I remember. I remember politics in Northern Ireland. I was a political orphan in Belfast, there was no party which I could join. I was no longer entitled to be member of the British Labour Party and the old Northern Ireland Labour Party was moribund. I voted for the Workers Party a few times even though I was suspicious of them. The party had originated as the Official Republican Movement and, although they had abandoned armed struggle, they still retained a lot of their old language and habits. I attended their Easter Commemoration in Milltown Cemetery in the Spring of 1981 and watched an IRA style colour party and heard an orator in a black beret speak about “The Republican Movement” as if nothing had changed since 1972. I took a WP acquaintance to task about this, but his explanations were very unconvincing and I could never have joined them. I also noted that they were trying to oust the Communist Party of Ireland as the Moscow’s chosen vehicle for Kremlin subsidies and that put me off even more. I had a number of friends in the CPI, including Madge Davison whom I liked and respected, but most of the members were “Tankies” who had supported, not only the invasion of Hungary, but also the crushing of the Prague Spring. There was no home for me there. My ideas about the Northern Ireland problem were clarifying, I now understood it as a conflict between two communities with incompatible aspirations. I still believed that a united Ireland would be better for everyone, but I accepted that it could not be imposed by force. The only way forward was an agreement about how they were going to live together and share the place in peace. I thought the only way forward was a devolved, power-sharing government. But I had no illusion that this was an immediate prospect, its advantage was that when it was achieved it would guarantee peace and might lead to eventual reconciliation. The other solutions on offer all presupposed reconciliation, but they had no way of actually bringing it about. The BBC showed a documentary that had been influenced by the Troops Out Movement and it was utter tosh. My friend Andy Pollak, who edited the independent political review “Fortnight” asked me to review it. I was scathing, tearing apart its half-truths and inconsistencies. And I explained why, despite having invented the TOM, I had now repudiated it. There was a ferocious reply by a former IMG comrade. A friend commented that the reply was even more dishonest than the original programme. Together with my essay on Republicanism in the book I edited with Austen Morgan, I had now publicly and comprehensively repudiated the ideas about Ireland that I had advocated in the 1970s. Which is why it was very boring, when discussing with Troops Out supporters, to hear them try to refute me with arguments I had invented in the first place. And it was irritating to see so-called “Labour Movement Delegations” come to Belfast, visit only Republican areas, and fail to speak to any trade unionists or socialists who had an alternative point of view. They were like the delegations to the USSR in the 1930s, who knew in advance what they were going to report. My friend Graham Walker from Glasgow, who was a Junior Fellow in the Institute of Irish Studies, invited me to speak at a meeting of the Campaign for Labour Representation in Ireland. They wanted the British Labour Party to accept members and contest seats in Northern Ireland. They claimed that this would eclipse the sectarian parties and create “normal” politics. I told them that I didn’t oppose the principle of what they proposed, but I didn’t think it would happen and, if it did, it would not have the effects they imagined. One of the people there was Brendan Clifford, with whom I had crossed swords in my IMG days. He was the pioneer of the idea that the Ulster Protestants are a nation and that socialists ought to support Partition. He bitterly attacked me for my former views and I mildly explained that I had changed my mind. He came back with sneering contempt, his objection wasn’t to my ideas it was to me because I had argued with him in the past. So I got him to agree that what I was saying was so despicable that it wasn’t worth discussing. When returned to the attack I reminded him of what we had just agreed and he shut up. A reasonable discussion then followed. I was asked whether or not I accepted that the majority in Northern Ireland had a right to self-determination and I said “yes”, which was the opposite of my position in “Ireland Unfree”, in which I had contended that it might be necessary to fight the “Irish Revolution” against the Protestant working class, I now thought that the human cost would be unacceptable and there could be no worthwhile outcome. I didn’t think the Campaign for Labour Representation would succeed, but that wasn’t what put me off joining them. They had all the hallmarks of a sect, parroting the same inane arguments and only rarely engaging in genuine discussion. Worse, they took to turning up at any meeting to discuss socialism and demanding that only their ideas should be listened to. Their central belief, that if the British parties put up candidates Northern Ireland would return to “normal” non-sectarian politics, fell apart under scrutiny. I pointed out in “Fortnight” that the British political system seemed to them to be a seamless unity only because they were so distant from it. They replied that I wanted to block Labour politics and maintain the sectarian system. Of course I did have another agenda, they wanted a single and undifferentiated political system in the UK, but I was a Scottish nationalist as well as a socialist and I was well aware that they opposed devolution for Scotland as strenuously as they opposed it for Northern Ireland. As for democratic socialist politics, since there was no point in waiting for the British Labour Party to bring it to us, I concluded that those who believed in it would have to promote its ideas and values on our own initiative, despite the difficulties and the small results that could be expected. So in 1984, when Paddy Devlin invited me to take part in a meeting to discuss re-launching Labour politics, I readily agreed.
Posted on: Tue, 03 Dec 2013 16:09:23 +0000
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