01.07.1999

Neither war nor peace

If the June 10 European Union election debacle signalled the end of the Tony Blair honeymoon, failure to secure the Northern Ireland settlement by the June 30 D-day deadline endangers, in time, the whole New Labour project.

Northern Ireland is the United Kingdom’s main weak link and therefore a weak link in Blair’s constitutional revolution. For nearly three decades Britain’s inability to rule the Six Counties in the old way and the refusal of the nationalist masses to be ruled in the old way was a festering ulcer on the Elizabethan monarchy system. There is no longer a revolutionary situation, but the counterrevolutionary situation is precarious. Northern Ireland remains a province of crisis.

Fear of the malevolent uncertainties that would grow in abundance from a semi-permanent continuation of a deadlock ensured Blair’s presence in Belfast, three days of negotiations in Stormont Castle and worried words from Bill Clinton in Washington. Possible failure to broker a deal between Sinn Féin and the Ulster Unionists, plus the parade commission’s ruling banning the Orange march down Garvaghy Road for the second year in succession, instantly brought renewed threats of loyalist rioting and terrorism. The shadowy Orange Volunteers and Red Hand Defenders - linked to a string of recent pipe bomb attacks on Catholics - reportedly have “active service units” on stand-by. Drumcree is an explosion waiting to happen.

David Trimble and the Ulster Unionist Party are under tremendous pressure. To compromise with Blair and agree to Sinn Féin ministers before IRA decommissioning would cleave its ranks. On the other hand a stalled peace process is a failure of leadership and programme. Either way a ‘no’ majority amongst the majority British-Irish is in the making.

Throughout this century the defining feature of unionism has been saying ‘no’ to equal rights for Catholics. As a labour aristocracy, working class Protestants have looked to the UK state to furnish them with privileges against and over Catholics. Partition post-1998 eschews gerrymandering and overt discrimination. More than that, Blair aims to win the consent, if not the active support, of the catholic-nationalist population. Each concession given to, or wrested by, the minority produces alienation amongst the majority. Ireland’s right to self-determination has again been denied and remains the central, unresolved, contradiction. But concomitantly old loyalism now finds itself adrift from the British state. The British-Irish Agreement redefines the union with Great Britain and necessitates a historical compromise with Irish nationalism ... the actuality of which is unpalatable.

The immediate beneficiary is sure to be Ian Paisley and his Democratic Unionist Party, which has been yapping and snapping at the peace process ever since Good Friday. Bourgeois loyalism is riven with stresses; plebeian loyalism is hardening. Those who dismissed the ‘no’ campaign of Paisley for the May 22 referendum in 1998 as the Neanderthal rantings of the isolated and doomed have been proved wrong.

There is little or no chance in the short to medium term of a full-scale return to the IRA guerrilla struggle against crown forces. The peace of the oppressors has overcome the violence of the oppressed. But Northern Ireland cannot smoothly and quickly be made good as a stable and uncontested part of the UK. That is what the British government and the official Ulster Unionists earnestly wish for. Not Sinn Féin-IRA. That explains why, much to the frustration of liberals like The Guardian’s Hugo Young, it can afford to be “culpably calamitous” and so “unyielding” (June 29).

Sinn Féin backed the British-Irish Agreement. However, it steadfastly refused to formally recognise “the legitimacy of the Six County statelet” (An Phoblacht May 7 1998). To have done so would betray all those men and women who gave or risked their lives over the last 30 years. It would also have been a break with the tradition of militant republicanism dating back to the Fenians and the Easter rising of 1916. And for what? Sinn Féin is an all-Ireland party with all-Ireland ambitions. Its constituency in the north is limited to the size of the minority nationalist-catholic population. In the south the élan of those who successfully resisted the might of Britain and kept their republican principles intact could well prove a massive vote-winner for reform in the not too distant future. Gerry Adams can have no particular desire to be minister of education in Northern Ireland. His sights are higher. Already in fashionable pro-Irish circles in Boston and New York he is feted as Ireland’s Nelson Mandela.

So while the Adams-McGuinness leadership made a momentous turn on Good Friday 1998 by committing itself to an unarmed strategy, nevertheless the IRA will in all likelihood never hand over its considerable arsenal of weapons to general John de Chastelain. Demands for the IRA to disarm are “nonsense”, said Gerry Adams a year ago, and would be “resisted” (The Daily Telegraph May 11 1998). He has never spoken a truer word. The IRA continues to operate as an unofficial police force in republican areas and stands threateningly in the background - an undefeated enemy of the British state. Put another way, the immediate prospect is one of neither an IRA war nor a Blairite peace. The Tory right is sure to exploit such a situation to the maximum.

Many a reforming British prime minister has come unstuck over Ireland. As Gladstone, Asquith and Wilson found to their cost, Ulster can provide a focus for all manner of reactionaries, backwoods traditionalists and malcontents. There would then be a real beauty in Blairism running aground on Irish rocks. True, William Hague joined the chorus of praise when the British-Irish Agreement was signed. Needless to say, the shadow cabinet has gradually edged away from bipartisanship in practice. Faced with Blair’s constitutional revolution which is about to abolish their inbuilt Lords majority at a stroke, institutionalised Labourite domination in Scotland and Wales, a ‘federalist’ Euroland and at least one more term of opposition, the Hague Tories are beginning to convert Northern Ireland into an anti-Blair weapon to be fielded alongside their Little England defence of the pound. Hague’s programme takes shape.

Though they are an integral part of the British-Irish Agreement, the Tory leadership has raised constant and carping objections to prisoner releases prior to any IRA decommissioning. Patrick Magee - the heroic would-be assassin of Thatcher and her ministers - was the subject of calculated Tory outrage and lamentation. In point of fact the relevant passage in the text stipulates that decommissioning should be “completed” by May 2000. What passes for ‘decommissioning’ is a moot point of course. Sinn Féin, however, is not bound to ensure such an outcome, only encourage it. Prisoners for their part are being freed not by an across- the-board amnesty but in line with a fixed tariff reduction on sentences. Furthermore under the terms of the agreement Sinn Féin has an automatic claim to seats in a power sharing executive - given its electoral support.

Despite that the Tories and their auxiliaries in the media instinctively sided with Trimble when in the run-up to D-day he insisted that “a credible and verifiable beginning should be made to a process of decommissioning before Sinn Féin ministers are permitted to assume power over their fellow citizens” (The Guardian June 28). The very idea of Sinn Féin taking part in the province’s government while the IRA remains fully armed is condemned out of hand as “appeasement” by Michael Grove of The Times (June 29). The Daily Telegraph leader is no less rabid. Blair’s willingness to have Sinn Féin ministers before decommissioning is “an evil thing, utterly opposed to true peace”. Were such a situation to come about, it would apparently “undermine representative democracy in the United Kingdom and ... in the Republic of Ireland” (June 28). Ulster Unionists deserve establishment solidarity. Not abuse for ruining the peace process.

The Hague Tories have no concern for genuine democracy. They are enraged because Blair’s constitutional revolution is destroying their divine right to govern the country through a minority vote at the polls and the unelected House of Lords. Ominously the Telegraph urges an “ermine revolt” to “uphold the constitution”. All government legislation should be blocked using the Lords, crucially Blair’s disenfranchisement of “several hundred of their number” - “one of the most autocratic bills in recent history” (June 29). Their putative aristocratic rebels could moreover yet find themselves a ready-made armed wing if the RUC were to be disbanded (ie, ‘reformed’) as part of some trade-off for token IRA decommissioning. Things are redolent with an impending constitutional crisis.

In anticipation it is therefore germane to recall that back in 1912-14 the Tories illegally conspired to scupper Irish home rule - firstly, in order to defend their landed interests in Ireland, and, secondly, to restore their political fortunes in Britain. They financed Sir Edward Carson’s armed rebellion against the Liberal government and fermented mutiny in the officer corps. In that light it is worth noting that since New Labour came to office the biggest political demonstration by far has not come from the left - as would be expected - but the right. Only simpletons believe that the 250,000-strong Countryside Alliance march was merely about hunting foxes. It was, as we said at the time, “the Tory Party flexing its extra-parliamentary muscles”.

A constitutional collision between the Hague Tories and New Labour should be our opportunity. Yet independent working class politics exists as no more than an abstraction. A problem made worse because it is hardly recognised. Most leftists in Britain are hopelessly mired in economism (bourgeois politics of the working class). For these comrades the stuff of politics is routine trade unionism on the one hand and on the other a vanished or disembodied utopia. The actual means of social transition - ie, mastering high politics and ever deeper, ever wider democratic struggles - are ignored or down-played. In practice the absence of a viable programmatic bridge results in auto-Labourism.

Thus, when it came to the peace process in Northern Ireland and the May 22 referendum, the bulk of the left meekly lined up behind Blair (and Trimble, Clinton and Ahern). The Socialist Workers Party, Scargill’s Socialist Labour Party, the Morning Star and the Socialist Party in England and Wales piously hoped that at last Northern Ireland - with its revolutionary nationalist minority - would gradually ascend to the ‘higher planes’ of civilisation supposedly represented by British trade unionism (ie, the lowest, most primitive politics of a slave class). Such misplaced arrogance reveals both lack of elementary anti-imperialist principle and programmatic nullity.

In contrast the CPGB called for a boycott of the May 22 referendum. We communists did so not in the name of impotent absentionism, but so as to highlight the necessity of a working class alternative. Where Blair remakes the constitutional monarchy from above, communists uphold the perspective of the working class remaking the constitution from below as a federal republic of England, Scotland and Wales. As to Ireland, we are for unity, independence and democracy. There must be a freely elected all-Ireland constitutional assembly whereby the Irish people can decide their own future without Blair or Clinton setting the agenda. We advocate and fight for the fullest democracy. That means in Ireland the protestant - British-Irish - minority having self-governing autonomy up to and including the right to separate.

Only through taking the road of revolutionary democracy can the workers make themselves a political, hegemonic, class, capable of its own self-liberation, and thus the liberation of humanity.

Jack Conrad