16.04.1998

Easter reaction

Easter witnessed an orgy of celebration across virtually the whole spectrum of establishment politics (nor could elements of the pro-Labour left restrain their economistic glee). Everyone suddenly seemed to be friends. Tony Blair and John Major, Bertie Ahern and David Trimble, Mo Mowlam and John Hume. Obviously they were united not by the mythical resurrection of their man-god. It was death not life that brought the normally fractious and bickering representatives of capital together. After nearly 30 years the revolutionary situation that gripped the Six Counties and which throughout that time explicitly endangered the constitutional existence of both the United Kingdom and the Twenty-six Counties is to be resolved negatively.

Good Friday was therefore good news for reaction at home and abroad. Once the British-Irish Agreement was announced congratulations instantly poured in. Bill Clinton - whose ally George Mitchell painstakingly brokered the deal - blessed it as a “great achievement.” Naturally Elizabeth Windsor “shared the delight.” William Hague warmly praised Blair and said “it is a very exiting day.” Jacques Chirac described it as an “example” for what he called “the international community”, showing as it does that “peace and reason eventually overcomes violence.” He is right, of course, in the sense that the peace of the oppressors has overcome, or at least replaced, the violence of the oppressed.

Easter’s settlement must be set against the broad background of the US dominated New World Order and the associated period of reaction ushered in by the ignominious collapse of bureaucratic socialism in Eastern Europe and the USSR. Objectively bureaucratic socialism was the opposite of working class socialism. Despite that, not least because of mutually reinforcing cold war ideology, working class militants subjectively identified with it as a positive break with capitalism and a system of social organisation to be emulated. That grand illusion of the 20th century has been utterly destroyed. But unfortunately not by the self-liberating activity of revolutionary proletarians. It is capital and its cult of the atomised family and the alienated individual consumer which stands triumphant as humanity psychologically prepares itself for the next millennium of the common era. Seemingly history has been thrown into reverse gear.

Ever since the 27th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in February 1986, where Mikhail Gorbachev offered the US cooperation in dealing with what he cynically called “international hot spots” - ie, revolutionary situations - imperialism has had a free hand to reassert its divine right to rule, rob and rape the planet. The New World Order was baptised in the blood sacrifice of 100,000 Iraqi soldiers. The 1992 Gulf War was used to send an unmistakable message - we are in the era of Americana Rex. Today, there being no rival superpower, the World Trade Organisation - an extension of Gatt and US hegemony - ruthlessly dictates economic policy over whole tracts of Africa, South America and Asia. Transnational corporations thereby enjoy unfettered access to national markets while millions are enslaved and impoverished through massive state debts. As to the USSR, it is only a history book memory - nostalgically mourned in Britain by Stalinites, Scargillites and Trotskyite defenders of so-called ‘proletarian property forms’.

The robber capitalism of Russia, Kazakhstan, Azerbaijan, etc, gestated and emerged from within ‘official communism’. Eastern Europe has likewise been transformed. Moreover it exists within the Nato sphere of influence and Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic are being actively readied for EU membership.

In step with each of these developments the capitalist order has been stabilised in the “international hot spots”. Nicaragua, Angola, Mozambique, Namibia, Cambodia, Palestine, South Africa and now Northern Ireland have seen deals struck and the forces of revolutionary nationalism tamed or/and integrated into the machinery of state and government.

Besides the US dominated New World Order the Northern Ireland peace deal has to be understood in the context of Blair’s drive to remake the UK constitution. As we have argued in this paper, since the 1960s popular identification with the UK state has been slipping away. In the Thatcher years slippage became a slide. The anti-trade union laws, the miners’ 1984-85 Great Strike, Trident, ending benefits for under-25s, the abolition of the GLC, the Wapping dispute, Section 28, the poll tax and privatisation of state assets caused deep resentment and a search for other forms of identity. By breaking the economic power of organised labour and reinventing Victorian values, Thatcher unintentionally undermined the ideology of the UK.

In the name of democracy and in the absence of a real democratic movement from below Blair is attempting to re-win popular identification. He has already dealt with Scotland and Wales. They are to have a parliament and an assembly, crucially with an inability to freely exercise self-determination. Other planks in the Blair programme are due to follow in rapid succession. London and a dictatorial mayor, European monetary integration, the most undemocratic form of proportional representation in European and Westminster elections, the de-Labourisation of Labour and party realignment, a House of Lords based on patronage not hereditary, a slimmed down royal family and perhaps most important of all Northern Ireland.

Northern Ireland has not just experienced a loss of popular identification. The masses refused to be ruled in the old way. The ruling class could no longer rule in the old way.

Northern Ireland was established amid anti-Catholic pogroms in 1920-21 explicitly as a counterrevolutionary protestant statelet. The Irish national democratic revolution - to all intents and purposes begun with the 1916 Easter uprising in Dublin - was stopped halfway by the British compromise offer of twenty-six counties. Internecine civil war and defeat was the tragic result. The Ireland of Pierce, Larkin and Connolly thereby metamorphosed into the Free State of Collins, Griffith and de Valera.

Through dividing Ireland the British ruling class successfully imposed a “carnival of reaction” north and south. Britain anchored its continued rule in the industrial northeast through the institutionalised oppression of the large catholic minority and fostering a labour aristocratic mentality amongst Protestants. As a result they loyally voted for the aristocrat Sir Edward Carson and Ulster Unionism, remembered an invented tradition of 1688, and fought and connived against catholics at work as in politics so as to secure better conditions.

Gerrymandering and draconian laws, bigotry and bribery, did for nearly 50 years. However in 1969 the rising movement for civil rights burst through the safe banks of protest politics and became insurrectionary. State sponsored pogroms produced only fiercer and more conscious and heroic resistance. The British army was rushed in by the Labour government of Harold Wilson in August 1969. The notorious B-specials could no longer impose law and order. Barricades went up in Derry and Belfast. Bogside was briefly a self-governing no-go area. The IRA experienced an influx of young recruits and encadred a generation. The war was taken to Britain. Heath abolished Stormont in 1972 and ‘temporarily’ imposed direct rule. Nevertheless the nationalist/catholic tide moved inexorably towards the IRA and Sinn Fein. Internment, Ulsterisation, the March 8 1973 border referendum, Diplock courts, the peace people, the Prevention of Terrorism Act and the SAS all failed. To this day the IRA remains militarily undefeated. Sinn Fein breaths down the neck of the respectable SDLP in terms of voter support. Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness won Westminster seats in the May 1997 British general election.

The majority section of the population was no less affected by the crisis. As a labour aristocracy, working class Protestants look to the state to give them privileges against and over Catholics. Each concession gained by the revolutionary minority created tensions in the loyalist camp. The monolith of unionism shattered under the strain. Paisleyism got itself a large constituency. Orange gangs like the UDA and UVF turned to full blown and often random terrorism. The Ulster Workers Council strike of May 1974 brought down the power-sharing Sunningdale agreement and its Unionist chief executive Brian Faulkener - the Labour government decided against using troops. Loyalist Ulster said ‘no’ again and again to other British peace initiatives - the Downing Street declaration, the Framework Document and the Anglo-Irish Agreement. How will the new settlement fair?

Blair is much better placed than Heath in 1972-74 or for that matter Thatcher in the 1980s. There has been a marked narrowing of Sinn Fein’s ideological vision. In the 1970s it considered itself an integral part of a world wide liberation struggle. Its enemy was not only British but US imperialism. Moreover, for Sinn Fein the Dublin government was illegitimate, a stooge, an agent of Britain. How times have changed.

Gerry Adams now thinks of Ahern, the SDLP and Clinton as allies in a pan-nationalist front, if not partners. Even if it overtakes the SDLP, Sinn Fein is unlikely to immediately participate in the proposed Northern Ireland assembly. Yet the fact is that in return for the freeing of prisoners and what are essentially minor constitutional concessions it de facto accepts the Northern Ireland statelet and the sacred unionist “principle” of consent.

Though there could be a steady trickle of defections to Republican Sinn Fein, the IRSP and the Thirty-two County Sovereignty Committee, Adams and co should be able to deliver their mass base for the May 22 referendum. That means the British-Irish Agreement is well placed to win the catholic/nationalist vote in the north - the SDLP fully supports the deal. The simultaneous referendum in the south is in turn almost unproblematic. So there only remains the protestant/unionist side of the equation.

Trimble leads a divided party. Five out of ten Ulster Unionist Westminster MPs oppose the deal, with its pledge to release prisoners and the north-south ministerial council. Blair, Trimble, Major and other mainstream bourgeois politicians are undoubtedly telling the truth when they insist that the British-Irish Agreement greatly strengthens the UK state - it will, if it goes through, help to gain the consent and acceptance of the catholic/nationalist minority if not their active support. Despite that, the UUP rebels know full well that the agreement redefines the union with Great Britain and necessitates a fundamental change in the nature of Ulster Unionism. The politics of anti-catholic bigotry and protestant ascendancy hardly dovetail with Blair’s ‘cool Britannia’. Messrs Donaldson, Thompson, Biggs, Forsythe, et al will therefore line up with the Rev Ian Paisley and the Orange Order in the ‘no’ camp in defence of narrow sectionalism and a disappearing status quo.

The dangers for the British-Irish Agreement are real for all that. Even with the pre-referendum boost provided by Clinton’s visit, the result is by no means certain. As Gladstone, Asquith and Lloyd George found to their cost, modern Ulster was born with the balling cry of ‘no’ on its lips. The protestant/unionist majority are of the same ilk as the white supremacists in the US deep south and apartheid South Africa. There will be mass opposition.

At present most Tory opinion has joined the chorus of praise. However, developments in Northern Ireland might act to alter that. Norman Tebbitt has already voiced trenchant criticism. Faced with Blair’s constitutional project, which is about to abolish their inbuilt Lords majority at a stroke, and the prospect of permanent opposition with the advent of PR politics, the Tory right could be tempted by extra-parliamentary methods - including a united front with Ulster. It is very germane to recall that back in 1912-14 the Tories illegally conspired to scupper Irish home rule. They financed Carson’s armed rebellion against the Liberal government and promoted mutiny by the officer corps.

The biggest political demonstration so far this year has been the 750,000 strong Countryside Alliance. Only a simpleton could imagine that display of privilege, arrogance and rural reaction was merely about hunting foxes. It was the Tory right flexing its extra-parliamentary muscles.

Divisions above demand not a defence of Blair’s new constitution and a ‘yes’ vote on May 7 in London and May 22 in Northern Ireland. As the last general election and the September 1997 referendums in Scotland and Wales prove, there is no hope in choosing the lesser evil. What is urgently required is independent working class movement from below. Where Blair proposes to reform the constitutional monarchy from above, we communists organise to single-mindedly fight for a federal republic of England, Scotland and Wales and a united Ireland.

Jack Conrad