20.01.2000

British-Irish debate summed up

Over the course of the last five months debate has raged to and fro in the Weekly Worker over the British-Irish question. I think we are now at the stage where it would be useful to sum up. Since we first published our theses on 'Ireland and the British-Irish' a wide variety of comrades have taken the opportunity to present their considered opinions (Weekly Worker August 26 1999). However, from the start two distinct camps were clearly visible. On the one side that of the consistent revolutionary democrats, which went on to win for itself a big majority of CPGB members. On the other side a veritable m"šlange, whom I am obliged to categorise as either inconsistent democrats or revolutionary non-democrats.

We consistent democrats have reaffirmed our determination to equip the working class with a fighting programme to achieve a united Ireland. Within that we argue for a British-Irish province - one county and four half-counties - which exercises self-determination. Advancing this demand serves to overcome the historic disunity of the working class in Ireland, and in the British Isles as a whole, and is based on the theory and best practice of Leninism. In other words our Ireland has nothing to do with realising the dreams of misty-eyed green nationalists. Irish unity is for us entirely subordinate to the worldwide struggle for communism, which in terms of means necessitates democracy and the voluntary, not forced, union of peoples. Choose different means and the ends become the opposite of what is subjectively intended.

What of our critics? Overwhelmingly these comrades are for a united Ireland too. Whether their Ireland can temporarily remain dominated by the capitalist mode of production, or whether unity can only be countenanced if it carries a 'socialist' or 'workers' state' guarantee is a moot point. Either way, British-Irish self-determination cannot be sanctioned. Hence in the name of the territorial unity of Ireland, or an abstract socialism, or both, the British-Irish would be frog-marched into a unitary state - perversely this is excused in the name of championing the rights of the oppressed.

The British-Irish are supposedly an inherently sectarian and pro-imperialist people or identity. According to this almost racist designation it follows for our critics that the British-Irish cannot be trusted with even the possibility of establishing their own independent state. To leave no chance whatsoever of any renewed oppression of the catholic-Irish the British-Irish are either to be totally denied any rights as a distinct people or at most they are to be granted local autonomy along the lines of a German Land or a US state. Naturally the proponents of involuntary union claim that this approach is the one that furthers the cause of socialism. 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 believe they have the full weight of Marxist orthodoxy behind them when they solemnly pronounce that self-determination only applies to full nations which are also oppressed by imperialism.

As shown by the contributors, this camp is extremely heterodox . Those arguing against consistent democracy in Ireland have included John Pearson (CPGB), Steve Riley (ex-CPGB), Delphi (SLP), Ruri McCallan (IRSP), Ivor Kenna (Stalin Society), Dave Norman (Stalinite), Bill Martin (SPGB), Dave Douglass (Class War), Alan Armstrong (left nationalist, left communist and SSP), Gerry Downing (freelance Trotskyite and Labour Party), Barry Biddulph (freelance Trotskyite), Jos"š Villa (ex-Workers Power), Tom Delargy ('state capitalist' and SSP), the Trotskyist Unity Group (Phils Sharpe and Walden) and Dave Craig (RDG).

In the course of our debate these comrades have between them fielded a whole army of misconceived, half-baked and, frankly, reactionary arguments in order to excuse their programme for the forcible incorporation into a united Ireland of an historically constituted people. But the long and short of it is that the British-Irish should humbly accept the will of the majority. If the British-Irish refuse to accept minority status, in the event of resistance, these "scabs" (comrade Craig's phrase) are not only to be forced in but if necessary kept in by coercion. Such is what passes for democracy in the anti camp.

Within the bosom of a united Ireland the British-Irish will discover themselves as true sons and daughters of Erin. In the meantime they can jointly determine the fate of the country through an enlarged Dáil. Of course, this line of reasoning echoes what Ulster Unionist prime ministers and British secretaries of state have been telling the catholic-Irish population in the Six Counties since 1920. Within Northern Ireland, or failing that the United Kingdom, the minority ought to respect the will of the majority as expressed in parliament. It is also what Margaret Thatcher, John Major and William Hague told the Scots and Welsh. Instead of calling for self-determination they should settle for common British rights under the monarchy and through representation in the House of Commons.

Our critics desperately try to evade the central point at issue. Namely that as a matter of principle the drawing of state boundaries must take full account of the sympathies of all those concerned. If we stand for the equality of nations and nationalities which have a clear geographical dimension, then, where antagonisms exist, there must also be a democratic constitution which enshrines the right to self-determination up to and including the right to secede. On such firm foundations a rapprochement can take place and divisions and mistrust be overcome.

To excuse their unwillingness to include the British-Irish within that category of peoples who, given their concrete circumstances, necessarily ought to have the constitutionally enshrined right to self-determination we have seen the anti camp try to conjure the British-Irish out of existence by linguistic trickery. If the issues before us were not so serious, such political voodoo could be dismissed as mere childishness.

They amount to the same thing, but any number of spells have been invented. Steve Riley pretends that the British-Irish are "not a distinct community", but a "religious faction" (Weekly Worker September 2 1999). Tom Delargy similarly would have it that the British-Irish "can only be clearly defined in religious terms" (Weekly Worker October 14 1999). Dave Craig adds a variation to the cack-handed sorcery: "The British-Irish are not a nation, but the Anglo-protestant part of the Irish nation" (Weekly Worker September 16 1999). For José Villa the British-Irish "are a privileged section of the Irish nation" (Weekly Worker September 30 1999). Perhaps most banally Alan Armstrong simply maintains that the British-Irish once existed but have become Ulster-British (Weekly Worker October 28 1999).

To begin with, no one in the anti camp expressed any objections to examining nations and national questions broadly under the headings systematically presented in Stalin's famous 1913 pamphlet Marxism and the national question. But, having seen where such an approach inexorably took us, a number of objections came forth. None serious.

Take comrade Downing. For him the fact that in later life Stalin expressed vile anti-semitic sentiments must invalidate his early work. He conveniently ignores other, more pertinent, facts. Eg, that Marxism and the national question comes highly recommended by, and was probably written under the close supervision of, Lenin, and that as a succinct textbook it educated a generation of proletarian revolutionaries.

Then there is comrade Villa. He disagrees with Stalin that nations are defined by a single common language. There "could be one or more languages", as for example in "Wales and Ireland", he writes (Weekly Worker September 30 1999). I objected and fielded a wide variety of Marxist authorities on the subject. In reply comrade Villa assures me that he finds his authority in Lenin. "It was Lenin," he breezily says, "who described Switzerland as an example of a multilingistic nation" (original emphasis Weekly Worker October 14 1999).

Unfortunately comrade Villa supplied no references and still refuses to do so. No matter. In terms of our overall 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 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 communication. 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 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 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. Other examples come to mind. South Africa, Canada, Belgium, Spain, Iraq, China, Indonesia, etc.

We have also been informed by comrade Armstrong, and trailing him comrade Craig, that Stalin is inadequate because he failed to take into account the vital role of democracy in forming and sustaining nations. By implication that would make all nations and nationalisms progressive. Evidently untrue. However, our duo's contention is woefully ahistorical. It completely overlooks the way autocratic state regimes cohered and coloured the archetypal nations of continental Europe. Eg, France. It was given form and substance just as much through the Bourbon dynasty and then the rule of Napoleon Bonaparte as it was by the brief flowering of democracy between the overthrow of divine right in 1789 and the onset of monocratic dictatorship in 1799. A similar observation can be made about Germany. There was the pale revolutionary democracy of 1848. But let us not forget the royal socialism of Bismarck, nor the national socialism of Hitler. That is why instead of equating nations with democracy we should instead stress the populist aspect; put another way, the necessity of a "common culture", as delineated by Stalin.

So I make no excuse for the continued use of Stalin's seminal pamphlet. Stalin, readers will recall, 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 five-fold definition must not be treated rigidly. Nevertheless it can be used to shine a light onto the British-Irish phenomenon in order to reveal its broad outlines. So let us once more discuss Stalin's five characteristics in respect to the British-Irish and see what conclusions follow.

It is correct to say, as comrade Villa's formulation implies, 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 British-Irish 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 "Anglo" formulation 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 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. As a consequence the Irish national question and British domination both took the outer form of religion which so frustrates and perplexes saloon bar experts and blinkered economists alike.

Taking into account the last 400 years, it is ridiculous to describe the British-Irish exclusively or mainly in denominational terms. One might just as well do the same with the catholic-Irish in Northern Ireland, and for that matter the catholic-Irish population of Eire.

There are, as I have pointed out, 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 and they use different alphabets. Yet, 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 by religion.

Those who duly 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. We must in other words go beyond the outer appearance of things. The same goes for muslim Bosniacs and orthodox Serbs. It would be pure muddle-headedness to dismiss Bosniacs as "not a nation" but the muslim "part" of the south Slav nation. It would be equally incorrect to insist that Serbs were no more than the "privileged section" of the south Slav nation.

Nations have to be grasped in their movement. They are not static, purely qualitative phenomena. The world is not neatly divided into nations and non-nations. 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, nations are complex phenomena which defy the common sense approach of turning to an atlas or official history text and equating every country, state or kingdom with a nation.

Nations, once they can be said to exist in history, are without exception always 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 dialectics can be 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 separation from Sweden in 1905). Religion can lose its power as a social agent and become a purely private matter, as for example in most of England and Wales, or it can be reinvented as a virulent national-ethnic medium for dividing people and simultaneously propagating new nation-states (eg, ex-Yugoslavia).

Anyway, as argued above, the British-Irish have constituted a "stable community" for some 400 years. Due to their similar conditions of existence in north-eastern Ulster the British-Irish have from generation to generation 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 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 first and foremost as Ulster-British, 15% as Northern Irish and only 3% as Irish. In contrast the figures for catholic-Irish are almost the same ... but reversed. Strangely, at least to my mind, 10% called themselves Ulster-British, 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 helped to shape Ireland for the last 400 years. Because it is distinct from, and counterposed to, the identity hardened under the weight of national oppression, mainstream Irish nationalism has experienced the greatest difficulty in coming to terms with the British-Irish.

Completely opposite assessments are held. On the one hand there are those who would exclude the British-Irish as an alien element. On the other hand, no matter how they think of themselves, the British-Irish are claimed, in the immortal words of the founding father of the Free State, Arthur Griffiths, as "perverted" Irish. In or out, the British-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 antis peddle the same approach. They too take as their principle starting point not class and class interests, but fixed and indivisible nations and national groups. Speaking like an engrained nationalist, comrade Craig declares: "The 'nation' is the sovereign political constituency in the modern world" (Weekly Worker September 19 1999). He is wrong. Communists work for highly centralised - ie, sovereign - democratic states which include within their borders any number of voluntarily merging and merged peoples.

What then of Stalin's point two, language? Obviously the British-Irish speak a common language. Of course, this is shared by the catholic-Irish (we need not quibble here with comrade Villa about Gaelic). Does a common language mean we therefore have a single and unproblematic nation? Again the south Slavs can be cited. The Croats share a common Serbo-Croat language with the Bosniacs and Serbs. Yet even under Tito with his drive for 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 divided into hostile and ethnically 'pure' states and in the case of Bosnia statelets.

We can easily cut the Gordian knot vis-à -vis language and the British-Irish. Unlike their Dutch, Afrikaner, German, Swiss, Norwegian, Danish and Swedish co-religionists - ie, fellow low church protestants - they, the British-Irish, have their own "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 Northern Ireland. 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. This forms a geographic whole broadly comprising of county Antrim, north Tyrone, south Derry, north Armagh and north Down - some council districts have massive 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 in terms of Stalin we come to the economy (point four). There are two factors that need highlighting. Firstly, and most importantly, north-eastern Ulster had an advanced capitalist economy throughout the 20th century. This fixes its proletarianised people into a single metabolism and leaves behind the isolation, parochialism and self-sufficiency that characterises traditional rural societies. 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 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 north-east 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 in the light of studying history, territory, language, culture and economy that Jack Conrad had concluded that the British-Irish cannot be characterised simply in terms of religion (an aspect of culture). They have enough commonality, objective and subjective, to lead me to characterise them a semi-nationality or a semi-nation. In terms of a nought to 100 scale of non-nation to full nationhood I have scored them at 75 for purposes of illustration.

Of course, as practice the national question belongs not to economics, linguistics, history, or naught to 100 scales, but - as Lenin rightly 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 be voluntary. According to this aim and these means Marxists derive and take their stand on self-determination.

That is why, unlike some of our more light-minded critics, we do not invent national or ethnic questions. We have no time for those who play with demands for Cornish, Moss Side and East German self-determination, or those who advocate not the overthrow of the UK state, but its weakening and the break-up of existing working class unity in the name of a romantic and completely abstract Scottish or Welsh workers' republic. Our aim is to positively overcome actual national-ethnic conflicts and antagonisms according to the principles of consistent democracy. We want peace between nations so as to bring forward and heighten the class struggle. So for us 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 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 scientific, as to whether or not Scotland or Wales are full nations.

Hence I am the last the deny the importance of what people think. Of course, identity is never singular. Scottish people today primarily define themselves as Scottish. Secondarily, many have a British identity. A hundred years ago many middle class and university-educated Scots thought in terms of being north British. What decides the matter for us is the existence and growth of a national movement which according to all surveys is much broader than simply those who vote SNP. We communists are for renewing the unity of the people and the working class in Britain at a higher level through consistent democracy.

In articles published in the Weekly Worker I have shown that the same spirit moved the Bolsheviks. They fought for, and after the October Revolution granted, self-determination to all manner of peoples, some of whom might at a stretch score as full nations: eg, Poland and Finland. Yet there were others, who, by whatever serious objective criteria one chooses, fell well short of full nationhood: eg, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan and Tadzhikistan. Their economies were mediaeval, there was mass illiteracy and in general mainly localised clan and family identities. Needless to say, despite that, they all became constituent parts of the Soviet republic with the right to self-determination. After the experience of tsarism there existed a deep-seated mistrust of the Russian state and Great Russians. Self-determination was the Bolshevik solution to bring about trust, reconciliation and eventual merger.

We have also exhaustively shown that the Bolsheviks took a consistently democratic approach to the Cossacks - a people which formed the military backbone of tsarism and white counterrevolution. Their Soviet Republic on the Don voluntarily joined the federal republic centred on revolutionary Petrograd and Moscow. As an aside I must answer comrades Villa, Downing, Armstrong, Delargy, etc, on the Cossacks. Why do I go on about them when their specific soviets were dissolved by decree in 1920? They represent for me the Bolshevik programme tested to its limits. Here we have Bolshevik defence of the right of self-determination in extremis. The Cossacks were privileged Russian settlers. A military caste of oppressed-oppressors with an unpleasant tradition of anti-semitic pogroms and general mayhem and slaughter.

The Bolsheviks did not begin by asking themselves whether or not the Cossacks constituted a full nation or for that matter whether or not they were an oppressed nation. They certainly did not try to 'disappear' the Cossack question through the idiotic device of pretending that they did not exist; that they were an integral part of the Great Russian nation. Till the storms of the civil war tore them apart Cossacks were an historically established commonality and as such had to be handled with respect and sensitivity.

The newly established Soviet government did everything within its power to reassure the Cossacks that it would not threaten their "land" or their "liberty". They were called upon to join the new order and urged to create "your own" soviets ('From the Council of People's Commissars to the toiling Cossacks', cited in J Reed Ten days that shook the world Harmondsworth 1970, p346). The strategy was to divide the ordinary Cossacks from their atmen, generals and landlords. It is then of more than just historic interest that the highest constitutional body in the country actually retitled itself: ie, it became the Soviets of Cossacks', Soldiers', Workers', and Peasant Deputies.

Such an approach to the Cossacks completely contradicts the assumptions of our antis. Namely that for Lenin and the Bolsheviks "the right of self-determination was all about supporting the struggle for freedom of oppressed nations" (Weekly Worker October 14 1999). Here 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 are presumably without rights and are therefore legitimately to be subject to the most draconian measures. A case in point being the British-Irish.

True, in the writings of Lenin (and his commissar for nationalities - Stalin) there are countless references to the necessity of advocating the right of oppressed nations to self-determination. In the age of the great European empires the majority of people on the planet were nationally oppressed. They had no independent states. The Bolsheviks, along with the 2nd and then the 3rd 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, as nations, had in general no problem with national self-determination. For the benefit of our inconsistent democrats let me explain in one short sentence the actual content of the slogan of self-determination for oppressed nations. It is a demand for the formal equality of all nations.

Did Lenin oppose self-determination for the British-Irish? Comrade Delargy tells us he most emphatically did. Triumphantly he holds aloft an article from March 1914. Lenin is quoted in quite a long passage rubbishing the protestant "rebellion" in Ulster against Irish home rule legislation that the Liberals 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. My Leninism is based on the most advanced theory and experience of the Russian Revolution which I seek to generalise through an active and constant process of criticism. Eg, Lenin opposed federalism for a revolutionary Russia even in World War I. In 1917 he became a convert. I am therefore not paralysed by Lenin's writings condemning federal constitutional arrangements as being unnecessary or retrogressive.

In all honesty Lenin displays a rather startling ignorance for someone who spent periods of exile in London. Gaffes about the "English-born" protestants and Carson's huge militia being nothing but "handful of hooligans" have to be dismissed as nonsense. However, let us not throw out the baby with the bathwater. Lenin's article contains an observation which comrade Delargy did not notice or decided to leave out. It is rather inconvenient for the antis. The Liberals' legislation provided for an Irish parliament. Lenin notes that its powers would be "determined by British law". There was no danger whatsoever of such a sop parliament "oppressing" the British-Irish (ibid). The objections of Sir Edward Carson and co were entirely spurious.

Lastly, this brings me to the most dishonest argument of the antis. Virtually all the elements within this camp claim that to advocate the voluntary, as opposed to the forced, unity of the peoples of Ireland is to "align" oneself with Ian Paisley and David Trimble. That British-Irish self-determination is equivalent to what is dubbed the 'protestant veto'. Moreover our critics insultingly tell us that in effect we should support the UVF, UDA, UFF, etc. Comrade Douglass speaks for the lot. From British-Irish self-determination "it must follow" that they "have the right to fight against being part of a 32-county state and those fighting to take them into one" (Weekly Worker January 13 2000).

He and other such comrades appear to know precious little about history. Carson and his UVF did not take up arms to prevent a united Ireland. Carson wanted to maintain a united Ireland under the protestant ascendancy through the continuation of a British-dominated Westminster parliament. Not surprisingly then, when the Ulster Unionists and their masters in London agreed to dissect Ireland in 1920, they did so not according to the principle of British-Irish self-determination. On the contrary, they sought to maximise UK territory around the Belfast-Antrim-north Down heartland. Hence some 500,000 catholic-Irish people were permanently imprisoned as an oppressed national minority. That is what loyalist armed gangs have fought to perpetuate and reinforce ever since. We "do not, and cannot, support the right of the British-Irish majority in the north to oppress the catholic-nationalist minority" ('Ireland and the British-Irish', thesis 7). Suggestions that we do, or should do so, are as misdirected as they are feeble.

Sinn F"šin and the IRA often appear more democratic than our antis. After all the republican movement does on paper recognise the principle of gaining consent. However, this consent is from Northern Ireland and not the British-Irish. Demography, not democracy, will for Gerry Adams eventually decide the issue. Communists must therefore continue to support what is progressive, criticise what is equivocal and steadfastly oppose what is undemocratic in the republican movement. The communist programme is clear and unambiguous. We are for the "immediate - ie, unconditional - withdrawal of the British state and British troops from Northern Ireland ... and a united Ireland" ('Ireland and the British-Irish', thesis 10). At the same time we fight for a one-county, four-half-county, British-Irish province in that united Ireland which constitutionally enshrines self-determination up to an including the right to secede.