11.11.1999

Armstrong’s weak polemics

Jack Conrad discusses the CPGB’s stance on the British-Irish in the light of history

Our position on Ireland and the British-Irish is now well known and can be summed up in terms of three basic and easily understood demands. Demand one: the Communist Party of Great Britain fights for the immediate abolition of Northern Ireland and the withdrawal of all British forces. Demand two: we support a united Ireland. Demand three: within a united Ireland there should be a transitional federal arrangement whereby a British-Irish province in north-east Ulster exercises self-determination. These are the politics of Marxism and Leninism as applied to the Irish question.

Within our small but steadily widening circle there is no disagreement about demands one and two. Yet though demand three is equally straightforward and flows from the elementary principles of consistent democracy that inform demands one and two, we have been subject to all manner of unwarranted attacks and unfounded accusations.

Simply by spelling out the historically constituted existence of the British-Irish and advocating their democratic rights in a united Ireland the CPGB - and Jack Conrad - has found itself charged with effectively favouring the repartition of a metaphysical Ireland, siding with imperialism against the oppressed and being pro-Paisley and pro-UDA.

Such nonsense has been comprehensively answered. To the unjaundiced reader we have proved in a series of articles that none of the above charges hold water. Not that everyone is convinced.

Sometimes, especially in this debate on the British-Irish, I feel I am engaged in a labour of Sisyphus. Debating with friends like Tom Delargy, Steve Riley, Dave Craig, John Stone, José Villa and, last and by no means least, my own fellow CPGB members in our minority is like trying to nail down jelly. In defence of fossilised, not to say sacred, assumptions they steadfastly refuse to listen to, or even mentally register, the most reasoned arguments, statements of elementary facts, let alone replies.

What divides us? I believe it has nothing to do with the CPGB retreating before the tide of Blairism or worries about appeasing the camp of reaction. What divides us is the consistent application of democratic principles.

The CPGB majorityists - by an overwhelming margin - seek a working class solution in Ireland. Unity of the working class is infinitely more important than the territorial unity of the island of Ireland - ie, a mere geography. We communists do not start with the bleached abstraction of a single and, to all intents and purposes, unproblematic Irish nation. On the contrary the palpable existence of deep historical ethno-religious antagonisms must be overcome positively, by the dichotomised peoples themselves, above all the self-activating working class. A goal which necessitates an emphasis on voluntary union and is inextricably linked to the communist project of human self-liberation.

In terms of Weekly Worker contributors, this approach has been supported by Jack Conrad, Mark Fischer and Ian Donovan. In September the Provisional Central Committee of the CPGB voted for the 20 theses on ‘Ireland and the British-Irish’. Afterwards, in the following month, we secured a whopping majority for them at the CPGB’s membership aggregate.

Our opponents are in the main inconsistent revolutionary democrats (in certain cases revolutionary non-democrats). These comrades advocate, or are quite prepared to countenance, the forcible unity of Ireland’s people. Because the British-Irish are either nothing but a mere “religious faction” or fall short of full nationhood, this supposedly inherently sectarian and reactionary community cannot be allowed to exercise self-determination. Such arguments have been presented by Steve Riley, Dave Craig, Gerry Downing, Tom Delargy, José Villa, John Stone and now alas Allan Armstrong - the comrade is a well known member of the Scottish Socialist Party and the Republican Communist Network.

Much of the dispute that has raged in the pages of the Weekly Worker for the last three months inevitably centres on the exact nature of the British-Irish. Comrade Armstrong’s contribution is no exception (‘Confused and inconsistent democracy’ Weekly Worker October 28). According to our friend, Jack Conrad gets the British-Irish wrong in terms of history. He also contends that the Northern Ireland Protestants have an altogether different identity. Nowadays they are not British-Irish, but Ulster-British.

Frankly, most of his facts are to my knowledge beyond dispute. At the same time they are either fielded somewhat dishonestly - that is, for the purposes of obfuscation, not clarity - or they are entirely secondary. Put another way, in spite of comrade Armstrong’s intentions they do nothing whatsoever to disprove my historical thesis or counter my political conclusions.

Instead of repeating once more the whole argument let us discuss what is more or less original in comrade Armstrong’s contribution and answer him in the form of a conversation. That way we can test our case and see if it can counter his best criticisms. I will quote comrade Armstrong’s actual words as liberally as space allows and do my utmost to avoid putting stupid formulations into his mouth.

Allan Armstrong: Those in Ulster who “came from Scotland” were not exclusively English-speaking. Nor were they exclusively protestant. The Macdonnels from Scotland’s western islands and Kintyre “had long been settled in Antrim”. Along with the native Gaelic-Irish these settlers “had eliminated Norman lordly and later English kingly control in this area”. They did not think of themselves as British; nor did they even think of themselves as “Scottish”, seeing “no contradiction in having a continuous Gaelic-speaking realm stretching across the North Channel”.

Jack Conrad: Allan, this is pure sophistry. No one in the CPGB has claimed that all settlers in Ulster originating from Scotland were English-speakers or Protestants.

From prehistoric times there has been a constant population exchange back and forth between what we now call north-eastern Ireland and Scotland. The historian Michael Lynch writes – uncontroversially - on the subject: “The sea, always in early history a conduit for mutual contact and influence rather than a barrier, is as likely to have linked the different Pictish peoples of Caledonia with Ireland” (M Lynch Scotland London 1992, p8). Indeed the ancient ‘Picts’ of Scotland were part of a culture united by the Irish Sea. Pictish nobles ruled northerly parts of Ireland till at least the 8th century. On the other hand the very name ‘Scotland’, as every school student knows, has Irish antecedents. The Scoti were an Irish ‘tribe’ - more likely a warrior elite - which successfully ventured into ‘Scotland’ and eventually gave it their moniker.

What about your Macdonnels? You admit that their folk movement from one side of the Irish Sea to the other predated the plantations. For the Tudor and Stewart monarchies they were part of the problem, not part of the solution. Such lawless types helped make Ulster one of “the most rebellious parts of Ireland” (‘Ireland and the British-Irish’, thesis 2). So I have not the least problem with the Macdonnels being Gaelic and not even Scottish in terms of ethnic-national consciousness. It is a mildly interesting fact. It adds another historical detail to the overall picture I have painted. Nothing more.

Allan Armstrong: The early 17th century settlers planted in Ulster from Scotland were a “mixture” of people. Not only were there English-speaking Presbyterians. Some spoke Gaelic and there were even a smattering of Catholics. Settlers - from Scotland and England - also “intermixed” with the native Irish. Moreover, there were native Irish “conversions” to protestant-ism, especially the established Church of Ireland, and intermarriage. The “lines” between the “protestant-British-Irish minority” and the “catholic Irish” “are not so hard and fast” as Jack Conrad suggests. There has been “plenty of change-over in identity”, not just “the stable ‘British-Irish’ community” you claim.

Jack Conrad: Again, Allan, I have no difficulty with what you say in terms of historical facts. Writing of the British-Irish as a stable community in no way negates fluidity or fuzziness. I have never written of the “lines” between the catholic-Irish and British-Irish being “hard and fast”. Let me explore the theme using the example of Afrikaners - who, I am sure you would agree, in relative terms, have “hard and fast” lines of language, skin colour, religion and culture which separate them from other South Africans.

As evidenced by the so-called ‘coloured’ community, the kleurlinge, there has been considerable intermixing between the ‘races’, not least extra-marital sex (often rape). The early Calvinist Dutch masters thereby crossed the ‘line’ between them and their imported slaves and the Nama natives and sired a new people. The Afrikaner population also mixed with the later British (and Irish, Jewish, etc) migrants, albeit on more equal terms. That said, such intermixing does not negate the historically established existence of an Afrikaner-speaking white population, which originated with the Dutch settlers some 300 years ago.

The British-Irish, as with any people, have to be grasped as a collectivity in movement in relationship to other peoples, above all the catholic-Irish. Again, let me remind you, I have never claimed fixed or uncrossable lines, only a stable, historically established community. Northern Ireland has parallels with apartheid. From birth to death human beings are classified - officially or unofficially - as possessing or not possessing certain rights. Yet, no matter how entrenched religious sectarianism may be, there is the possibility for some of altering, blurring or swapping of one’s identity.

At the edge of virtually every ethnic group there are examples of individuals gaining entry or whole groups converging, including full merger, as well as divergence and departure. Migrants to Britain sooner or later leave behind their specific origins and become British (thereby changing Britain). Eg, the sons and daughters of Caribbean migrants from the 1950s and 60s often nowadays ethnically describe themselves as black-British. The same goes for the Asian-British.

Allan Armstrong: “The majority” of the ‘British-Irish’ “did form a distinct, but largely Scotch-Irish presbyterian culture, which was often in opposition to the union state, and in particular to the established (Anglican) Church of Ireland.”

“The ‘British-Irish’ identity really emerged in opposition to the challenge of the United Irishmen and to the united nation (people) of Ireland.” The height of this identity was in the 19th century and was not “synonymous with Protestantism”, but “enjoyed catholic Irish support”. Some Protestants supported home rule.

However, the British-Irish identity is now a thing of the past. “Increasingly” it is “a figment” of Jack Conrad’s imagination. Here, proving my point, are some survey figures and trends. “By 1968, only 20% of Northern Ireland protestants considered themselves Irish, with eight percent opting for British-Irish or Anglo-Irish identities. Instead 32% thought of themselves as having an Ulster identity.” By 1990 Protestants who considered themselves Irish or British-Irish had declined to seven percent. In contrast 26% thought of themselves as Northern Irish while “those claiming British identity rose from 39% in 1968 to a high of 77% in 1984”.

Jack Conrad: I will ignore the slip in your 1968 figures. Here, Allan, we have the crux of our disagreement on British-Irish identity. We differ not only over semantics, but methodological approach. Firstly, in my opinion British-Irish identity is historically established, is undergoing constant change and exists today. Secondly, identity is multiple and never singular, as you naively appear to believe.

The very fact that you can, and in all seriousness must, discuss the protestants of north-eastern Ulster in terms of a “distinct” continuum as a commonality from the early 17th century to the 1990s is surely enough for any intelligent person to confirm that they constitute an historically established community. Of course, in terms of the degree of antagonism between this minority and the catholic-Irish majority, and what attitude the British-Irish took to the British state and Britishness, there has been a constant rearticulation. Something repeatedly stressed by me.

Nations and nationalities are not static, purely qualitative phenomena. The world is not neatly divided into nations and non-nations, nationalities and non-nationalities. While there is undoubtedly a qualitative side, there is a constant socio-political, quantitative dynamic of being and becoming which produces countless black to white gradations of grey. In other words, national identity is a phenomenon which defies the common-sense approach of turning to an atlas or standard history text and putting an equals sign between every country, state or kingdom and the category of nation.

That in the mid-19th century “some” catholic-Irish - no doubt in the main commercial capitalists, shopkeepers and minor state officials - thought of themselves as west British does not detract from my thesis. Nor does the fact that, from the 1890s to the 1920s, a layer of southern protestant intellectuals - eg, WB Yeats, Douglas Hyde, Ernest Blythe, Belmer Hobson, Countess Markievicz and Maude Gonne - sided with the nationalist cause.

Of course, the protestant community in north-eastern Ulster has defined itself differently over the course of the centuries. What was in terms of identity ideologically imagined as primary becomes secondary and vice versa. Use of the generic term ‘British-Irish’ allows me to discuss the sectarian divide that has existed in Ireland since the early 1600s. A phenomenon undergoing constant rearticulation, but one with a definite history. To deny change would be to fall into error. Likewise denying continuity is to make exactly the same mistake, only for different reasons.

The term ‘British-Irish’ encompasses the Presbyterian identity of the first plantations. My argument, with which you seem to concur, but whose veracity you refuse to admit for the sake of pig-headed polemic, is that the “settlers quickly diverged” from their Scottish and English origins and formed “another” identity. Was this identity simply Irish? No, it was a hybrid Irish identity, ethnically opposed to the other, catholic-Irish, identify. The British-Irish were, yes, also alienated from the Anglican ascendancy. Again, I have referred on many occasions to the antagonism that existed between the Presbyterian ‘strong farmers’ in Ulster and the established Church of Ireland. As a generic term ‘British-Irish’ is not contradicted by the exclusion and then the incorporation of the Presbyterians into what was the Anglican ascendancy.

Nor am I foxed by the medley of replies given by Protestants in Northern Ireland when it comes to primary identity as recorded in the neat boxes of opinion polls. ‘Ulster-Scots’, ‘Scots-Irish’, ‘Ulster’, ‘Ulster-British’, ‘British’, ‘Anglo-Irish’ or ‘Northern Irish’ are simply different manifestations of a common identity which, for the want of anything better, I call British-Irish.

Identity is many-layered like a Russian doll. Be that as it may, due to their similar conditions of existence in north-eastern Ulster the British-Irish have over the 400 years of their existence as a “stable community” developed customs, an outlook and character peculiar to themselves and formed a commonality now completely at odds with the catholic-Irish who inhabit the same state territory.

Allan Armstrong: You give the “catholic-Irish” a religious label. This suggests that the British-Irish “have risen above sectarianism” and slides very close to the “warring tribes” approach peddled by Peter Taaffe’s Militant/Socialist Party.

Jack Conrad: Allan, this really is scraping the bottom of your polemical barrel. Who ignores the presence of the British state? Stop playing games. As you are well aware, the CPGB has a proud record of campaigning - on the streets, in propaganda, in elections - for the immediate withdrawal of all British forces. Why do I use this generic term ‘catholic-Irish’? The answer has nothing to do with any failure to recognise that modern Ireland contains Jews, atheists, Muslims, etc, besides Catholics. Nor is it a devious way to flatter the British-Irish (or, if you really want, Ulster-protestants). The answer is rooted in history and how Irish national identity was forged.

The Tudor, Stewart and Cromwell-ian 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.

As a consequence the Irish national question and British domination both assumed the outer form of religion. What appears to saloon bar bigots and Peter Taaffe’s CWI alike as a primitive or irrational conflict between religions is in essence a national antagonism involving real material sectional and class interests (just like the religious wars of the 15th-17th centuries).

Allan Armstrong: Jack, you deny “the existence of any manifestations of nations or nationality at such an early period as the early 17th century - well, except when it suits”. My old RDG comrade Dave Craig is chided for having the “temerity to suggest that there may be such things as ‘English, Scottish, Welsh and Irish nations’”. To you these are nothing other than “crude Victorian inventions, designed to mystify the past and divide the working class”. Yet fully two centuries before, you have the presumably ‘non-national’ Scottish and English settlers ‘quickly stop[ping] being Scottish or English’, as they formed another - Irish [national] identity”.

In my view Britain has a common ruling class. However, there is no British nation. What exists in the British Isles are English, Scottish, Welsh and Irish nations: ie, four different cultures with a common territory. Nations and nationalities “arose alongside each other”. The long established national identities came to the surface with the advent of mass suffrage in the second half of the 19th century.

Jack Conrad: Allan, it is your unwillingness to really think, that results in the muddle you attribute to me. Let us start with nations and nationality. Suffice to say, I disagree with your virtual equation of the two categories. Far from arising “alongside each other”, nationality considerably predates the emergence of nation. I have described the Homeric Greeks as a “proto-nationality”. Divided though they were into many states, and as Aeolians, Ionians and Dorians, the Greeks shared cultural attributes, including a basically common language. Separate dialects were not entirely broken down by the invention of a written language.

The Greek mainland has very poor agricultural and mineral potential. Trade and war are the ancient alternatives to poverty. From about the middle of the 8th century BC Greek colonists began to fan out and establish cities and trading outposts over the Mediterranean and Black Sea coastal regions. Syracuse in Sicily, Marssila on the mouth of the Rhone, Saguntum in Spain, Heraclea in the Crimea, Ephesus in Asia Minor and specially allocated quarters in pharonic lower Egypt. In the wake of the epic conquests of Alexander in the 4th century, Greek civilisation spread throughout the Middle East all the way to the borders of modern India.

The Greeks outside Greece continued to be Greek in custom, language and religion. “Men away from home” is how they called themselves. Hellenism survived as the dominant culture of high society in the eastern Mediterranean till the Arab-Muslim expansion of the 8th and 9th centuries and the final snuffing out of the Eastern Roman empire by the invading Turks in 1453. The Greeks of Athens, Constantinople, Alexandra, Pergamum and Antioch spoke a common language, but did not inhabit a common territory. Nor were they held together by a common economy.

Broadly, a similar observation can be made about the ancient Jews. They were a nationality, not a nation. The nomadic proto-Jews - one of the 11 tribes of Israel - settled themselves in Judea and stepped forth as an historical people in the 5th century BC after the return of the elite from their Babylonian exile. However, like their hated rivals, the Greeks, Jewish commercial colonists established themselves throughout the Mediterranean and Middle Eastern world (Jewish settlements were found as far afield as India). Alexandria became as much a Jewish as a Greek city. At the time of Jesus there were as many Jews living outside Palestine as inside. Palestine too was a poor country.

Aramaic - a Syric language - was adopted by Jews in Palestine during classic times. Hebrew was maintained for sacred purposes. Elsewhere Hebrew was likewise relegated while a wide variety of lingua francas were adopted. Despite that the sense of Jewishness remained strong. Merchants are typically the most internationalist and national of the classes in the ancient world. What linked Jewry, what made it a nationality, was a common culture based on a freemasonry of trade, a sacred language and the cult of Jehovah.

Karl Kautsky makes a telling point, one that is highly relevant to our present debate. After all many of our critics still stubbornly insist that the British-Irish cannot have any national characteristics, because they are a mere “religious faction”. For the ancient Jews, says Kautsky, religion and nationality were “equivalent” (K Kautsky Foundations of christianity New York 1972, p248). Religious practices and taboos and frequent pilgrimages to Jerusalem for major festivals kept them as a commonality.

What of Scotland and Wales? Scotland was founded as some sort of a united kingdom in the 11th century. Till it was conquered in its entirety by the English crown in high feudal times Wales never possessed any sustained political unity as Wales. However, the moot point is that neither in Scotland nor Wales do we see a single nationality: ie, a historically constituted people with a common culture and common language.

Scotland had a long-standing Norse cultural presence, especially in the isles. Shetland was incorporated into the Scottish kingdom only in 1468. To this day many Shetlanders do not consider themselves Scottish. That aside, the kingdom had in its development a widening and far more fundamental cultural-linguistic fault line. In the lowlands, Scots or Lallans - a dialect of English - dominated. By the end of the 7th century Saxon warrior-colonists controlled areas as far north as the Forth, and they brought with them their language. British and Saxon petty kingdoms overlayed and stood on both sides of the present border.

The highlands are a contrast. Here was a slowly retreating Gaelic culture and language that still survives in pockets today. Lowlands Scots typically viewed the highlanders as uncouth barbarians and thieving savages. That is, until their final defeat at Culloden in 1746. After which it became eminently safe for the genteel folk of Edinburgh to romantically ape highland ways - the kilt, tartan and whisky were reinvented and commodified.

Wales too has had a deep north-south, English-Welsh cleavage. However, Wales was historically far more ‘Celtic’ than Scotland. Even in the 1880s three out of four still preferred to speak Welsh. English amongst the lower orders was at that time largely confined to Radnor, Monmouthshire, Glamorgan and parts of Pembroke. Either way, such elementary divisions make it impossible to - rationally - talk of a single Scottish or Welsh nationality or nation.

Nations are modern, not ancient. Nations arise not alongside nationality, but the creation of a home market associated with the coming of capitalist social relations. A common economy sweeps aside local exclusiveness and dialects and brings into existence what Otto Bauer called a “community of destiny” (O Bauer ‘The nation’, G Balakrishnan (ed) Mapping the nation London 1996, p51).

My argument is that this occurred from the 16th century onwards and that the first capitalist country, England, also had a Scottish and Welsh dimension - by 1700 England accounts for over 50% of exports from Scotland. In other words though capitalism begins as English “agrarian capitalism” - with a landlord, tenant and labourer triad - it matured as British industrial capitalism (E Meiksins Wood The origin of capitalism New York 1999, p93).

The accession in 1603 of James XI to the English throne as James I and the later merger of the English and Scottish parliaments in 1707 thereby proved not to be a fleeting union - such as those with Spain under Mary Tudor, the Netherlands under William and Mary, and Hanover under George I, II, etc. The British nation was defined by its common language (English), a common territory, culture (Protestantism) and economy.

Why do I trace our modern England, Scotland and Wales to Victorian times? There was, of course, as every standard history book tells us, a kingdom of England going back to Saxon times. The reality was, however, of high Wessex kings ruling over smaller kingdoms: Mercia, East Anglia, Kent, Essex, Northumbria, etc. The 11th century ‘English’ king Canute, or Cnut, was Scandinavian and also king of Denmark and overlord of Norway. The English emerged negatively as a rather vague, servile and highly fragmented proto-nationality under the brutal heel of Norman - French-speaking viking - conquistadors. Even in the early Middle Ages monarchs of England were not nationally English, but feudal lords with other kingdoms and fiefs.

Henry II held vast tracts of France. Normandy and Brittany from his mother. Anjou, Main and Tourane from his father. Aquitaine from his wife. He is thus better described - to evoke the spirit of the age - as Henri II. Often he spent the good part of the year in France. The same goes for Scotland and its Robert VIII de Bruce. Here was a feudal aristocrat, not a nationalist patriot. I am not surprised therefore to read that at the time of the act of union Englishness, Scottishness and Welshness were altogether uncertain notions, undercut by “strong regional attachments” and all manner of “loyalties to village, town, family and landscape” (L Colley Britons London 1992, p17).

What the majority of the people who inhabited the United Kingdom of England, Scotland and Wales had in common was Protestantism and, from the act of union in 1707 to the Battle of Waterloo in 1815, a common enemy in the shape of France - catholic and then revolutionary. Linda Colley writes of the “absolute centrality of protestant-ism”. Whilst readily admitting the conflicts and tensions between Anglicans and non-conformists in England and Wales, and Episcopalians and Presbyterians in Scotland (not forgetting Baptists, Quakers, Congregationalists, Methodists and so on), she is insistent that they should “not obscure what was still the most striking feature in the religious landscape, the gulf between protestant and catholic” (ibid pp18,19).

Till 1829 no Catholic was allowed to vote and they were excluded from both houses of parliament and all state offices. There were also prohibitions barring them from carrying arms. In effect Catholics were treated as aliens and potential traitors. Britain was never a confessional state. Nevertheless fear and loathing of Catholics cemented the majority in England, Scotland and Wales into a commonality that can usefully be labelled British. “Protestantism,” states a perceptive Colley, “was the foundation that made the invention of Great Britain possible” (ibid p54).

With the advent of mass education, and, yes, the beginnings of universal suffrage, in the late 19th century, the paradigm of Britishness was gradually shifted from Protestantism to a national version of history which was projected back into the mists of the past by paid persuaders.

Allan, you put this shift down to a grudging recognition of the prior existence of antedeluvian nationalities and nations. My view does not preclude various heraldic or pre-modern English, Scottish and Welsh modes of consciousness, nor a host of competing regional or local sub-cultures. However, it is obvious that our modern idea of these ‘nations’ with their ‘national’ kings and queens and associated myths and legends is in the main the product of Victorian historians and served to incorporate the newly enfranchised low church chaple and catholic (adult male) congregation.

National history was sponsored from above and taught in elementary schools “as a means of inculcating the virtue of patriotism” (H Kerney The British Isles Cambridge 1995, p2). Libraries and bookshops now automatically put histories into ‘English’, ‘Scottish’ and ‘Welsh’ pigeon holes - a reflection of present-day common sense. As was the classification of learned works on history in mediaeval monasteries into the lives of the saints and the genealogy of the noble families. In our day national history is axiomatic. Henri II thereby fights the ‘French’. Robert de Bruce beats the ‘English’.

Such history was in general unproblematic in the late 19th century and for three-quarters of the 20th century. There was no national movement in Scotland or Wales worth the name (unlike Ireland). Despite the myriad battles and dynastic conflicts of yore official history saved itself by being teleological. It inevitably arrives in due course at the glories of empire, the white colonies and the mutual rule and exploitation of countless inferior peoples in India and Africa by the English, Scots and Welsh. It is only with the end of empire and the unmistakable political and economic decline of Britain that this national history has switched from being a brilliant means of patriotic enchantment to something problematic for our rulers.

The rise of national movements in Scotland and Wales, not ancient nations, is what causes the CPGB to call for Scottish and Welsh self-determination and a federal republic We communists are for renewing the unity of the people and the working class in Britain at a higher level through democracy and a federal solution which overthrows the monarchy system and opens the road to socialism.

Allan Armstrong: The “Ulster British” are not a “distinct nation”. Rather they are “an ethno-religious group”, a particular form of “nationality” that applies to groups of people, “not territories”. Therefore the “Ulster British” should have minority rights as a nationality, not the national right to self-determination. They are in this way similar to the Jews in tsarist Russia and Poland. Yet Jews in Poland “could claim territorial majorities” in several parts of Poland. As a persecuted people these Jews “had a far better claim” than your “British-Irish” to self-determination.

Jack Conrad: Until the 17th century the Jews were scattered throughout Poland in shtetls: ie, exclusively Jewish town or mini-cities. These settlements were self-administering and under royal protection. The Jews constituted a people-religion fully integrated as an estate in the Polish social formation. They worked as artisans and acted as tax collectors operating as intermediaries between the serfs on the one hand and the aristocracy and monarchy on the other.

Though they were concentrated in their shtetls, there was a Jewish zone which formed something like a continuous territory. Some authorities calculate that here they constituted “70% of the population” (I Halevi A history of the Jews London 1987, p108). However the old order in Poland crumbled with the dissection of the country by Prussia, Austria-Hungary and Russia (which got the lion’s share). Poland was moreover economically the most advanced part of the tsarist empire and the Jews - previously an estate - were amongst the first to be affected by the rise of capitalist social relations.

Jews became urbanised capitalists and proletarians. This class contradiction gave birth to the Bund, a trade union organisation of Jewish wage workers who faced Jewish bosses. The Bund went on to transform itself into a political party - with branches in other parts of the tsarist empire. It programmatically advocated cultural-national autonomy for the Jews. An incorrect formulation that does, nevertheless, reflect the transformation of Jewish life. Not least the fact that they no longer formed a majority in any significant territory.

How about the British-Irish? By the end of the 19th century there were some 900,000 Protestants in Ulster, “of whom 670,000 lived in Belfast and its hinterland”. Within a “65-mile radius of Belfast” the British-Irish constituted “75% of the population” (H Kearney The British Isles Cambridge 1995, p212). Surely a territory by any reasonable reckoning.

And today? There is a sizeable, 42%, catholic-Irish minority imprisoned within the Northern Ireland statelet who have a palpable cultural-political affinity with the south. But the British-Irish remain concentrated roughly in the same area as at the end of the last century. There is a one-county, four-half-counties area around Belfast containing a clear British-Irish majority. This forms a geographically coherent whole broadly comprising of country Antrim, north Tyrone, south Derry, north Armagh and north Down - as I have pointed out, some council districts have massive 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).

As an ethno-religious nationality with a common territory the British-Irish should be given the right of self-determination in a united Ireland. Those who deny British-Irish self-determination must, logically, stand for the involuntary unity of peoples. Such a stance, and if realised in practice, would reverses the poles of oppression, and is alien to the spirit of working class socialism and communism. It is, Allan, to fall into vicarious Irish nationalism and adopt the means of bureaucratic socialism.