21.10.1999

British-Irish debate: Two approaches

Critics of the Communist Party’s 20 theses are inconsistent democrats, writes Jack Conrad

Our discussion on the British-Irish has, it seems, reached a point where more light is being generated than fury. Excellent. Though some mental confusion, factual mistakes and secondary theoretical issues remain to be sorted out, the main principles and thus the main lines of demarcation have emerged cleanly from the curses and gnashing of teeth that initially greeted the ‘Ireland and the British-Irish’ theses (Weekly Worker August 26). Debate has moved on from Jack Conrad’s supposed advocacy of a “protestant state for a protestant people”, or my so-called plan for the “repartition of Ireland”. Such unfounded and ill-considered nonsense has thankfully been left where it belongs - collecting dust in the archives.

Two distinct shades of opinion have emerged. On the one side stand the consistent revolutionary democrats. We want to equip the working class with a fighting programme for a united Ireland within which a British-Irish province - one county and four half-counties - exercises self-determination. This approach is based on the theory and the best practice of Leninism, and crucially a classless, countryless, moneyless vision of the future which in terms of means necessitates the voluntary union of peoples and taking democracy to its outer limits and beyond.

On the other side are inconsistent revolutionary democrats (in certain cases we have revolutionary non-democrats). These comrades are for a united Ireland too. However British-Irish self-determination is not to be countenanced. Everything is subordinate to the aim, not of working class unity and socialism, but the territorial unity of Ireland. The pro-imperialist British-Irish are therefore to be frogmarched into a unitary state and kept there if needs be by coercion - perversely this is excused in the name of championing the rights of the oppressed.

The British-Irish are demonised as inherently sectarian. It follows that such an unsound people cannot be trusted with even the possibility of establishing their own independent state. To prevent any renewed oppression of the Catholic-Irish the British-Irish are either to have no special rights as a community whatsoever or at most local autonomy along the lines of a German Land or a US state. Naturally the proponents of involuntary union claim their approach as genuine Leninism. The British-Irish are variously categorised - most narrowly as a mere religion. But - it is agreed by both sides - the British-Irish are neither a full nor an oppressed nation. This is a clincher for our inconsistent democrats. The comrades assume they have the full weight of Marxist orthodoxy behind them when they solemnly pronounce that only full nations - who are at the same time oppressed - have the right to self-determination.

Here, albeit sketchily, is how things lie with the inconsistent democrats, as represented by the latest letter of José Villa, formerly a leading member of Workers Power, and the articles by Tom Delargy of the Scottish Socialist Party, and Dave Craig of the Revolutionary Democratic Group (Weekly Worker October 14). In the course of our debate these comrades - not forgetting Steve Riley - have repeatedly raised certain testing questions for Marxism in their attempt to “trash” the 20 theses on the British-Irish. So in this, my latest reply, I feel obliged to recapitulate a number of arguments. Nevertheless I shall also attempt to move the debate onwards by fielding more illuminating facts and figures, and above all by conclusively showing that on national and ethnic questions Marxism as a body of thought is far richer, far more flexible and thus far more powerful as a weapon of class war than the brittle caricature we are presented with by the various economistic and bureaucratic schools of socialism.

Let us begin by again asking ourselves, who are the British-Irish? According to Steve Riley they are “not a distinct community” but a “religious faction” (Weekly Worker September 2). Dave Craig employs a slightly different formulation: “The British-Irish are not a nation, but the Anglo-protestant part of the Irish nation” (Weekly Worker September 16). José Villa regards the British-Irish as “a privileged section of the Irish nation” (Weekly Worker September 30). Tom Delargy is persuaded that the British-Irish “can only be clearly defined in religious terms” (Weekly Worker October 14).

None of the four protagonists mentioned above have expressed any objections to examining nations and national questions broadly along the lines systematically presented in Stalin’s famous 1913 pamphlet Marxism and the national question. Stalin, it will be recalled, argued that nations have five essential “characteristic features”. Firstly, and “primarily” a nation is a definite, stable, community of people; secondly, nations must share a “common language”; thirdly, they posses a “common territory”; fourthly, they have an internal economic bond to “weld the various parts into a single whole”; fifthly, they have a collective “character” which manifests itself in a “common culture” (JV Stalin Works Vol 2, Moscow 1953, pp303-307).

Of course, Stalin’s fivefold definition must not be treated too rigidly. But it can be used to shine a light on to the British-Irish phenomenon in order to reveal it in all its intrinsic complexities. So let us once more discuss Stalin’s five characteristics vis-à-vis the British-Irish and see what substantive conclusions follow.

It is correct to say that the majority of Protestants in Northern Ireland have throughout the 20th century constituted a labour aristocracy (not a religious, but a politico-economic category). They have sought to preserve their relatively meagre privileges at the expense of Catholics by initiating and buttressing sectarian discrimination from below and by appealing above to the Northern Ireland and British states. However the Protestants are not simply a labour aristocracy.

The British-Irish are a stable community of people who have continuously inhabited parts of what is now Northern Ireland since the early 17th century. They were settled in Antrim and Down as a mass of ‘strong farmers’ - from England, as comrade Craig’s definition suggests, but mainly, in a ratio of five to one, from Scotland. The plantations were designed to pacify the most rebellious part of Gaelic and Anglo-Irish Ireland and hence “assure” it for an absolutist British crown that had recently redefined itself according to its nationalised version of Protestantism: ie, Anglicanism. As was bound to be the case, the settlers quickly diverged from their origins and formed another - hybrid - Irish identity.

The Tudor, Stewart and Cromwellian plantations and drive for conquest negatively defined the Irish as Irish, both the Gaelic and Anglo-Irish, not in terms of language, but church. The Irish became a people-religion. The Catholic majority were victims of national oppression as Catholics and denied basic rights. The old English in Ireland were thereby excluded from the emerging British nation. By remaining Catholic, the Anglo-Irish became simply Irish. The bitter divisions between the Anglo-Irish and Gaelic feudal cultures “gave way ultimately to a sense of common Catholicism” - the highly fragmented Gaelic-Irish slowly merging with and forming a new “subordinate” English speaking culture “in the polity of Ireland” (H Kearney The British Isles Cambridge 1995, p170). As a consequence the Irish national question and British domination both took the outer form of religion.

Taking into account the last 400 years of history, it is ridiculous, to say the least, to describe the British-Irish exclusively or mainly in denominational terms. One might just as well describe the Catholic-Irish in Northern Ireland, and for that matter the Catholic-Irish population of Eire as a mere “religious faction”.

There are, as I have pointed out before, striking similarities between Ireland and the south Slavs. The Croats, Serbs and Bosniacs live in the same part of south eastern Europe and speak a common language - true, there are still distinct dialects spoken and different alphabets. However, due to a combination of factors - for example, incorporation by culturally antipathetic empires, Nazi divide and rule, and, capping it all the malevolent disintegration of bureaucratic socialism - they are today ferociously and bloodily ethnically-nationally divided according to religion.

Those who would dully pronounce that the Croats are “not a distinct community” but simply a “religious faction” are spectacularly wide of the mark, not to say spectacularly stupid. The Croats are ethnically-nationally defined by their Catholicism. One must in other words go beyond the superficial appearance of things. The same goes for muslim Bosniacs and orthodox Serbs. It is pure muddled-headedness to dismiss Bosniacs as “not a nation”, but the ‘muslim part of the south Slav nation’. It would be equally blundering to insist that Serbs are no more than ‘a privileged section of the south Slav nation’.

Nations have to be grasped in their movement. They are not static purely qualitative phenomena. So the world is not neatly divided into nations and non-nations. While there is undoubtedly a qualitative side, there is a constant sociopolitical, quantitative dynamic of being and becoming which produces countless black to white gradations of grey. In other words, nations are difficult phenomena which defy the common sense approach of turning to an atlas or official history text and classifying every country, state or kingdom as a nation. Nations, once they can be said to exist in history, are without exception undergoing a process of convergence with or divergence from other nations. Dialects can be submerged into a common, print-based language - Scots English into English English. Or dialect can used politically as the basis of a separate nation-state identity - as was the case with Sweden and Norway (conservative Norwegian nationalists chose as their ‘official national language’ Nymosk: ie, an archaic dialect which was most distant from Danish, after the political divorce from Sweden in 1905). Religion can lose its power as a social agent and become a purely private concern, as for example in most of England and Wales. Or it can be reinvented as a virulent national-ethnic medium whereby nationalist elites divide-cohere people into new nation-states (eg, ex-Yugoslavia).

Anyway, as argued above, the British-Irish have constituted a “stable community” for nearly four centuries. Due to their similar conditions of existence in northeastern Ulster the British-Irish have over the generations developed customs, an outlook and character peculiar to themselves (Stalin’s points one and five). The work ethic, blunt speaking, a collective memory of King Billy, 1688, July 12 and the battle of the Somme, the union jack, rival protestantisms, orangeism and hostility to republicanism and popery all mark out the British-Irish in terms of their self-image.

This is manifested in a British-Irish ethnic-national identity which is completely at odds with the Catholic-Irish who inhabit the same state territory. When asked who or what they are in national terms, 82% of Protestants described themselves at Ulster-British, 15% as Northern Irish and only 3% as Irish. In contrast the figures for Catholic-Irish are almost the same ... except reversed. Strangely, at least to my mind, 10% called themselves British-Irish, 28% Northern Irish, while a majority, 62%, viewed themselves as Irish (Northern Ireland social attitudes 1995-6, p37).

That subjective British-Irish “common psychological make-up” has been a material force that has visibly shaped Ireland for at least the last hundred years (in different forms and manifestations for the last 400 years). Because it is distinct from, and counterposed to, the Catholic-Irish identity hardened under the weight of national oppression, the ideologues of mainstream Irish nationalism have experienced the greatest difficulty in coming to terms with the British-Irish.

Completely opposite assessments of the British-Irish are held by Irish nationalists. On the one hand there are those who exclude the British-Irish as an alien element akin to the “Saracens in Spain” (O MacDonagh States of mind London 1983, p19). On the other hand, no matter how they psychologically, culturally and politically think of themselves, the British-Irish are claimed as an “integral part of the Irish nation”, albeit, in the words of Arthur Griffiths, as “perverted” Irish people. Either way for mainstream Irish nationalism the British-Irish, as outside aliens or “perverted” Irish, have no right to call “into question” the “integrity and authority of the nation” (cited in C O’Halloran Partition and the limits of Irish nationalism Dublin, pp36,37).

Our inconsistent democrats arrive at exactly the same conclusion. They too take as their principal starting point not class and class interests, but fixed and indivisible nations, symbolised for them by Ireland. Comrade Craig boldly declares that: “The ‘nation’ is the sovereign political constituency in the modern world” (September 19). He, and the other inconsistent democrats, are therefore convinced, as a matter of faith, that Ireland has an almost metaphysical oneness, that the British-Irish are either pro-imperialist outsiders or a religious minority. Consequently, he and his allies reason that, as there is a single Irish nation, minorities - ie, the British-Irish - should abide by the will of the majority. They should be content with minority rights in a unitary state (a mirror image of what mainstream British and British-Irish politicians say to the Catholic-Irish minority in Northern Ireland). If the British-Irish refuse to accept minority status, in the event of resistance these “scabs” (comrade Craig’s analogy) are to be forced into a united Ireland and if necessary kept there by coercion. Such a travesty for comrade Craig and his co-thinkers is democracy.

But we must not run ahead of ourselves. We are still exploring the ethnic-national identity of the British-Irish in terms of the essential criteria outlined by Stalin. What then of Stalin’s point two, language? Alone, no doubt for his own reasons, José Villa, disputes that nations are defined by a common language. There “could be one or more languages”, as for example “Wales and Ireland”, he writes (Weekly Worker September 30). I disagree and fielded a wide variety of Marxist authorities on the subject to back my original contention. In reply comrade Villa assures us that he bases himself on Lenin: “It was Lenin,” he says, “who described Switzerland as an example of a multilinguistic nation” (original emphasis Weekly Worker October 14).

Comrade Villa supplies no references unfortunately. But in terms of method, while giving the utmost attention to outstanding theorists like Lenin, we should avoid descending into scholasticism and crude quote-mongering. If Lenin did write of multilinguistic nations, then frankly, in my humble opinion, his formulation was either hasty or plain wrong.

The primitive evolution of nations is synonymous with uniting territories whose populations speak, or come to speak, a common language - something triggered or consolidated with a standardised print-language. Language is the most important medium of human intercourse. A common language is a huge advantage in establishing and developing a flourishing home market. Without a single language the business of buying and selling (including buying and selling labour power) is greatly hindered. Presumably that is why in his pamphlet The right of nations to self-determination Lenin is convinced that for the “complete victory of commodity production, the bourgeoisie must capture the home market, there must be politically united territories whose population speak a single language” (VI Lenin CW Vol 20, Moscow 1977, p396). As to Switzerland, I have not trawled every reference in Lenin’s Collected Works. Nevertheless in his Critical remarks on the national question he mentions Switzerland as an “exception in that she is not a single-nation state” (ibid p40). There are five common languages - ie, German, French, Italian and the two dialectics of Romansh. Switzerland, has a single market, but, as I have argued, is a multinational state.

What of the British-Irish? Obviously the British-Irish speak a common language. Of course, this is shared by the Catholic-Irish (we need not quibble here about Gaelic). This phenomenon of one language alongside ethnic-national division is also present in the case of the south Slavs. The Croats share the Serbo-Croat language with the Bosniacs and Serbs. Yet even under Tito with his Yugloslavisation from above they were organised into distinct republics (formally with the right to self-determination). Now, after a series of brutal civil wars, they are cleaved into hostile and ethnically ‘pure’ states. However, we can easily cut the Gordian knot vis-à-vis language and the British-Irish. Unlike their Dutch, Afrikaner, German, Nigerian, Swiss, Norwegian, Danish and Swedish co-religionists - ie, fellow Protestants - they, the British-Irish, have a “common language”. Again, we prove beyond any doubt that they cannot be defined simply by religion.

What of a common territory (Stalin’s point three)? There is a sizeable, 42%, Catholic-Irish minority imprisoned within Northern Ireland who have a palpable cultural-political affinity with the south. But the British-Irish are not scattered throughout Ireland or for that matter evenly distributed within Northern Ireland itself. They are certainly not the equivalent of the Jews - a people-religion - in tsarist Russia. There is a one county, four-half-counties area containing “a clear British-Irish majority” (thesis 15). This forms a geographically coherent, whole broadly comprising Antrim, north Tyrone, south Derry, north Armagh and north Down - some council districts have overwhelming British-Irish majorities. In both North Down and Carrickfergus 91% of the populations are British-Irish; in Castlereagh it is 90%, Ards has a 88% British-Irish majority and Newtownabbey 87% (Northern Ireland 1991 census figures).

Lastly we come to the economy (Stalin’s point four). There are two issues that need highlighting here.

Firstly, and most importantly, north-eastern Ulster has had an advanced capitalist economy throughout the 20th century. This fixes the mass of its proletarianised people into a single metabolism and sheds the isolation, parochialism and self-sufficiency that characterises traditional rural economies.

Secondly, while there is no British-Irish economy as such, Northern Ireland has evolved along its own economic pathway, making it distinct from the rest of Ireland. Till the mid-17th century Ulster was generally regarded as the poorest of the Irish provinces. The industrial revolution changed all that. North-eastern Ulster developed in a way that had far more in common with Liverpool and Glasgow than the rest of Ireland. Belfast in particular was an industrial city that served not Ireland, but the worldwide British Empire. Furthermore capital in Belfast was mainly personified by Protestants. Protestant control and industrialisation “gave the political economy of northeast Ulster its unique character” (L Kennedy and P Ollerenshaw An economic history of Ulster Manchester 1985, p65). Today the north-south axis remains weak, the east-west axis with Britain strong.

It is on such foundations of history, territory, language, culture and economy that Jack Conrad had concluded that the British-Irish are more than a “religious faction” (an aspect of culture). They have enough commonality, objective and subjective, to characterise them as a semi-nationality or a semi-nation. In terms of a nought-to-100 index of non-nation to full nationhood I have scored them at 75 for purposes of illustration.

We have chided comrade Craig and others for adopting a check list approach. This has caused some misunderstanding. He takes it as a rejection of a scientific, rational, definition of the nation. As evidenced above, that is hardly the case. So we need not waste time on my definition of a nation which supposedly I keep “hidden” (Weekly Worker October 14). No, my criticism of comrade Craig is not that he has a definition of the nation. My criticism is that he approaches living ethnic-national conflicts with clipboard in hand, ticking off who is and who is not a full nation. He substitutes a check list for what actually requires political thought and political solutions. Like a doctrinaire, comrade Craig has his answer in advance. He will only allow self-determination for full nations.

He gets himself into a total mess, telling us that the “British nation is not homogeneous, but a multinational state” (Weekly Worker September 16). Monstrously he concludes that Britain as a nation - not a ruling class state formation - is “reactionary”. Presumably he considers the linguistic, territorial and economic unity of tens of millions of people, the formation of a big home market and the birth of a modern working class a backward step. Worse comes. England, Wales and Scotland are the real nations “struggling to breathe, struggling for air, struggling to get out in the open”. And the comrade expresses hurt surprise when I warn him about straying into nationalism!

These intellectual contortions are entirely due to comrade Craig’s check list approach and derive from his arse-about-face logic. He rightly rejects the mathematical majority of Britain and stands by the right of the “scabs” in Scotland and Wales to self-determination. Ipso facto Scotland and Wales, for comrade Craig, must be full nations because only full nations can have such a democratic right. His proof that Scotland is a full nation? Firstly, what people in Scotland think. Second, a Lenin quote from Engels. Engels, you see, once spoke about four nations in the British Isles.

We can start by dismissing Engels’ use of the word ‘nation’. Before the 20th century the word carried much wider, looser connotations than today. Engels might just have easily spoken of four races in the British Isles.

That the British Isles in Engels’ time was the common territory of the United Kingdom state I cannot deny. Nor do I deny that it originated with the dynastic-state merger-takeover of three kingdoms and one principality. However, with the advent of universal education in Victorian times a “so-called” four nations history became the standard paradigm in schools, which was projected retrospectively into the ancient past. Here, it must be stressed, we have not real history, but “a means of inculcating the virtues of patriotism” (H Kearney The British Isles Cambridge 1995, p2). That is why I have suggested that the origins of modern-day England, Scotland and Wales are in the 19th century ideological imagination.

As to Lenin, he used the terms ‘England’ and ‘Britain’ interchangeably. The thing to lay hold of in the writings of both Engels and Lenin is their principled stand alongside the oppressed Irish and their demand for Irish self-determination. This was solidly based on consistent democracy, not quality control (full nationhood has always been a nationalist aspiration). Engels and Lenin, like Marx, were primarily concerned here with politics. As praxis the national question belongs not to economics, linguistics or history, but - as Lenin puts it - “wholly and exclusively” to the sphere of political democracy (VI Lenin CW Vol 22, Moscow 1977, p145). To achieve and build socialism the working class must seek the revolutionary unity of all nations and peoples - such unity can only but be voluntary.

According to this aim and these means Marxists derive and take their stand on self-determination. Communists do not invent or exacerbate national or ethnic antagonisms. We have no time for anarcho-bureaucrats who chatter on about self-determination for Cornwall, Yorkshire or Moss Side. Our aim is to positively overcome living national and national-ethnic conflicts according to the principles of consistent democracy. We want peace between nations so as to bring forward and heighten the class war. For us therefore the key practical task is not inventing an a priori check list of who has and who has not the right to self-determination. Where national antagonisms and national movements concretely exist we must bring forth definite political solutions. That is why the CPGB is for an England, Scotland, Wales federal republic. The existence of real popular resentments in Scotland and Wales decides our programme, not a check list, no matter how rigorous, as to whether or not Scotland or Wales are full nations.

Hence I am the last to deny the importance of what people think. As shown above, the British-Irish neither act nor imagine themselves as Irish. Of course, identity is never singular. Scottish people might today primarily define themselves as Scottish. Secondarily, many have a British or more local identity. A hundred years ago middle class and university-educated Scots prided themselves as being north British. So what? For us, however, it is the existence and growth of a national movement - which is, according to all surveys, much broader than those who vote SNP - that demands answers. Communists are for renewing the unity of the people and the working class in Britain at a higher level. This will be achieved under the banner of democracy and a federal republic - through which we will open up the road to socialism.

In previous articles I have shown that the Bolsheviks fought for and after the October Revolution granted self-determination to all manner of peoples, some of which might at a stretch have qualified as full nations: eg, Poland and Finland. Yet there were others, who by whatever serious objective criteria one chooses, fell well short: eg, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan and Tadzhikistan. Their economies were medieval, there was mass illiteracy and in general mainly clan and family identities. Needless to say, despite that, they all became constituent parts of the Soviet republic with the right to self-determination. We have also exhaustively brought forth evidence that the Bolsheviks had an exemplary attitude towards the Cossacks - a people-caste which formed the military backbone of tsarist and white counterrevolution. Their Soviet Republic on the Don voluntarily joined the federal republic centred on revolutionary Petrograd and Moscow in 1918.

As an aside I must answer Tom Delargy on the Cossacks. Why do I go on about them? They represent for me the Bolshevik programme tested to its limits. Here we have Bolshevik advocacy of the right of self-determination in extremis. The Cossacks were privileged Russian settlers on the frontiers of the tsarist empire. A military caste with a vile tradition of anti-semitic pogroms and general mayhem and slaughter. Daftly comrade Delargy accuses Jack Conrad of “insulting” the British-Irish because I draw a parallel between them and the Cossacks - the Cossacks, you see, were peasant-soldiers; the British-Irish are an “integral component” of the Irish working class. Interestingly, Engels writes of the British-Irish as “Scotch protestant military colonists” (F Engels Ireland and the Irish question Moscow 1978, p443). But this is not the thrust of my argument. Comrade Delargy is not only wrong to imply that the British-Irish are exclusively working class: he is, poor man, unable to grasp my observation that as a people they and the Cossacks were both oppressed-oppressors.

What of comrade Delargy’s main charge that Jack Conrad “fails to understand” that for Lenin “the right of self-determination was all about supporting the struggle for freedom of oppressed nations” (Weekly Worker October 14)? Comrade Villa makes a similar claim. Again, we have a terrible misreading of Marxism as a whole and Lenin in particular. It leads our inconsistent democrats to completely undemocratic conclusions. Oppressor nations in their book are presumably without rights and are therefore to be subject to the most draconian measures. A case in point being the British-Irish who, having been designated as pro-imperialist, or pro-oppressor, are to be forced into a united Ireland.

True, in the writings of Lenin (and his commissar for nationalities - Stalin-Djugashvili) there are constant and countless references to the necessity of the working class defending the right of oppressed nations to self-determination. In a world divided by the great European empires the overwhelming majority of humanity was nationally oppressed. The Bolsheviks, along with the 2nd International, advocated self-determination as a general principle (not as a panacea). But that did not mean that they sought the national oppression of the Great Russian, French, British and German nations. It should hardly need saying, but these oppressor nations had no problem with self-determination. For the benefit of our inconsistent democrats, let me explain in one short sentence the content of self-determination for oppressed nations. It is a demand for the formal equality of nations. Here is an example. In March 1914 the Bolshevik’s duma faction introduced the ‘national equality bill’ in order to highlight the oppression of non-Russians, above all the Jews. Its first clause reads: “All nationalities inhabiting Russia are equal before the law” (VI Lenin CW Vol 20, Moscow 1977, p173). So the goal of communists is not some perverse denial of rights or a reversal of the poles of oppression.

Did Lenin oppose self-determination for the British-Irish? Comrade Delargy tell us he most emphatically did. Triumphantly he produces a quote from March 1914. Lenin is cited in quite a long passage as rubbishing the protestant “rebellion” in Ulster against Irish home rule legislation that the Liberal government had tabled against stiff Conservative opposition. He mocks them as “black hundreds” and a “handful of hooligans”. These Ulsterites - Lenin calls them “English-born Protestants” as distinct from the “Catholic Irish” - raised a hue and cry against being ruled by an “alien creed”. But Lenin is of the opinion that their armed rebellion would “melt away” and “disappear” if the Liberals “appealed to the people of Britain, to the proletariat” (VI Lenin CW Vol 20, Moscow 1977, p150).

If I were a biblical Leninist I would be deeply embarrassed. Thankfully I do not believe that every word of Lenin is gospel truth. My Leninism is rooted in the most advanced theory and experience of the Russia Revolution, something I seek to generalise by an active and constant process of criticism. For example, Lenin opposed federalism for a revolutionary Russia even during World War I. In 1917 he became a convert. I am not paralysed by Lenin’s writings condemning federal constitutional arrangements as being unnecessary or retrogressive. Instead, I think.

In all honesty in comrade Delargy’s quote Lenin reveals a rather startling ignorance of Ireland for someone who spent periods of exile in London. Gaffs about the “English-born” Protestants and Carson’s huge militia being nothing but a “handful of hooligans” are easy to mock. However, let us not throw out the baby with the bathwater. Lenin’s article contains a passage which comrade Delargy did not notice or decided to omit. It is rather inconvenient for his case. The Liberal’s home rule legislation provided for an Irish parliament. Lenin notes that its powers would be “determined by British law”. There was then no danger of such a sop parliament “oppressing” the British-Irish (ibid). The objections of Carson and co were entirely spurious.

Lastly, this bring me to comrade Delargy’s worst and weakest argument. He says that because Jack Conrad advocates the voluntary, as opposed to the forced, unity of the peoples of Ireland - he has only just discovered it - I “align” myself with Ian Paisley and David Trimble. British-Irish self-determination is equivalent to what is today called the ‘protestant veto’. More than that, comrade Delargy rhetorically tells me that I should in “retrospect” recognise as “legitimate freedom fighters” organisations like the UDA, etc, which have in the “past taken up arms in order to prevent the creation of a united Ireland” (Weekly Worker October 14).

Comrade Delargy appears to know precious little about history. Sir Edward Carson and his Ulster Volunteer Force did not take up arms to prevent a united Ireland. Carson sought to maintain a united Ireland under the protestant ascendancy … through the continuation of British rule. The comrade confuses form and content. Carson’s Ulster Unionist Party - without Carson himself - agreed with the British government to dissect Ireland in 1920. But not according to the principle of British-Irish self-determination. On the contrary, they maximised the territory around the British-Irish Belfast-Antrim-north Down heartland. In so doing some 500,000 Catholic-Irish people were permanently imprisoned as an oppressed national minority within the Six Counties. That gerrymandered oppression is what loyalist and unionist parties and armed gangs have fought to perpetuate and reinforce ever since: ie, the right to oppress the Catholic-Irish minority. None of them actually stand for British-Irish self-determination. That is the real content of loyalism-unionism, not comrade Delargy’s fantasy world, where UDA thugs are fighting for my programme.

Unbelievably comrade Delargy finally asks whether or not Jack Conrad’s support for British-Irish self-determination is “unconditional”. If the comrade actually took the trouble to read and digest the 20 theses, he would have his answer. No, my support for British-Irish self-determination is premised on two conditions.

One:

“There can be no right of present-day Northern Ireland to self-determination ... We do not, and cannot, support the right of the British-Irish majority in the north to oppress the Catholic-nationalist minority” (thesis 7).

Two:

“The CPGB is for the immediate abolition of the United Kingdom ... We are for the immediate - ie, unconditional - withdrawal of the British state and British troops from Northern Ireland ... and a united Ireland” (thesis 10).

Put another way, the CPGB supports British-Irish self-determination in terms of agitation after the withdrawal of Britain and the abolition of the Northern Ireland statelet. Yes, a united Ireland must be brought about voluntarily, something facilitated, but nothing more, by the democratic offer of a one- county, four-half-county British-Irish province.