02.09.1999

Blair’s province of crisis

The Good Friday British-Irish Agreement signalled the formal end of the IRA’s protracted guerrilla war against British rule. It was not, however, the beginning of a normalised British peace. Since Easter 1998 the situation in the Six Counties is best characterised as an unstable counterrevolutionary situation. Neither war nor peace.

Mo Mowlam and the Northern Ireland office has sought to navigate the agreement between the ambitions of Sinn Féin/IRA and the intransigence of the unionists. The skills of Odysseus are not in evidence. In trying to avoid Scylla, they have fallen into Charybdis.

In July the Northern Ireland executive came unstuck. Beset by intractable internal divisions and with the Paisleyites snapping and biting at their heels, Trimble’s Ulster Unionists pulled back. They could not take the final step. They would not, could not, countenance Sinn Féin ministers.

Blair solemnly pledged an “end to bombings, killings and beatings, claimed or unclaimed; an end to targeting and procurement of weapons; progressive abandonment and dismantling of paramilitary structures actively and directly promoting violence; full cooperation with the independent commission on decommissioning”, etc. True, the IRA ceased military operations targeting the British state. Yet not one gun nor one bullet has been decommissioned. More to the point, under the terms of the Good Friday agreement the IRA considers it legitimate to execute informers like Charles Bennett and enforce its authority in nationalist-catholic areas - not least against those deemed “anti-social”.

It is within Mowlam’s remit, as secretary of state, to pronounce that the IRA had broken the ceasefire and thereby expel Sinn Féin from the peace process. To have done so would though surely have wrecked the entire Good Friday agreement and triggered all manner of unforeseeable consequences. Instead, after some prevarication, she announced, on the Thursday of last week, that although the IRA had “sailed close to the edge” the ceasefire held.

How did the IRA respond? Did it reel back in contrition? Did it start decommissioning? Did it promise to accept “purely peaceful and democratic means”? No, no and no. In a bold and cleverly calculated upping of the tempo the IRA carried out a series of punishment beatings in nationalist-catholic areas and ordered some half-dozen youths to leave Northern Ireland forthwith.

Dealing with petty criminals - joyriders, housebreakers, muggers - in such a brutal manner is obviously distasteful, but the IRA has little choice. It is a military-political movement, not a state. Two other factors must be stressed. Firstly, even its bitterest enemies admit that the IRA’s summary justice receives “support” from “local people who will often report crimes such as drug-taking and car theft to the local paramilitary leadership rather than the police” (The Daily Telegraph August 30). Secondly, most exiles “return home after a year or so” if, through an intermediary, they agree not to “transgress” what The Guardian stupidly dismisses as “terrorist law” (August 30).

Either way, the IRA was not cowered by Mowlam, but encouraged. Hence, while keeping within the parameters of the ceasefire, as flexibly defined by the secretary of state herself, Brian Keenan and the IRA have established their right - almost de jure - to police nationalist-catholic areas. In other words, as long as the IRA does not kill RUC men, British soldiers, politicians or Protestants, the ceasefire has “not broken down”.

Predictably the unionists reacted with fury and a flood of crocodile tears. Trimble demanded the suspension of prisoner releases, publicly questioned Mowlam’s competence and called for the delaying of next week’s Mitchell review of the Good Friday agreement. Blair refused. Instead, through the Downing Street press office, he expressed full confidence in his “marvellous” secretary of state. The “breached” but not “broken” formulation concerning the ceasefire has the prime minister’s imprimatur.

Picking up the baton, the Tory press savaged the whole peace process. Peter Hitchins attacks the Good Friday agreement as being “based on lies and betrayal”. It is “a blot on our national history”, he patriotically thunders (The Express August 30). In a similar vein the Daily Mail uses former IRA infiltrator Martin McGartland to lament the IRA “being officially allowed to police its own areas” (August 30). The Times also condemns the growth of IRA power under the Good Friday agreement: The IRA’s “armalite evictions ... are a systematic flouting of state authority, a murderous form of gangsterism by which republicans seek to exert their illegal authority over ‘their’ areas” (editorial,August 30). The elected government is accused by The Daily Telegraph of “appeasement”, of “planning to hand policing to terrorists”, of “losing control of the province” and “actually planning to lose control” (editorial The Daily Telegraph August 31). Treason in short.

Here we have the grounds for a Tory coup. Ominously the Telegraph has already urged an “ermine revolt” to “uphold the constitution” (June 29).

There has been much clubroom chatter in Park Lane and The Mall about a plan B: ie, solving the Northern Ireland problem vi et armis. But a return to army patrols, special police powers, informers and no-jury convictions is obviously unworkable as a constitutional settlement. Neither the SDLP nor Washington nor Dublin could accept it. As to the IRA, it has proved beyond a shadow of doubt that it can withstand anything the British state can politically afford to throw against it - internment, SAS assassinations, criminalisation, etc.

Nevertheless there is a recognition in high Tory circles that Blairism - unassailable in the House of Commons - can be undermined in Ireland. Northern Ireland is the UK’s main weak link and the main weak link in Blair’s constitutional revolution. Certainly a stalled Good Friday agreement leaves the whole New Labour project vulnerable. The Tory Party therefore breaks with 30 years of bipartisanship and embraces the unionists.

It is not that the Tories have any particular affinity with the unionists. Their rasping talk of British citizenship, the queen and the union are but synonyms for the protestant ascendancy. Ulster’s loyalty is loyalty to Ulster alone. But in the search for a weapon with which to hit Blair Tory eyes naturally light upon the unionists. With unionist disloyalty the Tories hope to break New Labour. Hague once joined the chorus of praise for the Good Friday agreement. Now he writes of how Blair “has betrayed Ulster” (The Daily Telegraph September 1). Faced with Blair’s constitutional revolution which is about to abolish their inbuilt Lords majority at a stroke, a ‘federalist’ Euroland and at least one more term of opposition, the Hague Tories are wielding Northern Ireland alongside their Little England defence of the pound. Hague’s programme takes shape. It is then surely 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 mainly about hunting foxes. It was, as we said at the time, “the Tory Party flexing its extra-parliamentary muscles”.

Blair and Mowlam have little room for manoeuvre. They are impaled on the horns of a dilemma: both nationalists and unionists sincerely desire peace, but each wants a different peace and neither wants the peace that goes with the Good Friday agreement.

On the one hand Sinn Féin/IRA have no interest in seeing Northern Ireland work as a residual outpost of the United Kingdom. Even though it backed the Good Friday agreement Sinn Féin steadfastly refused to recognise “the legitimacy of the Six County statelet” (An Phoblacht May 7 1998). The republican movement is committed to a united Ireland ... and Gerry Adams has all the makings of its first leader. In the south the élan of those who successfully resist the might of Britain and keep their republican principles intact could well prove a massive vote winner. That in no small part explains why the IRA can afford to be so unaccommodating, aggressive and provocative.

On the other hand Trimble is under tremendous pressure. The Ulster Unionists found it impossible to abide by the letter of the Good Friday agreement. To have done so would have had Trimble, as first minister, sitting alongside Sinn Féiners in cabinet all the while with the IRA fully armed and operational. Such an acceptance of Sinn Féin ministers before IRA decommissioning would have cleaved the ranks of the Ulster Unionists and immeasurably strengthened the hand of Paisley and his Democratic Unionist Party. All in all a ‘no’ majority amongst the majority British-Irish now effectively exists.

Of course, the fundamental problem is not some inherent Irish cussedness, unreasonableness and propensity to violence. It is the division forced upon Ireland in 1920-21. Northern Ireland was established not to meet some protestant British-Irish yearning for self-determination, but to secure for Britain the largest possible territory around the, then strategically important, Belfast industrial conurbation. Something by its very nature that was not only unjust, but ultimately unworkable. Northern Ireland meant the national oppression of a large catholic-nationalist minority and the renewal of the protestant ascendancy.

Needless to say, 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 an equal and opposite alienation amongst the majority. Ireland’s right to self-determination has again been denied and remains the central, unresolved, contradiction. But as a concomitant old loyalism now finds itself adrift from the British state. The Good Friday agreement redefines the union with Great Britain and necessitates an historic compromise with Irish nationalism ... the actuality of which is beyond the pale.

In all probability the next big storm will be the reform of the RUC under the auspices of Chris Patten. His commission’s report has already been heavily leaked. In actuality the recommendations might well be toned down in order to render them less objectionable to Tory-unionist opinion. Nevertheless if a renamed RUC is shorn of its special branch, cut by 75% in terms of personnel and policing is devolved to local authorities, the Hague Tories could yet find themselves with an unofficial armed wing. Mass resignations, passive mutiny, uniformed protest demonstrations are all far from impossible.

Such a constitutional crisis ought to be our opportunity. Yet independent working class politics exists as no more than an abstraction. A predicament made worse because it is hardly recognised. Most leftists in Britain are hopelessly mired in economism (bourgeois politics of the working class). A Tory-unionist challenge in Northern Ireland would see the old left line up with Blair in the name of ‘peace’ and the ‘lesser evil’. Auto-Labourism and social pacifism is a stubborn thing.

Communists hold to a different approach. Where Blair remakes the constitutional monarchy from above, the CPGB says the workers can take the lead in remaking Britain from below as a federal republic (as advocated by Marx, Engels and Lenin). As to Ireland, we are for an immediate British withdrawal and reunification. Communists advocate the most extensive and deepest democracy. That means full citizenship rights for both religio-ethnic communities in Ireland and a negotiated arrangement whereby a one-county, four-half-county British-Irish federal entity can exercise self-governing autonomy up to and including the right to separate.

Without such a communist minimum programme there can be no voluntary unity of Ireland, let alone working class liberation.

Jack Conrad