Ireland has dominated British politics in the recent weeks. Geoff Bell looks at the cracks in Labour's bipartisan policy.
In April 1919 J R Clynes, a leading member of the Parliamentary Labour Party, rose in the House of Commons to speak on the question of Ireland, a country then in the midst of a national revolution. He protested at the inaction of the coalition government, at its failure to evolve a political solution capable of restoring some legitimacy to British governance of Ireland. Noting the success of the Sinn Fein party and the eclipse of the constitutional road in Irish nationalism he protested: 'Lawlessness is being encouraged by the government's neglect of this troublesome subject'.
'Troublesome subject' is one of those key phrases which seem appropriate on most occasions when British governments and parliamentary oppositions have tried to wrestle with Ireland's British problem. It suggests exasperation, frustration, annoyance and an overwhelming wish that Ireland could somehow disappear and never again intrude into Britain's domestic policy. It is a phrase for all seasons, particularly the spring of 1981, It especially summarises the feelings of Michael Foot, leader of the British Labour Party and as good a parliamentarian as was J R Clynes, 62 years ago.
Michael Foot, Ireland and parliamentarianism have a recent acquaintance, In July 1977 in his role as Leader of the House of Commons, Foot negotiated a pact with the Official Unionists whereby their MPs agreed to vote with the minority Labour government, In return they received an increase in the number of seats allocated to Northern Ireland at Westminster, the majority of which the Unionists, or other Loyalists, would be likely to win.
At the time of the deal Jock Stallard resigned in protest as a government assistant Whip, but there was no great revolt among Labour's left wing. Such deals were the way things happen at Westminster, and though the Official Unionists were not particularly savoury allies, in the crisis situation the government faced in the summer of 1977, beggars couldn't be choosers.
Even at Westminster there are times when the consequences have to be borne for such squalid manoeuvring. When the Labour government fell in March 1979 it did so because two Irish MPs, Gerry Fitt, then leader of the Social Democratic and Labour Party, and Frank Maguire, an independent Republican, abstained from the vote of confidence. Fitt's reason was the Labour/Unionist alliance, dead though it then was, Maguire's was the government's policy in the H Blocks in Long Kesh prison.
Although it was an Irish straw which finally broke the Labour government's back, that government's Irish policy hardly figured in most of the post mortems which followed the Wilson/Callaghan years. Two examples, arguably the most important of the left wing critiques, are Coates and Topham's What Went Wrong and Tony Benn's Arguments for Socialism. The word 'Ireland' appeared in neither even though it was Labour which phased out political status and introduced the Prevention of Terrorism Act.
Even when left-winger Arthur Scargill, president of the Yorkshire National Union of Miners, launched a campaign to dump Roy Mason as Barnsley's MP there is no evidence that Mason's Irish despotism was highlighted.
By the start of 1981 a trickle of interest in Ireland had appeared in sections of the Labour left. In the pamphlet How to Reselect Your MP Chris Mullin, the deputy editor of Tribune, roundly attacked the entire Mason regime, and named two Irish issues on which he advised constituency parties to check the record of their MPs — the Prevention of Terrorism Act and the Emergency Provisions Act.
By the time this pamphlet was produced Ireland was already hitting the headlines, The first hunger strike at the H Blocks and Armagh had drawn attention, in a way no Labour MP had been prepared to do, to the nature of 'justice' in Northern Ireland: the conveyor belt of repression on which suspects of 'terrorist offences' were arrested under special legislation, questioned under special rules, tried in special courts, but denied special treatment once they had been despatched to prison
Labour left wakes up to Ireland
Even before the first hunger strike there were indications that the left in the Labour Party considered that Ireland now merited their attention, Peter Hain, a leading member of the Labour Co-ordinating Committee said in the summer of 1980 that he favoured a six month deadline for withdrawal from Ireland. Then, at the October Labour Party conference Tony Benn told a fringe meeting organised by the Labour Committee on Ireland: 'The sooner Britain withdraws from Ireland, the better'.
But none of this hinted at the storm which broke in the aftermath of the death of hunger striker Bobby Sands, the newly elected MP for Fermanagh and South Tyrone. Michael Foot had steadfastly supported Thatcher's determination to allow Sands to die, His Northern Ireland spokesperson Don Concannon, had even visited Sands a couple of days before his death to inform the hunger striker of Labour's support for Thatcher,
The first to protest was Patrick Duffy, a former navy minister and someone not normally associated with left wing causes, Speaking in the Commons, Duffy attacked what he called the 'me-tooism' between Foot and Thatcher on the hunger strike, Where the normally moderate and tranquil Patrick Duffy led, others followed. Tony Benn, with his campaign for deputy leadership by then well under way, called in late May for the withdrawal of British troops and a policy which promoted the re-unification of Ireland.
The importance of Benn's statements was recognised by his opponents. Michael Foot threatened to sack him from the Shadow Cabinet. Denis Healey, his opponent for deputy leadership, hurled abuse at him for suggesting in a private meeting of the Tribune group that Sands should be allowed to take his parliamentary seat. It was now undeniable that Ireland had become a real, live issue in the left/right battle in the Labour Party. So strong was the tide of opinion that Tony Benn predicted at the end of May an imminent change in Labour's policy,
The suddeness with which Ireland became a cause of the Labour left is, at least in part, deceptive. It is reminiscent of what popstar Val Doonican once said when he remarked that it had taken him 15 years to become an overnight success. Similarly, it has taken twelve years of constant campaigning in Britain to make the Irish cause an overnight success with the Labour left.
The Irish solidarity movement in Britain has found difficulty in reaching out to broad forces in the labour movement. But the propaganda produced and the constant lobbying undertaken by some of those in the Troops Out Movement, did prepare the ground for the challenge to Labour's traditional bipartisan approach to Ireland.
The crucial point was not so much Sands' death, but that he had been elected to the British House of Commons. This struck at the heart of not just the Labour left's but the whole Labour Party's political and strategic conscience.
Labour's deep parliamentarism
The first election manifesto of the Labour Party — then the Labour Representation Committee — insisted in 1900 that the party was 'fully alive to the fact that the great battles between capital and Labour are to be fought out on the floor and in the division lobbies of the House of Commons'. Since then the British parliament has been seen by Labour's theologians as not only the means and the end in itself, but as an institution to be revered, and to be humble towards.
Sands' election was not so much an embarassment to the class conscious Tories, who recognise the House of Commons for the playground it is, but rather for the Labour Party, because of its elevation of the parliamentary method into the realms of religious dogmatism.
The speech of J R Clynes can be quoted again to illustrate this tradition, Referring to the 1918 general election in Ireland which had seen the landslide victory of Sinn Fein over the bourgeois constitutionalists in the Irish Nationalist Party. Clynes complained that the 'inaction of our government' had meant that:
'The party which stood for constitutional action and law and order in the affairs of their country (Ireland) and in the affairs of its government, was nearly destroyed at the polls; and the party which treats this country and this House with contempt and refused to come near it, has received the support of the great majority of the Irish people'.
In the spring of 1981 this history repeated itself. Bobby Sands' election victory was followed in the Belfast council elections by the defeat of the moderate, constitutionalist Gerry Fitt. His conqueror was Fergus O'Hare, a Trotskyist no less, a campaigner for the hunger strikers, and someone who, like Sinn Fein in 1918 'treats this country and this House with contempt'. Accordingly, important people in the Labour Party began to say, something has to be done to halt this dreadful process.
This was not just because Labour politicians perceived a need to come to the aid of their fellow moderates and constitutionalists in Ireland. It was because the whole constitutional methodology, which Labour has worshipped more than any other party in Britain, was being degraded internationally.
Again, there is a marked similarity with the nature of this protest and past attitudes which have been expressed by Labour MPs. During a parliamentary debate on Ireland in 1919 a Labour spokesperson warned:
'It would do well for this House to remember that parliamentary institutions are on trial before the workers of the world, They form a system which is being scrapped in several of the countries of Europe, a system that has not yet justified itself either in relation to the wrongs of Ireland or in relation to the wrongs of Labour. I say it with regret, I am not pleased to say it, I wish it were otherwise, organised workers are being slowly but surely forced to conclude that parliamentary government is a fraud'.
Therefore, it could almost be run on at the end of this quotation, should not Bobby Sands MP be allowed to take his seat, as that nice Mr Benn had so sensibly suggested?
If this appears as a rather harsh and cynical evaluation, it should be remembered that for some years US politicians have argued that Britain should promote a political solution to the Irish conflict. The British media, searching to put the worst possible light on such advice, insisted that this represented no more than a vote-catching operation directed towards the Irish in America.
The truth of the matter is that Edward Kennedy, to take the most prominent example, will get the Irish votes he needs as long as he remains a Kennedy and a Catholic. What stirred the US politicians into action was similar to that which prodded the leader writers in the Guardian and The Sunday Times to make similar pleas for a change of course: an appreciation that what was at stake in Northern Ireland was a leading Western nation getting bad press. It further produced a politically unstable situation in Ireland which could lead anywhere, especially with the Provisional IRA starting to talk in the language of Castroite revolutionaries, rather than in the quaint and largely harmless language of conservative green nationalism.
It was not just US politicians and the more sensible newspaper editors who protested, If the leaks are correct then the British Foreign Office had for a number of years been pleading for a search for the solution to the Irish national question. Most dramatically of all, Thatcher herself had made the first tentative steps in this direction with the talks which she and Lord Carrington had with the Irish government of Charles Haughey in December 1980. Carrington's presence suggests that the discussions were not confined to the problem of butter mountains in the EEC or the quality of the tea-pot Haughey presented to Thatcher.
Labour's bipartisan foreign policy
The lateness with which those on the Labour left caught up with these developments and began themselves to think strategically about Ireland is illuminating. Again, there is a familiar pattern. It was, after all, Thatcher and Carrington who had the daring and imagination to settle Zimbabwe, just as it was Harold MacMillan, 20 years ago, who spoke about the need for Britain to float with the 'wind of change' in Africa.
In both instances Labour followed and applauded, but it has seldom initiated such changes in foreign policy. The bipartisanship which so strongly aided British policy in Ireland these last 12 years is just one example of a general bipartisan approach towards foreign and imperial affairs. With only one or two exceptions, Labour has always been happy to endorse a bipartisanship the parameters of which have invariably been drawn by the Tories, It is the Tories who have hoisted the Union Jack, and if expediency demands, rolled it down again It has been left to Labour to merely salute.
Such then is the context in which the current debate within the Labour Party on Ireland should be seen. While the cries for a break in bipartisanship may be on the increase, there remains a lack of specificity as to what should take its place.
While Benn recognises that 'partition was a crime against the Irish people' his call for UN troops to replace British ones can only be interpreted as meaning that the UN rather than Britain should police that partition. This may not be what Benn meant, but Irish reality has a way of twisting good liberal intentions into becoming, in the phrase used by the historian Trevelyan in his judgement of Gladstone's Irish policy, 'too little and too late', The proposal on UN troops is not original. Richard Crossman's diaries record that Crossman and Barbara Castle both toyed with the idea in August 1969 when British troops were sent into Belfast and Derry,
J R Clynes continued to support the type of Home Rule solution proposed by Gladstone after it had been rejected by the majority of the Irish people. Similarly the Labour left still have a lot of running to do to catch up with the mood of a substantial proportion of the all-Irish majority, which is clearly swinging towards a new militancy as a consequence of Thatcher's and Foot's intransigence over the hunger strikes.
Having issued these warnings it is possible to proceed along a more positive path. The difference between the British Foreign Office on the one hand and Thatcher and the Bennite left on the other is that the former think and plot in private while the latter speak in public, The effect of this difference is marked, in the first place, in Ireland itself
Charlie Haughey attempted to portray the Anglo/Irish talks as being the first, but most important step on the road to Irish unity. This carried with it an implicit warning to all concerned not to upset the apple cant, but to rely on secret diplomacy, constitutionalism and 'good old Charlie'. It was, in effect a call for the demobilisation of the Irish masses, which was essential if the type of new neo-colonial solution he and Thatcher were inching towards was to have any potential.
The opposite was the case when the Labour left began to make Ireland an issue. They did so as a result of Sands' election, the obvious support for the hunger strikers, and the mass movement which grew up on the streets as a manifestation of that support. It was in that respect an encouragement for that mobilisation to continue. For, if Labour was moving as quickly as it appeared to be doing then, perhaps, if the pressure was maintained, it would move even further: from talking about a vague committment to Irish unity and British withdrawal to spelling out the ABC of that withdrawal.
When the Labour right accused Benn of making statements that would 'encourage violence' in Ireland they were correct. Although violence for the parliamentary leadership can be defined as any form of mass action which refuses to be bound by the safety valve of British 'peaceful protest'
Ireland as a key issue in the Labour Party
The Labour leadership's objection to Benn bringing Ireland into the deputy leadership was not because the Labour Party has a principled objection to the concept of Irish unity. Such a policy can in certain circumstances be at one with Labour's parliamentarianism. What worried Foot and Healey was the manner in which Benn made his call for the withdrawal of British troops an issue in the left/right battle in the party, that he did so at a time when Foot was doing his patriotic duty and standing shoulder to shoulder with Thatcher against a hostile world,
Labour's Irish spring has as much to do with the Bennite challenge to the general nature of Labour's consensus politics as it has to do with the fight for a socialist policy towards Ireland. Nevertheless, the Irish door has been opened in the Labour Party, what matters from this point onwards is what will lie behind it,
Certainly the door will not be easily closed again, whatever decision the Labour Party conference comes to on Ireland when it debates it this autumn. The Labour Committee on Ireland's model resolution to the conference calls for a break in bipartisanship, an end to the right of Northern Ireland's Loyalists to veto Irish self-determination, and a policy of committing the next Labour government to withdrawal,
There will be arguments, and rightly so, about the vagueness of this motion, specifically around the lack of precision as to when that withdrawal would take place, Recent opinion polls have shown 33 per cent of Labour voters supporting immediate withdrawal of British troops, However to expect the next Labour Party conference to endorse the call for 'troops out now' would be to overstate the current debate in the Labour Party and the strength of the party's left wing.
Even for the Labour left, never mind the party as a whole, to take up Peter Hain's call for a six months timetable for British withdrawal, a whole new chapter would need to be written on the Labour Party. For that would be, if not a clear break with reformism, then at least a partial fracture. That is not to argue against campaigning for troops out of Ireland now by socialists in the Labour Party. If nothing else, stating this one consistent Marxist position on Ireland, for immediate self-determination, can have the effect of moving at least some in the direction of a more progressive position.
It would however be naive to pretend that Tony Benn is capable of raising the Starry Plough of James Connolly's Citizen Army above the British House of Commons, or for that matter, above the Labour Party's new headquarters in south west London. Sad and disgraceful though it is, the following words of the Irish bourgeois nationalist leader, Charles Parnell, written in 1884, have still to be disproved:
'We are told of some great wave of English democracy which is coming over here to poor Ireland to assist the Irish democracy. The poor Irish democracy will, I fear, have to rely upon themselves in the future as they have done up to the present'.
The historical material quoted in this article is a fraction of that which will be contained in a forthcoming book published by Pluto Press on the Labour Party and the Irish question by this article's author, Full references will be available therein.