11.06.1998

Bucking the issue

From The Call, paper of the British Socialist Party, June 6 1918

The government is still unable or unwilling to find a solution of the intolerable situation it has itself created in Ireland. Meanwhile the press and the politicians are concerning themselves very much just now with a proposal for federal home rule for the whole of the United Kingdom.

On its merits this is a proposal we would support. A scheme which places executive powers over local questions in the hands of the citizens of that locality is far more democratic than the present centralised bureaucracy. In its early days the BSP had on its programme a demand for home rule for London.

The sinister aspect of the present discussion however is that it is avowedly advanced as a solution to the Irish question, and is clearly designed to sidetrack the whole issue. Home rule for Ireland has nothing in common with a scheme that simply aims for the decentralisation of government.

The Irish question is a nationalist question, while the demand for greater autonomy for England, Scotland and Wales, assuming that it is voiced to any extent, is not. It may be urged that the English, Welsh and Scots are as different in race as the Irish are from the rest, but the fact that these differences hardly affect our national life today proves that the national barriers between peoples are largely artificial.

The division in modern society is not on the lines of nationality, but of class. The Irish people will discover this eventually when they have secured home rule. But we know the futility of endeavouring to make this clear to a people who are subjected to what they are firmly convinced is ‘foreign’ domination.

For that reason international socialists insist on the right of self-determination for all nations. That right must be conceded in Ireland too.