unity, patriotism and waving the flag.

Then there is Burnham’s commitment to devolution. Some atomised ‘lefts’ have accused him of double standards.² But wanting more Bonapartist mayors has little or nothing to do with Irish reunification. Yet the fact of the matter is that Burham’s hands are tied by the history of Northern Ireland, its creation and the strategic approach of Westminster and the British state long before he became PM.

True, the GFA states:

It is for the people of the island of Ireland alone, by agreement between the two parts respectively and without external impediment, to exercise their right of self-determination on the basis of consent, freely and concurrently given, north and south, to bring about a united Ireland, if that is their wish, accepting that this right must be achieved and exercised with and subject to the agreement and consent of a majority of the people of Northern Ireland.³

However, the Northern Ireland Act 1998 states: “the secretary of state shall exercise the power [to hold a border poll] if at any time it appears likely to him [!] that a majority of those voting would express a wish that Northern Ireland should cease to be part of the United Kingdom and form part of a united Ireland.”⁴

Taken together, these provisions expose a fundamental contradiction. The GFA supposedly presents Irish self-determination, and most of the republican and socialist left urged a ‘yes’ vote in 1998: Sinn Féin, SDLP, Communist Party of Ireland, the Socialist Party, Socialist Workers Movement, etc. GFA would defeat the Paisleyite ‘no’ campaign, end the violence and step by step lead to a reunified Ireland (and, for the economistic left, ‘normal class politics’). But, and this is crucial, the GFA and the Northern Ireland Act actually leaves the decisive trigger for a border poll in the hands of the British secretary of state, who alone decides whether it “appears likely” that a majority in Northern Ireland would vote for unity.

This imbalance has been at the heart of decades of frustration for those of us wanting an end to British occupation of the Six Counties. Those who placed faith in the GFA road through which Irish unity could ultimately be delivered are now confronted with the reality of British strategic interests … and Britain does still have a strategic interest in being able to control the whole of the island of Ireland through controlling Northern Ireland. (If the south could be brought into Nato that might be a different matter). Burnham’s ‘bread and butter’ remarks ought therefore to bring about a radical rethink on the left, not silly complaints about inconsistency.

Oppression

Any serious analysis has to go back considerably earlier than the GFA. Britain’s relationship with Ireland developed through periods of conquest, colonisation, settlement, resistance and incorporation, leading to today’s political and social situation.

The Act of Union of 1800 abolished the Irish parliament and incorporated Ireland into the United Kingdom. The Government of Ireland Act 1920 established separate institutions for northern and southern Ireland, providing the constitutional framework for partition. And the Anglo-Irish Treaty of 1921 established the Irish free state, while Northern Ireland remained in the United Kingdom.

So partition was no arbitrary administrative accident. Northern Ireland was constructed as a six-county entity within the United Kingdom, with its constitutional relationship to Britain maintained through the institutions of the state. The sectarian and colonial structures that shaped society had deep roots in the English/Scottish colonisation of Ulster, particularly the ‘plantation’ of the 17th century.⁵ These historical divisions subsequently shaped the political and constitutional processes that helped produce the six-county state of Northern Ireland.

Constitutional arrangements are never politically neutral. Northern Ireland’s creation reflected the strategic interests of the British state, while compromising with Irish nationalism and its ambitions: Éamonn de Valera wanted a united, Catholic, Gaelic nation based on rural smallholdings, economically self-sufficient and free from British interference. Though never fully realisable, that programme helps explain the huge popularity of his Fianna Fáil amongst small farmers and urban workers that made it the dominant political party in Ireland during the 20th century.

Meanwhile in the north, Protestant workers and farmers could be relied upon to protect the union with Britain by voting for the Ulster Unionist Party, in return for which they received material, political and cultural privileges. Catholics were a second class minority.

Of course, Protestant and Catholic are not simply religious categories. There are class and national divisions that closely map onto those confessional designations. In Northern Ireland the Protestant working class was a labour aristocracy and clung to a definite British-Irish national identity. Despite the promises of the GFA, that has not gone away. Indeed the GFA has institutionalised sectarianism: every government has to be a coalition uniting the two different ‘traditions’. Hence today we have a four-party coalition: Sinn Féin, Democratic Unionist Party, Alliance and Ulster Unionist Party.

The political task of communists is not to rely on the terms of the GFA and tailing Sinn Féin in the forlorn hope of forcing the British secretary of state to concede a border poll. That is the perspective of the Socialist Workers Netywork and People Before Profit (its leader, Richard Boyd Barrett dreams of becoming a minister in a ‘left’ government headed by Mary Lou McDonald and Michelle O’Neill).

This is where James Connolly remains important. Connolly did not regard national independence as the final destination of political struggle. He understood that an independent Ireland could still be an Ireland in which workers were exploited: “If you remove the English army tomorrow and hoist the green flag over Dublin Castle, unless you set about the organisation of the Socialist Republic, your efforts will be in vain.”⁶

The point was not that national liberation was meaningless. It was that changing the flag was not enough. A united Ireland under capitalism would still contain landlords, employers, banks, financial capital and transnational corporations. Workers would still have to fight over wages, housing, public services, democracy and the distribution of wealth.

The abolition of partition and the abolition of capitalism are therefore different political questions. They are connected, but they are not the same thing.

Self-determination

Burnham’s argument that referendums can be socially divisive is not wrong. Referendums reduce complicated questions to binary choices and can be dominated by wealthy interests, the mainstream media and misinformation that amounts to barefaced lies. Brexit demonstrated how competing sections of the ruling class can use popular fears and frustrations to rally the masses behind them: we had two bourgeois camps. The Lexit campaign tailed Boris Johnson, Michael Gove and Nigel Farage; Another Europe is Possible tailed David Cameron, George Osborne and Keir Starmer.

Democratic rights cannot be conditional upon everyone agreeing in advance about the result. The fact that a question is divisive does not make it illegitimate. The constitutional question already divides Northern Ireland. It is embedded in political parties, institutions, identities and competing understandings of national belonging. Refusing to provide a democratic solution does not make those divisions disappear.

The real issue is not demanding the ‘right’ to hold a referendum though. We recognise no such ‘right’. Especially here in Britain we should be demanding a British withdrawal from Northern Ireland. In Ireland itself communists should stress rapprochement and voluntary unity. We have no interest in unity brought about at the point of a bayonet.

There are those who see Irish unity as a necessary stage in the struggle for socialism. Their basic idea is that workers should pursue their economic struggles around wages, rents, public services, etc. Meanwhile they should support, aid, pressurise, urge on the Sinn Féin ‘left’ nationalists. No, on the contrary, it is the working class itself that needs to take on the leadership of all democratic questions - not least, when it comes to Ireland, the national question.

The national question and socialism are hardly the same thing. But they are related though, given working class leadership. Without working class leadership all we have is one variety or another of nationalism. That is for sure.

The Irish Free State provides an unsurpassed historical example of what happens when workers have been persuaded, politically disarmed, by the arguments of stagism. Independence did not abolish capitalism: it changed the political framework within which Irish capitalism developed. National independence and working class emancipation were never the same thing. The same would be true of a united Ireland today. A united Irish state would still be part of an international capitalist economy. Capital would still move across borders. Transnational companies would still operate. Employers would still seek to maximise profits and workers would still have to organise to defend their interests.

There is therefore no case for pretending that Irish unity in and of itself is a prelude to socialism. In fact, even if a 32-county Socialist Republic is declared and the red flag raised over Dublin Castle, the danger is that, far from it inspiring others as Connolly hoped, it would be the prelude for disaster. A united but isolated Ireland would be blockaded, sanctioned, even invaded. That is why a European perspective is the vital starting point. Socialist politics in Ireland do not culminate in a 32-county Socialist Republic. That is a left nationalist delusion.

Working class liberation has to be international or it is nothing: capital rules as a global system and can only be superseded globally. A united Europe under the rule of the working class represents the most realistic route towards that end.

1. The National August 31 2026.↩︎

2. www.reddit.com/r/LabourUK/comments/1w018pf/andy_burnham_says_a_united_ireland_poll_is_off.↩︎

3. assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/1034123/The_Belfast_Agreement_An_Agreement_Reached_at_the_Multi-Party_Talks_on_Northern_Ireland.pdf.↩︎

4. www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1998/47/contents.↩︎

5. See J Bardon The plantation of Ulster Dublin 2011.↩︎

6. As explained by James Connolly in ‘Socialism and nationalism’: www.marxists.org/archive/connolly/1897/01/socnat.htm.↩︎