The Windsor Framework

Posted on March 2, 2023 by irishmarxism

Dan Kitwood UK in a Changing Europe

The ‘Windsor Framework’ agreement between the EU and Britain to maintain or replace (take your pick) the Northern Ireland Protocol to the Brexit Withdrawal Agreement is a truly remarkable document. It allows Northern Ireland to have free access to both the EU single and UK markets for goods.

The British Prime Minister visited to ensure we knew how great this was even though, as a staunch Brexiteer, he had helped ensure that Britain walked away from this “privilege”, this “prize” that put Northern Ireland in a “unique”, “unbelievably special position” . . . ‘like the world’s most exciting economic zone”, that ensures we are an “incredibly attractive place to invest for businesses”. Perhaps the most fulsome declarations against Brexit I have ever heard.

Yet the truly remarkable factor is that such an arrangement is supposed to be impossible. When Russia claimed that Ukraine could have close trading relationships with the EU and also with its own Eurasian Customs Union, the EU claimed it couldn’t be done. Ukraine had to look decisively West and could not continue its attempts to straddle between it and Russia. We know, of course, that this provoked the Maidan uprising in 2013-2014, when the Ukrainian President decided that the price of greater access to the EU and erecting barriers to Russia was too high.

Ukraine split over his decision, with the open intervention of the United States, repression by the Ukrainian security forces, violence by protesters and seizure of weapons by pro-western elements, including the far right and fascists. This led to a counter-mobilisation in the East of the country among pro-Russia Ukrainians and a civil war that led to Russian armed intervention in Crimea and then Donbas. The conflict never really ended and, of course, we know that this eventually led to the Russian invasion and the proxy war between the US with its NATO allies, and Russia.

So, why is it that what has just been achieved in the North of Ireland could not be done in Ukraine?

The answer, of course, is that the decision in respect of Ukraine was a geopolitical one aimed not just at Ukraine but against Russia, even if some claim that the bureaucrats in Brussels did not fully appreciate this aspect of what they were doing. In any case, the new ‘Windsor Framework’ is essentially a political agreement with political significance that does not primarily lie in the North of Ireland.

It has been pointed out by commentators that the EU and British have put entirely different spins on the significance of what has been agreed, with the former claiming that it has not “renegotiated the protocol” while the British have claimed that the deal “fundamentally amends the text and provisions of the original protocol”; lots of ‘dancing on the heads of pins’ according to one journalist.

Nevertheless, the protocol stays, there remains a ‘border on the Irish sea’ and not inside the island, and the fundamental relationship between the EU and Britain remains. The EU has made concessions and the British have agreed measures that the EU thinks it can live with which minimise physical and other trade-related interventions. The EU Q&A is replete with references to the limits of its flexibility. So, the trusted trader scheme can be suspended if ‘1) the UK fails to provide the EU with access to the relevant UK IT customs systems and databases, or 2) the UK does not live up to the commitments it undertook when setting up the trusted trader scheme.’ On excise ‘the UK will not be able to apply any duty rate below the EU minima’; on duty rates for small producers of alcoholic beverages ‘the UK will not be able to set duty rates for small producers below EU minima rates. The respect for EU minima rates will protect the level playing field with the EU’ etc.

Breaches of the controls are inevitable, but it must be considered that these are going to be relatively unimportant. Northern Ireland is both small and peripheral and ultimately so in the political sense as well, a far cry from Ukraine. The EU was quick to claim the deal as a one-off, so the Swiss can’t follow up on it. The significance of the deal agreed lies in the British acceptance that the road is running out on hostilities with the EU, a project that is taking its Tory sponsors to electoral defeat.

The deal is not however the last word. The disapplication of EU laws is still winding its way through Westminster and controls on imports to Britain have still not been introduced; Brexit has still not been ‘done’. The ’Windsor Framework’ has still to be implemented while deadlines for the various steps are part of the agreement. Beyond this, the problem of continued divergence between the EU and Britain remains, as does its potential impact. While on the British side the debate is about the extent of future divergence, or even its advisability, on the EU side the debate will be about the potential benefits of further deepening, where consideration of its effect on relations with Britain will be a minor concern.

The major innovation beyond the rather technical aspects of trade policy is the introduction of a ‘Stormont Brake’, as an ‘emergency mechanism that will allow the UK government, at the request of 30 Members of the Legislative Assembly in Northern Ireland (Stormont), in the most exceptional circumstances, as a last resort . . . to stop the application of amended or replacing provisions of EU law . . .’

‘The Stormont Brake can be triggered only after having used every other available mechanism, and where the amended or replacing EU act, or a part of it, significantly differs in scope or content from the previous one and application of such amended or replacing act would have a significant impact specific to everyday life of communities in Northern Ireland in a way that is liable to persist. . . . If triggered and if the conditions are met, the amended EU act would not apply automatically in Northern Ireland.’

This represents the introduction into the workings of the Protocol a mechanism akin to the ‘petition of concern’ introduced in the last British initiative to save the Stormont administration–New Decade, New Approach–meant to get Stormont to work after the previous breakdown. The original devolution arrangements, meant to demonstrate that the Northern Ireland polity could function ‘normally’ and without conflict, introduced powers of veto for each sectarian bloc as a key incentive to make them work it.

The petition of concern was meant to be a last resort insurance-type mechanism but was reportedly used 115 times in five years, a testament not to it working, or to the number of issues absolutely vital to one side or the other, but to the degree of sectarian division. It has quickly been speculated that the restrictive grounds of its use, mirrored in the wording of the new deal as set out above, would make no difference to the willingness of unionists to paralyse the Protocol agreement with the EU. There is no reason why this might not be the case except for the different circumstances of the ‘Windsor Framework’.

Like the ‘New Decade, New Approach’ deal, it requires 30 members of Stormont to trigger it from at least two parties, and since there are 37 unionists out of a total of 90 members, this looks eminently possible, even accounting for those specifically excluded. Once triggered it would take a harder to procure ‘cross-community’ vote to allow any suspension of a new EU law to be lifted.

While there are various other, on the face of it, rather onerous requirements, including for consultation, the key difference is that the British government is required to apply the veto on any new law, and the British government is not going to do this if it is not in their interest as well, regardless of what unionists think. If it does, the EU can then take retaliatory measures that are proportionate.

It is just about feasible for unionists to repeatedly attempt to apply the brakes, but this would lead to ridicule for themselves and their Brexit cause, and would fail, not mainly because of this but because the British government is in charge. The British, by making the agreement in the first place and failing to meet the Democratic Unionist Party’s seven tests, have shown that the demands of unionism are not its priority.

The Stormont Brake has been characterised as a carrot to unionism but one that requires the DUP to return to Stormont and end its boycott, as it can only be triggered in a functioning Assembly. The offer of a veto is thus a sardonic judgement on the power of the veto the DUP already wields.

It was widely thought, even before the appearance of the new deal, that the DUP would play for time so that it would withhold judgement before the local elections in May. These, it is thought, would reveal the verdict of the majority of unionists on the deal to be negative, or certainly negative enough to damage the DUP should it accept it. This would hardly be a surprise since an oft-repeated unionist expression is ‘not an inch’. Unfortunately, it cannot retake the ground itself and the crisis is of its own making – by supporting Brexit, accepting the different circumstances of Northern Ireland, opposing the alternative Theresa May deal, even if it could have worked, and the initial support it gave for the Protocol’s benefits. This leaves it ill-prepared for a battle against the British government.

Postponing decision on the deal might appear smart, especially since the party is divided, but it might not take that long before this looks weak, and vulnerable to accusations from rivals that it is. The main rival is Traditional Unionist Voice, which is a one-man band, which itself illustrates the hollowness of unionist opposition. This, however, can just breed frustration and anger. Far from protecting themselves, DUP delay may simply strengthen unionist opposition by opening the door to those willing to be clear and forthright, with resignation developing among others of its supporters. In any event, in local terms, the Windsor Framework is a defeat for unionism. You can tell this, when even the King gets it in the neck.

The significance of David Trimble

Posted on July 27, 2022 by irishmarxism

Trimble and Paisly at Drumcree (Belfastlive.co.uk)

The death of David Trimble will not be marked by the same fawning saturated media coverage of his fellow Nobel peace prize winner John Hume. When the two winners were announced many nationalists thought he didn’t deserve the prize but was awarded it because it could not be given only to a nationalist. It was part of the whole ’equality of the two traditions’ motif that characterised the whole process.

It wasn’t so much because of the personality traits that even respectful obituary writers found impossible not to mention of him. That Peter Mandelson said he had ‘never encountered anyone as rude in my life’; or that he had a ’notorious temper’ passed down from a grandfather who was in the Royal Irish, and then Royal Ulster, Constabulary; or that he was argumentative just like his father. Neither was it his arrogant angry public persona.

Bertie Ahern in ‘The Irish Times’ couldn’t help noting that he had ‘a short fuse’; the obituary in ‘The Irish News’ labelled him ‘to some extent a cynical politician’, and ‘The Belfast Telegraph’ political commentator stated that ‘he was a hard man to like.’ Much the same could be said about Hume, although he usually hid it better.

For someone who was a unionist politician for decades and then leader, it says something that Arlene Foster, who trod the same path, thought it necessary to state that ‘I never doubted that David fundamentally believed in the Union’, which must sit beside other observations that the Pope is a Catholic.

The much-hyped achievement of peace following historic agreement between the two sectarian tribes appeared as the pinnacle of Hume’s work and long political career. Trimble, on the other hand, had not been so prominent for so long and when he did appear he did so as the next voice of unionist intransigence and supremacism.

His earliest notoriety came as a member of Bill Craig’s Vanguard movement, which is the closest unionism came in ‘the Troubles’ to becoming a mass fascist movement. He also played a role in the Ulster Workers Council strike in 1974 that brought down the Sunningdale power-sharing agreement and which succeeded not simply because of extensive unionist opposition, but crucially because of widespread paramilitary intimidation and the complete failure of the British state’s armed forces to challenge it.

He then came to prominence in 1995 when he walked arms aloft with Ian Paisley as they celebrated the disputed march of Orangemen through the Catholic Garvaghy Road in Portadown, in what was seen as another act of sectarian triumphalism. This was widely seen to break the deal brokered previously to avoid residents having their noses rubbed in it, something he denied. But given the prominence of the dispute at Drumcree over a number of years and the loyalist killings associated with it, it was viewed as a victory over the whole Catholic population.

This action however helped him win the leadership of the Ulster Unionist Party shortly after, and his reputation for being hard-line was reinforced when he met the loyalist paramilitary killer from the Portadown area, Billy ‘King Rat’ Wright, during the Drumcree dispute the following year.

Thus, while Hume’s actions in giving birth to the Good Friday agreement appeared consistent with his prior political activity, Trimble’s role could only be presented as some sort of conversion, necessary to sell the Belfast Agreement as not some sort of unionist victory. As we can see from Arlene Foster’s remarks, this proved difficult.

Victory may come in many colours but plenty of unionists believe it can only come with red, white and blue ribbons. And this was Trimble’s problem, his achievement and his significance.

While it is claimed that the Good Friday Agreement was the creation of Hume and Adams it was built by the British. The role of Hume and Trimble was to modify it as they were able and sell it to their constituencies. That it is estimated well over 90 per cent of nationalists voted for it shows that this was not a difficult job for Hume. Not so for Trimble. Various numbers are quoted for the level of unionist support in the referendum that approved the deal, but the highest that looks reasonable is 57 per cent. And Trimble’s problems only started there.

His even more difficult fight was within his own party to defend the deal, with repeated confrontations taking place within the Party’s ruling Council involving those opposed to the Agreement who sought to get rid of him. At the meeting in May 2000 Trimble won only narrowly by 53 to 47 per cent. The Party split, a part led by Jeffrey Donaldson joining Paisley’s DUP, which quickly became the main unionist party. In effect, the majority of unionists now opposed the Good Friday Agreement; something studiously ignored by the media who don’t want to register this fact as the underlying reason for the repeated failure of the new Stormont to work as intended, even when it is sitting and not otherwise in suspension, as it is today.

Supporters of the Agreement, especially nationalists, must therefore acknowledge that they owe more to David Trimble than they might care to acknowledge, for given their enthusiasm for it his personality and previous history is secondary. The relative failure to celebrate his role is understandable since his sectarian constituency just about voted for the deal at the time and without the enthusiasm of Irish nationalists. But that is why his role was important in a way Hume’s was not. Since then, of course, their approval has fallen and the deal has been subject to changes unaccompanied by the initial hype.

The failure of his achievement in the Agreement to bring the stability anticipated could not be ignored in the obituaries but we have been told that while ‘it has many flaws’, compared to the alternative ‘it is infinitely preferable’ (John Manley, ‘The Irish News’). For ‘The Irish Times’ obituary writer ‘it is better than the alternative: another failed powersharing experiment and a possible return to violence . . .’

It is a moot point whether instability due to lack of a deal in 1998 is worse than instability as a result of its existence now: whether instability resulting from continued search for a deal is worse than that arising from the achievement of a deal that continually breaks down. From the start the absence of widespread political violence has been identified with the Good Friday Agreement by politicians and the media but the origins of the deal and the experience of its (non) operation show the two are not the same. That such identity is required is explained by the lack of any other merit to the sectarian arrangements put in place that repeatedly fail and fall over.

Trimble was a reactionary and the Belfast/Good Friday Agreement he fought tenaciously for was no exception. Latterly he was a keen exponent of Brexit and opponent of the Northern Ireland Protocol. So much for the politics of stability.

‘The Irish Times’ obituary records that the standout line in his Nobel peace prize acceptance speech in Oslo included the remark that Northern Ireland had been ‘a cold house for Catholics’. This, however, is a euphemism for decades of discrimination and repression. The Agreement he fought for was designed only to make modest changes to what was considered a modest injustice. Turning the heating up was not a solution to a house that should be condemned.

The Assembly elections and Brexit

Posted on June 5, 2022 by irishmarxism

The Assembly elections a month ago saw Sinn Fein become the largest party and entitled to nominate the First Minister of Northern Ireland. The election was heralded as historic with an Irish nationalist taking the post for the first time. Nationalists celebrated, although without much celebration, pointing to the irony of the ‘Protestant state for a Protestant people’ being headed by a (Catholic) nationalist. Whether this was doubly ironic was not considered – what is the imperative to dismantle the Northern state if it is no longer able to guarantee its original purpose of sectarian supremacy?

Very symbolic, everyone agreed. But beyond this obvious reversal, symbolic of what?

Perhaps the heralding of border polls North and South that would deliver a united Ireland?

This blog has argued that such unity is some way off and there does not yet exist a majority for a united Ireland in the North. Sinn Fein’s victory confirms this.

Despite declaring the election ‘historic’, turnout was slightly down from 64.78% in 2017 to 63.61% last month. Sinn Fein appears to have cannibalised the nationalist vote rather than extended it, as its share increased by 1% and that of the nationalist SDLP fell by 2.9%. As a share of the total vote the nationalist total amounted to 40.93% (353,069 votes), when including votes for People before Profit and the Irish Republican Socialist Party, (on the grounds that their position on the national question involves support for a united Ireland).

A point made here before however is that the national question will not be confined to purely national questions whenever it comes to be posed as a realistic possibility. The ‘conversation’ campaigned for by Sinn Fein about such possibility does not make it probable.

The combined vote of unionist parties was only just under 4,000 less than the nationalist total at 40.47%. Its composition changed however, as some DUP voters found something even more reactionary to vote for – the Traditional Unionist Voice vote increased from 2.55% to 7.63%, increasing more than three times absolutely. Sinn Fein became the largest Party only because of Unionist division. Its prominence is therefore symbolic of what caused this division and weakening of unionism.

Since it might reasonably be expected that voting in a border poll will entail different considerations and additional incentives to participation it is necessary to consider what the election results imply for the outcome of a border poll. If we consider the Sinn Fein result not just in terms of those who voted (29%) but as a share of the electorate as a whole (18.5%) we can see the scope of the potential impact of any increased turnout.

It is assumed that the 2021 census results that will come out relatively soon will record an increase in the Catholic share of the population and decrease in the Protestant. The last Census in 2011 found 45.1% of the Northern Ireland population were Catholic, with 48.4% from a Protestant background. More importantly, religious background does not map directly onto political allegiance – the 2021 Northern Ireland Life and Times (NILT) survey reported that 32% of respondents identified as unionist, 26% as nationalist and 38% as other. An examination of support for the Alliance Party illustrates the complexity.

It was held up as the real winner of the election, heralding not the victory of Irish nationalism but of ‘the centre ground’ in which the ‘constitutional question’ is not primary. The party’s vote increased to 13.53% (116,681 votes) from 9.05% (72,717 votes), or an absolute increase in votes of 60%.

The Party originates as a straightforward Unionist Party with a clear position on the border but has moved away from presenting as a non-sectarian unionist party to a party variously described as neither unionist nor nationalist, as ‘other’, agnostic on the border or simply seeking to relegate it to the future. Beyond this, the Alliance Party has never shown that it is any real opposition to most of the reactionary policies pursued by either Irish nationalism or Irish unionism.

The weakness of this is obvious. The national question is not one that can forever be avoided and the context and terms in which it is presented will go a long way in determining responses. It will not simply be a question of recording existing opinions but a political struggle to change them, which will be heavily impacted by economic and social developments that will be driven by outside forces, as we have already seen through Brexit.

Most people already have a view, even Alliance voters. The NILT survey is reported as showing that over half of all Alliance voters supported membership of the UK while only 35% of it from a Catholic background supported a united Ireland. When we consider that some (minority) of nationalists, in the SDLP for example, may not vote for a united Ireland and that the majority of those who do not vote will be from a Protestant background, the odds on a vote for a united Ireland are fairly long, as is the timescale in which it might become otherwise.

What has heightened speculation has been Brexit and the economic and political effects of unionist support for it, including through some unionists finding themselves voting against it. While the DUP strongly supported it, and the hardest version of it they could get, the Ulster Unionist Party opposed Brexit, although it left it to its members whether they could support it or not.

The reverberations from the inconsistency between the anti-Brexit view of a minority of unionist voters and its most prominent leaders is not something that is going to go away. Brexit is not a one-off move, as many of its supporters believe. Far from being the achievement of ‘freedom’ it involves increasing separation from Europe with all the negative consequences that it will continue to bring, for as long as it is implemented as it is currently. What is really symbolic in the circumstances is the large number of unionists getting Irish (EU) passports (even some who voted for Brexit).

Trade between North and South has increased dramatically while trade between the Irish State and Britain has reduced as some of this is re-routed from the direct crossing via Dublin port to Northern Ireland and then into the Irish State. This in itself matters because the Irish State is no longer significantly underdeveloped compared to Britain. It is no longer clearly the case that people in the North would be significantly worse off if they lived in a united Ireland, on top of which the sectarian aspects of the Irish State have diminished, although far from disappeared. What were once absolutes have been, and are still, in transition. It is the North that now looks backward and parochial to increasing numbers of people across the island.

What is of more immediate importance is that despite claims to having got Brexit done, the Tory Government has demonstrated that it hasn’t got anywhere near it. This is most obvious with the dispute over the Northern Ireland Protocol but is also shown through more delays to the introduction of controls on EU goods imported into Britain; plus the failure to gear up its own regulatory bodies to perform the functions previously carried out at EU level, and continued complaints of exclusion from European initiatives such as the Horizon scientific research programme.

The DUP is now refusing to join the Executive of the devolved administration and to allow the newly elected Assembly to operate. It claims that the Protocol has impacted on the constitutional position of Northern Ireland as part of the UK, even though Jeffrey Donaldson has previously specifically dismissed such a claim, and the Party’s previous leader attempted to argue its positive impact on the local economy.

The DUP’s problem is not that Brexit has failed but that it has succeeded in demonstrating that it was a mistake. The Protocol that was necessitated by the hardest Brexit the DUP could support is held up as being to blame for weakening political links to Britain. It dishonestly claims that it fundamentally impairs Northern Ireland’s constitutional position as part of the UK while nationalists equally dishonestly claim it has no significance at all.

While the DUP opposes the Protocol and nationalists support it both want it changed, and both want to pretend and ensure that Brexit can and will have little or no impact on trade. While both claimed before the vote that Brexit would have big consequences they now want to pretend it can have next to none. It is claimed that the frictions and additional costs to trade can be more or less ameliorated and risks to the integrity of the EU’s Single Market minimised if not ignored.

All are in reality, or so it is claimed, united on a ‘landing zone’ for a deal in which goods from Britain destined for the Northern Ireland market go through a radically different procedure than those being forwarded to the Irish State. In this the business lobby is widely quoted as the experts without any particular agenda.

Already the EU has signaled that there can be dramatic reductions in checks but that this requires access to information, data flows and means of assurance that the British have so far refused to give, contrary to the Protocol they agreed and signed. Despite claims to the contrary the risk to the Single Market is not zero, and the British Foreign Secretary has already boasted of the future ability of Britain to import into Northern Ireland agricultural products from the rest of the world that would not be allowed into the European market. This is not to mention other British objections around state aid and governance etc. that the EU will not accept.

The DUP hitched itself to Boris Johnson’s Brexit and was betrayed through his agreement to the Protocol, an agreement the Brexit Tories had no intention of keeping. For the Tories, the Protocol gives them the advantage of continuing to rally their support around a Brexit struggle they claimed to have already won, while offering some hope that they can leverage any EU concessions into the wider Trade and Cooperation Agreement.

For the DUP, reversal of previous claims that the Protocol is no threat and had positive economic impacts, provides an avenue for them to regroup from their mistakes and attempt to regain their position as the biggest party and therefore entitlement to the post of First Minister. It was their idea to change the rules so that the largest party could claim this post, which had previously enabled it to demand support from unionists in order to prevent Sinn Fein capturing it. If they can get sufficient concessions on the Protocol it can wait for another election, claim the credit and then get back to displacing Sinn Fein as the biggest party.

This requires reliance on the Johnson Government continuing to dispute with the EU but also ultimately coming to an agreement. Despite a continuation of the dispute being a reminder that Johnson did not ‘get Brexit done’ it is the only route he has to protecting his position inside the Conservative Party and providing some sort of cover for Brexit’s negative consequences. The introduction of the legislative route to overturning the Protocol builds some delay to actually having to break from it or swallow defeat. This is obviously not sustainable in the longer term and is less and less convincing in distracting from Brexit’s failures. In these circumstances The EU has little reason to accept British demands.

The DUP will find it difficult to retreat while Johnson pretends he can face down the EU, and Johnson has become such a liability his policy of asking the punters why he did Brexit in the first place, and sticking a crown on pint glasses, will not cover for his mess.

The victory of Sinn Fein might be symbolic, but it arises within circumstances more important than such symbolism. It might herald a position in government office North and South of the border but the border will still be there and, as usual with its successes, it will illustrate that what is good for it has only remote connection to what is good for the Irish working class.

Covid and the failure of the NHS

Posted on November 19, 2021 by irishmarxism

Thirty-six years ago I had an interview for a temporary clerical officer job in the local hospital. One question was – ‘Who is the most important person in the health service?’

Thinking on my feet as I sat in the interview I answered – ‘the patient.’

Which is the right answer.

Although this doesn’t appear to be the case today.

While I was recruited to possibly the very lowest rank in the health service all those years ago, those today at the very top appear to have a different view.

Last week the Minister for Health at Stormont, Robin Swann, issued a public consultation on whether new staff recruited to the health service and social services should be compulsorily vaccinated. The Minister both in the consultation and in interviews more or less ruled out vaccination of all staff, considering it relevant, or perhaps only possible, for new and agency staff.

It should be remembered that the Minister and Executive ensured that all health service staff, including office staff with no contact with patients, were offered vaccination last year before patients described as extremely clinically vulnerable – those with suppressed immune systems for example.

When some of these patients were sent the draft of a letter proposing that they ensure all visitors to their homes take a Covid test, the project disappeared when it was returned with a question whether this would also include the visit of district nurses.

The public consultation launched last week mentions that “Trade unions, employees and employers will have a key role in this consultation, but the views of the general public will also be very important.” It also mentioned relatives, and failed to mention patients.

This week the Minister announced he wanted the introduction of a mandatory Covid-19 passport scheme and this has been agreed by all the parties except the DUP. So, while the Minister wants anyone going into a restaurant or pub to demonstrate that they are vaccinated, or not otherwise a risk, he thinks it’s acceptable for nursing staff dealing with the care of vulnerable patients to be excused this requirement.

Part of the reason for the recent increase in Covid is obviously the partially seasonal nature of the virus. In the case of Northern Ireland however it is also due to the relatively lower numbers vaccinated than Scotland, England and Wales, despite having had a head start on them. It currently has a higher number totally unvaccinated and a lower number fully vaccinated with a booster shot.

Not only has this probably led to increased severity of infection – requiring hospitalisation – but also increased the sickness level of health service staff (up to 20% among nurses). Media reports following Freedom of Information requests indicate potentially lower vaccination rates among nursing and social services staff than among the rest of the population.

The trade union UNISON has opposed mandatory vaccination of nurses and called for a voluntary approach of persuasion. The union might appear to be on more solid ground if it did not make the stupid point of asking why health service staff should be singled out. Management might also strengthen its position if it were to at least mention the needs of patients, that their views should be canvassed, and that protocols were in place to ensure that the most vulnerable patients were not unnecessarily exposed to unvaccinated staff. Both might have more of a point if they had followed through on their argument and were to point to a rigorous campaign to get staff to voluntarily vaccinate.

Unfortunately, as argued before, the needs of the NHS bureaucracy have been put before the needs of the people it is supposed to serve; summed up in the mantra that we must ‘protect the NHS.’ Politicians wave the possibility of the closure of Emergency departments; of the health service “about to topple over” if immediate action is not taken; and warnings by senior medical staff that “this phase of the pandemic is now the toughest”.

Just like the Tories in Britain, they point to the crisis they helped create in order to point away from their own culpability. Instead, it becomes an alibi that implicates those subject to a collapsing service who are blamed for not following guidance and advice.

They congratulate the staff on their heroism in order to absolve themselves while making their heroism a continuing requirement of their work; wrap themselves around the NHS brand in order to avoid and deflect away from their role in its failure, and threaten future collapse as a move to pre-emptively protect . . . themselves.

This partially explains Swann’s particular penchant for lavishing praise on NHS staff with ‘proof’ of seriousness by repeated announcements of additional funding. When advertising the gruelling pressure on doctors and nurses dealing with the pandemic, he presents himself as a vicarious fellow sufferer. Identification of the NHS with himself reaches a pinnacle when he says that “I don’t have enough nurses, I don’t have enough doctors.”

Additional funding, as he acknowledges himself, cannot conjure up and deploy staff out of nowhere; its announcement is instead more usefully deployed as a response to internal requests for action by medical staff raising concern at where services are heading. Additional funding cannot immediately increase capacity, especially if it is non-recurring and limited to a one-off injection, but unfortunately long-term planning has not been a strong feature of the NHS.

So, we are now enjoined to accept renewed restrictions involving Covid-19 passports in order that the NHS not be overwhelmed. Unfortunately, it is abundantly clear that the NHS has already been overwhelmed. While pointing to the crisis and away from themselves we are supposed to listen to the words of politicians and not recall their responsibility and years of inaction.

Years of unprecedented underfunding of the NHS are now presented as a historic problem that attaches to no one in particular today. We are simply reminded that the task now, our task, is to ‘protect the NHS’ in an unprecedented pandemic.

Many socialists get very defensive about criticism of the NHS, as if it were some sort of socialist enterprise in the midst of capitalism. The reasons for this are numerous, including that it is free at the point of delivery, is not run for a profit and is owned by the state.

Except that it is not free, and is funded by a regressive taxation system; many private companies make a lot of money out of it; it is owned and managed by a capitalist state, and having worked in it for 22 years I can confirm that there is nothing democratic about the way it is managed. Like all state ownership, it is bureaucratic and unaccountable, as repeated scandals exposed within it testify.

It is not therefore simply a question of underfunding, and to uncritically defend it because the only alternative is conceived as privatisation is a mistake. Socialism involves different ownership of the productive forces, including those that protect and improve our health, and this democratic workers’ ownership is not a question of a name on a title deed but of how productive forces are organised and developed.

Workers are not ignorant or indifferent to the bureaucratic failings of the NHS because they are the ones who use it, while some better off workers, middle classes, and definitely the richest all use private health care to one degree or another.

It is argued that the pandemic is unprecedented but the longer restrictions continue the more circumstances can no longer bear the description of exceptional. The lower rate of vaccination might go some way to explaining the greater effect of increased incidence of Covid than in other countries, while the later roll-out of booster vaccinations than in other countries might similarly explain renewed restrictions. Nevertheless, it is the declared necessity of protecting the health system that is employed as justification for the new restrictions announced this week.

We have been informed repeatedly about the pressure which health service staff have been put under, and our reliance on them has been reason enough for most people to accept restrictions. That this pressure has been harsh is real enough but this in itself does not permit the demands of the politicians and bureaucrats to go without challenge.

There have been enough first- and second-hand reports that not all NHS staff have been under similar pressure to ask why this organisation cannot more effectively and efficiently deal with Covid and the other demands placed upon it. Some of the reasons we have mentioned above – that the NHS is a bureaucracy in which individual talent and commitment can only have individual effects.

That the NHS is failing is shown by some of the latest statistics from the Northern Ireland health service which show that between the years 2019/20 and 2020/21 total admissions to hospitals fell by 30%; average occupied beds fell by 17.9% and total theatre cases fell from 110,605 to 59,762, a fall of 46%, and 50% on the previous year’s figure.

What these figures show is that it was not simply a question of capacity but the capability to use that capacity and the inability to use it efficiently. A factor in this will no doubt be increased sickness of staff, but the higher rate of unvaccinated staff contributed to this. Other factors will be the inability to institute infection control without reducing capacity with the creation of much-hyped ‘Nightingale Hospitals’ illustrating the problem.

The results of this failure can be seen in increased waiting times; for example in the 112,915 patients waiting to go to hospital at 30 June 2021, up from 97,243 at 30 June 2020, and 88,203 at the same time in 2019; an increase of 28% over the two years. This is an example of only the most obvious and measurable outcome, which most damaging effect is in the impact on health.

The British government has successfully protected itself by using the NHS as a shield because its popularity has facilitated this, which in turn is partially because the only alternative to it is perceived as privatisation, which is widely unpopular. Much of the Left, with its state-centred view of socialism and greater predilection for knowing what it is against rather than what it is for, has put itself in no position but to follow the government, with the add-on of demanding more money.

When the London Olympics opened nearly ten years ago, it was noted that the NHS was part of the show, a tribute to its place in the national psyche. What it wasn’t was a tribute to socialism, no more than was the presence in the show of James Bond and the Queen.

The Northern Ireland Protocol and Brexit 2 – the cart without a horse

Posted on October 24, 2021 by irishmarxism

The offer by the EU to significantly reduce checks on goods, especially food, on the Irish Sea border, and the promise to legislate for British authorisation of medicines supplied into NI and therefore the Single Market, takes away the salience of complaints of barriers to the supply of goods from Britain into Northern Ireland. The solution of the medicines issue was promised long ago and the EU was never going to allow itself to be held up to criticism for preventing the supply of medicines, including cancer treatments, to NI. The non-issue of British sausages that was already hardly alive was killed once again by the EU breaking with its policy on chilled meats entering the Single Market.

This does not mean that these issues are solved. One reason that the existing border checks did not work was because the British and Unionist minister at Stormont made sure that they didn’t. The scope, or motivation, for a repeat approach by the British in the enforcement of the compensating mechanisms proposed by the EU for the abandonment of checks at the sea border remain to be seen.

Instead, the question of the role of the EU’s European Court of Justice (ECJ) has been held aloft by the British as the key requirement in negotiation of a new Protocol. Of course, the unionists don’t want any Protocol but that could only be the outcome if the UK and EU entered a trade war that none would benefit from, especially the British. The unionists aren’t worth that price for the British so they will just have to sell as a victory whatever Johnson and Frost agree to in the end.

However, if both the British and unionists wanted to declare victory now is the time to do it. The EU declared it would not negotiate and it has; its restrictions on food imports and requirement for authorisation within the EU for medicines circulating within it are important elements of its Single Market but have been given up in this case (the former to an extent). It can bypass them only because it believes it can contain these concessions within the Protocol, that is within its arrangements for the North of Ireland. It obviously takes the view that there will be no leakage into any other trading relationship and no precedent set that could be exploited by other trading partners.

Both the British and unionists could therefore claim that not only has it forced the EU to negotiate the Protocol, which it still denies, but that they have compelled the EU to surrender much of what it said it could not do. It has political coverage for this not only for the reasons just set out but also because for its Irish member state and for Northern nationalists what matters is that there is no Single Market land border down the middle of the country. As long as the checks along the Irish sea are held to be working, they are happy.

But this will remain an issue. The more the British depart from EU regulation, the greater the scope for unapproved goods to circulate into the Single Market and therefore greater risk to the integrity of it. The compensating proposals from the EU would therefore have to have meaningful effect and will grow in impact as Britain diverges from EU requirements, whether arising from its own decisions or from those of changed EU rules.

This is not the declared reason for the new prominence of the ECJ in British demands. Instead, it is what a NI business representative called “nothing but a Brexit purity issue.” For him the ECJ “it is not a practical or business issue.” In fact, for business the Protocol gives unique access to both the UK and EU markets. Were the British market certain to continue to be the much more lucrative and important the unionists would have little to fear from this parallel opportunity. However, the growing trade between North and South and the reduced trade between the Irish State and Britain means that their opposition to the Protocol on political grounds is justified even if nationalists deny it. Unfortunately for unionist leaders this political opposition is detrimental to the people they represent, which will not have short term importance but will in the long term.

The unionist commentator Newton Emerson has argued that Irish and EU complaints about British negotiating tactics are a ‘slight loss of perspective’ and that their annoyance is mistaken. In effect, both sides are at it and it’s a case of ‘all is fair in love and war’ . . . and trade negotiations. He is however wrong to say that “the fact that Frost is tearing up his own deal is a redundant complaint. The protocol is being negotiated.” It matters that the negotiations that are now being conducted are not a first stab at an agreement but follow bad faith negotiations by the British who never intended to implement the deal they signed.

It matters because all the arguments made by Emerson about the ECJ not being necessary for Single Market governance must face up to this. It is not a matter of whether the NI Protocol can be made amenable to Swiss type arrangements or those governing EU relations with Norway, Iceland and Lichtenstein, which insert arrangements that put ECJ competence at a greater distance.

Why would the EU agree to Swiss governance arrangements when the British have just rejected Swiss trading arrangements? Why would they seek to introduce arrangements involving numerous bilateral treaties that they already find too onerous and have sought to dispense with? Why would they seek the governance arrangements applied with Norway etc. when the British specifically rejected the EEA option as the form of Brexit they should seek? Part of the reason why the EU will not want to agree is that the British cannot be trusted.

If Emerson wants to critique the statements of Irish politicians in relation to the British approach to negotiations he would be better to start with Varadkar’s nonsense that “for decades, for centuries, British people in many ways were renowned by the fact that they were an honourable people; people whose word you could trust . . .“ And by “people” it should be understood to mean the British state.

Has he not heard of Perfidious Albion? Has he no knowledge of the Anglo-Irish treaty, with its Boundary Commission, or the promise by the British king in 1921 that the new Northern Ireland parliament would be “an instrument of happiness and good government for all parts of the community . . .’?

The British may reject the mitigations of border checks and alternative arrangements and may demand removal of any role for the ECJ. If they do, they may proceed with Article 16, which will lead to further negotiations but also opens up the possibility of retaliatory measures against them by the EU. Tory Brexiteers are still bloviating about the EU needing Britain more than the Brits need the EU but only the blinkered continue to entertain such nonsense.

It is reported that Article 16 may be triggered by the British on narrow grounds that may avoid a fuller EU retaliatory response but we would have to see what such narrow grounds might be and the EU has indicated it is weary of British negotiating tactics.

Even if the EU were to agree to some intervening body between the operation of the Protocol and adjudication by the ECJ, this would not essentially change the fact that there would be a Protocol that would involve a trade border between NI and GB and none between the North and South of Ireland. It would not change Northern Ireland membership of both the UK and EU markets or the economic dynamics released by this arrangement. It would not put to bed the problems that will arise if the British decide to increasingly diverge from EU rules. It would not change the enforcement mechanisms ultimately available under the Protocol or wider Trade and Cooperation Agreement and it would not change the power imbalance between the UK and EU.

The attitude socialists should take to all of this should follow from their opposition to the whole reactionary Brexit project, which seeks to reverse the internationalisation of capitalism and the long-achieved broaching of nation state constraints on the productive forces. Such an international development of capitalism is precisely the material basis for socialism and the unity of the working class irrespective of nationality.

Some on the left have opposed Brexit only by registering its English nationalist clothes and necessarily xenophobic and racist expression, without appreciation of this more fundamental basis. For some, not even this has dawned on them and they have supported Brexit without being able to demonstrate that it has led to any compensating advance by the working class.

Just as nationalism feeds off other nationalisms so the Brexit war of words has involved Priti Patel advocating the threat to Ireland of food shortages from a no-deal Brexit and the French threatening to deny power supplies to the Channel Islands. Socialists must oppose all such offensive nationalist threats. Opposition to Brexit does not mean defence of the policies of the EU but simply recognition that we do not oppose the development of capitalism by demanding it regress to a more primitive form less suited to creation of a new society.

In terms of the Protocol, we oppose the creation of a land border in Ireland as a strengthening of division on the island and recognise that this could only come about from increasing the separation of Britain from the EU, most likely from acrimonious conflict that would have the effect of dividing workers, and not only in Ireland.

Back to part 1

A Brexit compromise with Unionism?

Posted on April 16, 2021 by irishmarxism

In the previous post I argued that there should be no attempt to conciliate unionism, and certainly not by socialists. Although its politics is entirely reactionary this is what is being proposed by a number of commentators who really should know better.

In one blog, a comment asserted that the ‘institutions of the [Northern] State are errand boys for Sinn Féin, who are errand girls for the Army Council, which is a body of totally unreconstructed IRA hard men from back in the day. Moreover, it is an almost entirely Northern body, on the cusp of taking control of a 26 County State.’

This, of course, is phantasy. Locally, the regular columnist in the nationalist newspaper questioned whether ‘sectarian control [has] simply changed hands?’ and asserted that it was ‘difficult to avoid the observation’.

This ignores recent history that is littered with loyalist riots against what they see as encroachment on their rights by Catholics. Indeed, such riots played a major role in the start of ‘the Troubles’ with such inconvenient facts as the first policeman killed being shot by loyalists.

Conciliation has already been adopted by the Police Service of Northern Ireland pretending that loyalist paramilitaries are not involved in organising and leading the riots. Its first statement pointed the finger but refrained from outright assignment of responsibility. It waited until the umbrella group for the main paramilitary groups had issued an appropriate statement denying involvement, and calling for only peaceful action, before stating that these organisations had not ‘sanctioned’ violent protest and that only individuals may have been involved. This is the normal way of trying to prevent escalation; part of what was called a long time ago an ‘acceptable level of violence.’

The Unionist columnist Newton Emerson has written in a number of Irish newspapers that compromise with loyalist demands should be made to protect the peace process. After all, warnings by nationalists and the Irish Government that republican violence would follow any Brexit land border within the island had led to it being placed down the Irish Sea. If Irish nationalism could threaten violence to get its way what’s wrong with unionism doing the same?

There is some obvious truth in this, except that a hardened land border, while not strictly contrary to the Good Friday Agreement (GFA) as often claimed, would not only serve (dissident) republicans but would also severely undermine the current political arrangements.

In the GFA nationalists were to accept the legitimacy of partition and of the Northern State in return for some cross-border bodies, a hypothetical mechanism to bring about a united Ireland through a border poll, one however that was in the gift of the British Government, and a power-sharing Stormont regime that included an effective sectarian veto on change for both sides, which of course is more obstacle than opportunity for those seeking change.

If the border were to be strengthened as a result of a hard Brexit that most of unionism supported while the majority in the North of Ireland opposed, and with the stupidity of the DUP coming back to haunt them in loyalist riots, nationalism might consider that promises are cheap but reality expensive. It was not republican dissidents that put a border down the Irish Sea but the Irish Government and the EU with the blessing of senior US politicians.

Emerson goes on to ask ‘should we risk restarting the Troubles ‘over inspecting packets of ham at Larne?’ He queries the evidence and reason for believing that the EU Single Market ‘would otherwise be swamped via circuitous smuggling of food through Britain and Northern Ireland.’

He also, in rather contradictory fashion, suggests a law-and-order solution to smuggling across the Irish border and maximum mitigation of the effects of the Protocol in order to assuage loyalist paramilitaries who, although almost defeated, require concessions. In this regard there are further press reports of money for these paramilitaries in a continuation of the policy of weening them off criminality and political violence by giving them what they want. Alongside this a law-and-order solution would be applied to the really delinquent factions.

All this is washed down by the admission that ‘at some point we will have to confront the moral squalor of giving in to violence but that moment is hardly now, when so little might be required to prevent violence. Rather it would be immoral to prioritise hypothetical ham over life and property.’

Of course, the ham is far from hypothetical and Emerson gives every indication of suffering from the illusion of the supporters of Brexit who never understood the magnitude of the decision they supported. He regards the potential breach of the EU Single Market as small, although both the EU and British sought to use the North of Ireland as leverage in the overall Trade and Cooperation Agreement, promoting its importance to any overall deal.

There is no reason to believe that loopholes would not be exploited and no reason for the EU to believe that the British Government would not seek to exploit concessions or mitigation or whatever term is used to fudge the regulations. The British have openly breached agreements already reached and failed to implement practical measures, such as installation of inspection posts and access to data, that it promised to deliver.

The EU has claimed that the most difficult issues could be solved by the British agreeing to synchronise their food standards with those of the EU but the British have ruled this out, and while the British have asked for flexibility the EU has stated that they must first implement what they have already agreed.

It would go too far to say that loyalism and the British Government are in cahoots, the latter is not attempting to get rid of the Protocol altogether, but the pressure applied by both is in the same direction.

The Single Market may not seem so dramatic as yet another political crisis in Northern Ireland but the EU has more interest in the former than the latter: concessions that are given only to Britain might easily give rise to discrimination cases against the EU. More generally, retreating on the basis of pressure from political violence does not set a good example for any other potential challenges to Brussels and member states.

There is no reason or evidence to believe that smuggling would not take place on the Irish border were it also to become the border for Brexit, or to believe that such smuggling would need to ‘swamp’ the EU Single Market for it to matter to the EU. On the other hand there is good reason to believe that mitigation of the trade border in the Irish Sea would not be enough for loyalism. For the EU, checks on any border would have to mean something and if they did loyalism would object.

There is no doubting that these checks are onerous and will increase after the transition but the negotiations between the EU and British to find technical solutions do not warrant the view that the Protocol will be effectively removed. These negotiations were reported by RTE and the Guardian, with some sceptical coverage of them by one informed blogger.

There has so far not been enough direct impact on imports to motivate those not consumed by potential constitutional implications to protest. As Emerson points out, Marks & Spencer has just announced the opening of a new food store in Coleraine, and Covid-19 has been a much more immediate barrier than Brexit to people getting what they want.

This does not mean that loyalism is not angry, or has cause, but their anger should really be directed to the DUP who led them up the garden path with Boris Johnson at the forefront. Nevertheless, while loyalism does not need to be particularly coherent, there are also limits to what an incoherent view of the world will achieve in bending that world to its own misapprehensions.

Emerson’s law-and-order solution does not seem to recognise the incongruity of calling for increased repression of dissident republicans and others in order to reduce ‘paperwork’. He wants a retreat on policing of protest demonstrations that are held within unionist-majority areas so as to avoid ‘confrontation’, but it’s not clear how much consideration he has given to the minority living within these ‘unionist-majority areas’.

Of course, in most Protestant areas Orange marches are generally popular and there can be little doubt that a majority of Protestants oppose the protocol and would have sympathy with the aims of demonstrations against it. The majority would have less sympathy with the paramilitaries who often accompany such displays and that is their problem: one doesn’t come without the other. Emerson forgets that the immediate victims of loyalist paramilitaries are Protestants in working class areas who are often presented as the paramilitaries’ political constituency, in so far as they can claim one.

He is right therefore to acknowledge the ‘moral squalor’ involved in concessions to loyalism but over twenty years from the deal that was supposed to bring peace and an end to them, we apparently have to make some more, and to the same people. He says that ‘we’ have to make them but the majority of the population have had no choice in the matter. His ‘giving in to violence’ has in the past not only involved ‘giving in’ but the sponsorship of loyalist paramilitaries by the British State through all sorts of collusion. This has involved not only accepting loyalist violence but protecting its perpetrators and assisting its organisation and effectiveness through state agents. In his seemingly bold and brave admission of unfortunate necessity we are to forget what it has meant in the past.

If Newton Emerson’s proposals have any educative value, they show the limitations of unionist opinion, even from its most intelligent and least prejudiced sources. It reminds me of the statement last week by First Minister Arlene Foster who, after riots and petrol bombs, and with one bus driver attacked in a case of “attempted murder”, declared that these actions were an “embarrassment” and “only serve to take the focus off the real law breakers in Sinn Fein.”

In the mind of unionism, even when its their fault it’s really someone else’s, anybody else’s. Brexit was a unionist own-goal which they are trying to reverse. Socialists have no interest in defending their seventeenth century reaction from twenty-first century capitalism. It would be good if the many on the left in Ireland who also supported Brexit would acknowledge that they too have made a mistake.

Back to part 1

Recognising Unionist rights?

Posted on April 12, 2021 by irishmarxism

A Belfast bus burning on the Shankill Road

The recent riots in the North of Ireland have been described as the worst for some years. It is not that they are particularly large or violent. In fact, they have been localised and rather small, many rioters being not much more than children. Some have arisen from loyalist groups more involved in criminality than politics and kicking back at policing too effective for their liking.

So why the concern? The first is that they might get out of control and gather momentum. The summer is the traditional unionist marching season so there will be plenty of opportunities for disturbances. This is especially the case now that the state is going to have to relax the Covid lockdown. A second is concern that the Boris Johnson Government is not considered to have the skills to pacify the situation, or may even have reasons to keep the pot boiling.

It is his betrayal of the unionists in his ‘fantastic’ – ‘oven-ready’ – Brexit deal that has been the main reason for the eruption of unionist anger. If the definition of stupidity is believing anything he says then the Democratic Unionist Party has shown itself to be the dumbest of the dumb. Yet even now their leaders call on him to do the right thing and scrap the Northern Ireland Protocol to the Trade and Cooperation Agreement with the European Union; something with much bigger ramifications for the British state than riots in Ireland.

The placing down the Irish Sea of the inevitable trade border arising from Northern Ireland staying in the EU Single Market is, as unionists claim, a clear separation of it from Great Britain, even if nationalists and others claim it has no constitutional significance. Its maintenance would be a reverse for unionism and cause for demoralisation. While the same barriers are in place between Britain and the Irish State, the effect is to encourage further North-South economic integration. This, however, is of most significance from a longer term perspective and the Brexit deal excludes services, where it might be expected that the British and EU economies might diverge, with possible similar effects between the two states in Ireland.

The leader of the DUP Arlene Foster started off the year more or less accepting the NI Protocol and pointing out that Northern Ireland membership of both the UK and EU markets gave it certain advantages in terms of trade and foreign investment. The more bitter DUP MPs, such as Sammy Wilson and Ian Paisley, nevertheless continued to denounce the betrayal, perhaps all the more so because they had been personally associated with being taken for fools. Leaked minutes of a DUP meeting appeared to indicate that at least some DUP members had about as much respect for these figures as many of us outside.

Which brings us to one of the more immediate causes of unionist agitation. As pointed out in a previous post the main cause for the swift change of direction by the whole DUP and its titular leader was an opinion poll showing significant loss of support to the even more rabidly militant Traditional Unionist Voice. When the NI Director of Prosecutions recommended no prosecution of Sinn Fein members following their attendance en masse at an IRA leader’s funeral, and their apparent breach of Covid-19 restrictions, it proved to be the spark that lit the fire.

But this too, while causing understandable unionist anger, is largely a confection. Unionists condemned the DPP decision but blamed the police when it was the police who had recommended prosecution. Unionists have lighted upon liaison between the police and Sinn Fein before the funeral as a reason given by the DPP for likely inability to prosecute, but such liaison is not unusual.

The other reason given by the DPP was the Covid regulations themselves and their unfitness for the purpose of successful prosecution. But it was the DUP (and Sinn Fein) who were responsible for drafting these regulations and if they could not be prosecuted it is yet another example of their incompetence. Much of the consequences of Brexit and of the fall-out from the Bobby Storey funeral can therefore be laid at the door of the DUP. Far better for someone else to be the target of loyalist anger than themselves.

Arlene Foster called for the head of the Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI) to resign and refused to meet him, although then did so since she had previously met the loyalist paramilitaries; while the leader of the rival Ulster Unionist Party joined in calling for his resignation but could not explain in a radio interview what he had done wrong. Meanwhile, the first loyalist riot in Belfast against this failure to prosecute lack of social distancing at the republican funeral took place in the same area in which a loyalist funeral in September had failed to do exactly the same thing.

In a sense none of this incoherence matters, reactionary causes don’t have to be coherent, they just have to be reactionary. The charge levied by unionism is that everyone else doesn’t understand them, doesn’t appreciate their anger, and doesn’t acknowledge that their ‘British identity’ is being undermined. Since this amorphous charge is without any clear definition it becomes whatever unionism says it is. What is being claimed is that anything unionism doesn’t like is undemocratic, and the more it is upset the more undemocratic it is, and the less everyone else understands.

So what unionism wants is what it wants and deserves to get. The Northern State was set up for them and it should fulfil its role of satisfying the majority whose existence it is for. Since its position has historically been one of sectarian privilege and supremacy this should continue to be bolstered, and any attempt to undermine it is undemocratic and sectarian itself. The nationalist demands for respect, tolerance and equality apply to unionism in equal measure, which means respect for its reactionary culture, tolerance of its sectarian practices and obeisance to its supremacist demands. The current political arrangements in the North of Ireland are supposedly based on these values, to be shared by nationalists and unionists alike, making it obvious why they aren’t working.

We who live here however are expected to bow down before unionist demands and recognise the failure to offer unionism what is its due, so that we must sympathise with its turmoil and incoherence. We are supposed to accept the democratic rights of bigots on the basis that there are a lot of them. Fortunately, the world is a much bigger place and it is possible to imagine that the limits of political change are not defined by sectarian reactionaries, no matter how locally numerous they may be.

While forecasts of an imminent border poll and of a potential united Ireland are premature, the already existing growth of the non-unionist defining section of the population no longer allows unionism to constrain all political development and change. Even the attempt to share out resources, privileges and rights along sectarian lines has proven unstable, although without yet the maturation of forces to make it fall over.

Socialists should acknowledge that the death of sectarianism, and the forces that defend it and promote it, will not be painless and will not be entirely peaceful. In the next post I will look at renewed proposals to conciliate this sectarianism. In the meantime we should not support compromise with sectarian reaction, if only on the grounds that it does not work. What progress there has been even within Northern Ireland, has come from denying unionist demands and opposing its demonstrations and threats. Socialism or any sort of democratic settlement will not come without the defeat of unionism, the more demoralised it is the easier and less violent its demise will be.

Forward to part 2

Brexit isn’t working

Posted on March 9, 2021 by irishmarxism

Brexit isn’t working, and isn’t going to work. Sooner or later its false promises were going to be exposed and it didn’t take long. The recession caused by the Government’s Covid-19 lockdown policy has only partially hidden its effects but sector specific issues and complaints from trade associations plus the emergence of official statistics are revealing the damage.

French customs recorded that exports and imports to the UK in January fell by 13 and 20 per cent compared to the average of the previous six months, while the volume of French trade to other countries increased. German exports to the UK were down 30 per cent year on year, continuing the decline since the Brexit referendum, while Italy reported a 38 per cent drop in exports and 70 per cent drop in exports.

Some of this is undoubtedly due to the pandemic and its effect on the reduction of consumer demand, and some due to the build-up of inventory in anticipation of Brexit, but these are dramatic reductions. Although not dramatic enough it seems.

It is now reported that the British Government is so Brexit unprepared that the introduction of checks required by it, postponed until April and July, would so damage trade that they could lead to shortages in supermarkets. They will therefore be deferred further, with a “lighter touch” in controls on imports while work on border inspection posts continues, or in some cases only starts.

British exports to the EU however will continue to have the full suite of border checks applied, while the EU will be alert to the components imported into the UK that are incorporated into these exports but have been subject to rudimentary checks, if any. Other countries might also wonder at British discrimination in favour of EU exports to the UK while theirs suffers the full panoply of inspections. This temporary solution cannot therefore be a permanent one but has the potential to create more problems – the “fantastic” Brexit deal all over it might be said.

On this score, while unable to implement controls on its own borders, the ‘Minister for the Benefits of Brexit’ still celebrates the achievement of “a sovereign country in full control of our own destiny while keeping open and free trade between us”; claiming that while many said it could not be done, David Frost can declare “but we did it”. Except that what “we did” – what he was personally responsible for negotiating – he has now torn up three times in one week in respect of the Northern Ireland Protocol (in relation to supermarkets, parcels and plants/machinery).

The greater integration of the Northern Ireland economy into the British, and the political divisions within it, have brought to the fore the irreducible problems of Brexit that in Britain have been addressed by reduction in trade, lorry parks, restriction of entry into Kent and postponement of the application of import controls.

These controls are undoubtedly onerous, with potentially separate approval documentation for hundreds of individual items in containers and lorries. Many seem petty and pointless, at least to those doing the trading. Before the controls were even implemented the leaders of the DUP and Sinn Fein had written to the EU Commission expressing concerns about the effects of these controls and asking for “flexibility”.

At the time I thought that Sinn Fein was complaining about something it had supported: the Brexit border had to go somewhere and it went down the Irish sea as it wanted. For the DUP the complaint was consistent with their opposition to any separation from Britain, even if it wasn’t consistent with their support for Brexit. But both were guilty of not accepting the seemingly empty statement of Theresa May that Brexit meant Brexit.

The difficulty of full implementation of the Brexit deal in relation to the North of Ireland was appreciated by the EU, which is why it was prepared to come to some agreement with the British Government if this could be separated from wider application. This is what the EU side thought it was doing when perfidious Albion did what it does.

Both the EU and the British sought to leverage the situation in Ireland to their advantage and the latest spat is a continuation of that. The breach of the Trade and Cooperation Agreement (TCA) is a provocation that obviously plays well for the Tories politically but it has no future and can only fool the gullible Brexit supporters so often – yes even some of them will eventually twig.

The EU will not be deterred from pursuing its existing course and if it does not hold all the cards, the ones held by the British entail paying a price for their being played. The range of actions it can take will always involve a higher price being incurred by them than the EU. The possible benefit to the British is that any eventual fudge needed to get the Irish Sea border arrangements to work can be claimed as a victory even if the EU is content to accept it.

For the EU, the difficulty is, as they say, one of trust. How can it be confident that any attempt to adjust the working of the NI Protocol does not entail more than a fudge that it can live with? It is even now pointing out that the British are not implementing the deal already agreed, including providing EU officials with the information they require to validate checks.

Given the nature of the existing TCA there is no great need for the EU to seek to ‘punish’ the British, it has enough mechanisms to address non-compliance. Were the British Government to still seek to essentially violate and contravene the Protocol it would compel the EU and Irish Government to choose between a Brexit border at the Irish land border or make the entry and exit points in the Irish State that border. The latter has been described by unionism as a win-win-win situation (for GB, NI and the Irish State) but it would entail all goods leaving the Irish State being subject to checks whether made in that EU member state or not, and it would mean acceptance into that state of any British product whether single market compliant or not; hardly a win for Dublin.

The Brexit border at the Irish border would be widely condemned as a breach of the Good Friday Agreement (GFA) and although it isn’t we have reached a stage where political reaction will very much go along the same lines as if it did. Practically it would be difficult to enforce and politically it would be very damaging. Were the GFA working smoothly it might be remotely possible to conceive that this just about might be accepted (at a stretch) but not under current and any conceivable future circumstances given the instability of the Stormont Assembly and Executive.

Sinn Fein would find it impossible to stay in a political arrangement which produced an obviously strengthened border. The DUP and other unionists are now faced with the same choice, as ex-DUP leader Peter Robinson has explained – basically suck it up or bring down the Executive and Assembly, which is not even guaranteed to get rid of the Protocol anyway. Comparisons have been made with unionist opposition to the Anglo-Irish Agreement in the 1980s, but this opposition failed.

The DUP engineered the temporary suspension of Brexit checks at the ports through claiming that there were threats to staff that were not confirmed by the police. Council staff from a DUP dominated council and from the DUP controlled Agriculture Department were briefly withdrawn prompting EU staff to follow suit. The DUP has been unable to back up its claims of intimidation and the trade unions involved have denied claims that they had raised serious concerns. The DUP Minister has also stopped work on building permanent border inspection posts (upon which work hasn’t started) but this too will not be a permanent obstacle to operation of the Protocol.

Loyalist politicians have engaged in their usual sabre-rattling, threatening to fight and engage in “guerrilla warfare” although this is always to be engaged in by someone else, in the first place by the loyalist paramilitaries. They in turn have reminded everyone that they and the wider ‘unionist community’ are “angry” and are withdrawing support from the Good Friday Agreement. Since this Agreement envisaged loyalist paramilitaries disappearing through bribery, and they have no intention of disappearing and see no need to do so when the bribes keep coming, what this ‘support’ amounts to rarely gets asked, just as it’s to lots of people’s advantage for it not to get answered.

The DUP came under criticism for meeting the paramilitaries’ umbrella group but the British Government, through the Northern Ireland Office, had already done so. Normally when the British do something unionists don’t like these paramilitaries eventually get around to killing Catholics. This time the immediate targets are as likely to be Protestant employees carrying out border checks as Catholics, and the British Government can be portrayed as at least partially on their side in seeking modification of the Protocol, if not yet its removal. Their problem is the EU and the Agreement made with it.

DUP opposition has been motivated as much by falling polling numbers as the embarrassing results of its Brexit policy. Its support was reported in February to have dropped to a 20-year low of 19 per cent, more than nine percentage points down on its vote share at the last Stormont election, which could see it being eclipsed as the biggest party by Sinn Fein. The First Minister of Northern Ireland would then be a supporter of a United Ireland. Most of the lost DUP voters have gravitated to the even more rabidly reactionary Traditional Unionist Voice, which according to the survey has increased its support by 10 per cent.

DUP leader Arlene Foster began the year by declaring the Protocol “the gateway of opportunity for the whole of the UK and for Northern Ireland” while now calling it “absolutely devastating.” The DUP privately lobbied the British Government for a “Swiss-style” deal before their Economy Minister condemned it for requiring the UK to “slavishly” follow the EU. The same Minister also complained about a £70m hole in her budget created by the loss of EU funding.

Unionist opposition is therefore incoherent and is partially muffled by the duplicitous policy of the British Government, which is attempting to delay the worst impacts of Brexit and probably harbours some vain hope it can modify the workings of the TCA permanently. The EU will continue to implement the deal and to grind down non-compliance with the tools included in the Agreement.

In all this rolling calamity, that once again has exposed the disaster that is Brexit, we should finally not forget the role of the leader of the British Labour Party, Sir Keir Starmer, who voted for the TCA and now also owns its results. However, rather than begin to separate himself from it and expose the disastrous effects of the Tories’ Brexit, he thinks he can ignore it and say nothing, even as it impacts the people for whom his three wise monkey policy is supposed to be for. This, along with everything associated with Brexit, will not work.

Another lockdown – Why?

Posted on October 18, 2020 by irishmarxism

There are no easy solutions or answers. So said Doctor Michael McBride, Northern Ireland’s Chief Medical Officer, when announcing the return to lockdown. There were hard and difficult choices, all with bad outcomes, but what was good for health was also good for the economy, poverty does kill people.

Just before this the Health Minister, Robin Swann, announced that the new restrictions were required in order to protect the NHS. We could not turn away Covid patients he said – ‘who would suggest such a thing’ – suggesting instead that other patients be turned away, without being so dramatic is saying so of course. McBride said that we needed to ‘help protect the non-Covid health service’, not long after one hundred planned operations in the Belfast Trust had been cancelled.

The announcement involved a presentation that included graphs of new cases, number of tests and numbers of hospital in-patients, but no graph on the number of deaths. The Northern Ireland Statistics Research Agency latest weekly report recorded that in the week ending 9 October the total number of deaths in Northern Ireland was 348, of which 89 were due to respiratory causes. The number of deaths where COVID-19 was mentioned on the death certificate, whether or not COVID-19 was the primary underlying cause of death, was reported as 11, which was just over 3 % of all deaths during the period.

To those who thought Covid was exaggerated Doctor McBride said that they needed to ‘wake up’ to the number of cases, number of in-patients and number of deaths.

Two questions were then asked repeatedly by the journalists invited to speak at the presentation. What was the evidence that the new measures were required and what happens if it doesn’t work?

The question on evidence wasn’t answered; one journalist was referred to the minutes of the UK experts group SAGE and to unspecified peer reviewed articles. No one asked whether the members of the Executive were limited to this, or were offered this as an answer if they had asked the question. ‘It worked before’ was one further response to the question.

To the second question – what happens if it doesn’t work? – the answer was that the public must follow the guidelines, so implicitly it’s your fault if it doesn’t. Only near the end of the press conference did the Chief Scientific Advisor Ian Young state that people’s behaviour would have to change after the end of lockdown. Elsewhere it was reported in one newspaper that the document informing the decision on a new lockdown had stated that further interventions will be required “early in 2021 at the latest.”

It would also seem that relaxation of restrictions at Christmas with the “likelihood of increased population mixing” in the run up to it is a significant consideration. (No, I don’t understand the rationale behind this either.)

The document apparently reports concern that Covid hospital admissions will rise to 450 to 600 at the peak; while the average number of NHS Acute services beds available in Northern Ireland was reported as 3,891 for 2019/20 and 3,882 in the previous year. The average number of occupied beds was identical in both years at 3,239. The forecast peak of Covid-19 patients of 600 would therefore occupy a forecasted maximum of 18.5% of the average number of occupied beds at the peak or 15.4% of available beds, before any plans for temporary expansion.

This includes all Acute beds and it would appear that the document has the aim of having a total of no more than 20% of general medical beds, around 320, being occupied by Covid patients. Of course, it is more complicated than this and lots of uncertainty surrounds the ability to create additional capacity, and especially how much will actually be needed. There is no explanation reported on the inconsistency between a target of 320 beds and expectation of up to 600 being required.

Given the lack of transparency, avoidance of answering questions, finger-pointing and general arrogant condescension of the Health Minister and experts it is no surprise they didn’t provide the level of information provided in a short newspaper article. Non-sequiturs, plain contradiction and pontification are regarded as the currency that is required to get the population to do as it’s told. And the population in the main accepts the argument, such as it is, and gets on with generally keeping to the rules except when it doesn’t suit them.

The latest Department of Health figures for 16 October show 3,711 beds available, 180 less than the average last year, with 211 taken up by Covid patients and 615 unoccupied. The figures also show that of 104 ICU beds available 26 are taken up by Covid patients with 21 unoccupied. No doubt the number of beds occupied will increase as it always does in the winter with the onset of influenza infections.

The effect of winter pressures is already being felt in Care Homes with 301 respiratory outbreaks being reported and 72 being classified as Covid related, with a further 10 suspected to be Covid. Around three quarters of ICU and Care home outbreaks are therefore not Covid related. The increased pressure on beds will also most likely reflect the same pattern. If the NHS is overwhelmed by Covid it will not be because Covid in itself is overwhelming.

The figures for the growth of Covid outbreaks in Care Homes is a cause for concern while ‘protect the NHS’ may again be interpreted as a need to get elderly patients out of hospital and into Care homes in order to free up beds – regardless of testing beforehand. It was remarkable that in the press conference the appalling death toll in Care Homes was not referenced or any pledge made to protect their residents.

If the Health Minister and his experts therefore have an argument justifying their approach, it is not that Coivid-19 is an especially lethal threat but that the health service cannot cope with the additional work. So the focus becomes one of reducing the work on non-Covid patients by creating Nightingale Hospitals that use existing facilities and existing staff and involve relatively little activity, while the capacity of the rest of the Service is massively reduced. The overall efficiency of the NHS therefore plummets just when it needs to increase. And this is called ‘success’, and we are all asked to applaud it.

Rather than address this issue as the primary problem, which might raise the question how we got into this position, we have instead the enormous task of shutting the rest of society down (in so far as this is possible). While those most vulnerable are, or can be, identified the message is given that everyone is more or less threatened, when this is not the case. And because it’s not the case the population more and more ignores the rules when it suits, which allows the politicians and bureaucrats to sermonise and talk nonsense, such as the head of the British Medical Association in Northern Ireland telling us that “success leads to complacency, complacency leads to failure.” You might think that if a successful strategy leads to failure you’ve got the wrong strategy.

The approach of the politicians and health service bureaucracy has the comfortable effect (for them) of making the population the problem, requiring that it accept the shutting down of much of its normal everyday activity. Much of the services provided by the NHS is also cut because the NHS is already, how shall we put it, not up to the job. The politicians and bureaucracy responsible for this situation then demand of the population that it support and approve of this, garnering its sympathy because many of the staff who work in the NHS are now exhausted.

Which, brings us once again to the question of what is the right strategy. While the North once gain goes into a level of lockdown the Southern Government is discussing going to Level 5, the most severe level of restrictions in its five-level menu. The prospect now looms of repeated expensive lockdowns that lead only to a higher number of cases when they end.

In ‘The Irish Times’ someone took out a full-page advertisement opposing the current approach and supporting the Barrington Declaration. This has led to objections and claims by some that they will no longer buy the paper. The facts quoted in the advert are nevertheless true: that current life expectancy in Ireland is 81.5, the median age of death from Covid-19 is 83, a total of 20 people under 44 have died from Covid-19, and the record of Covid-19 deaths is one that includes those who died with Covid and not from it.

Controversy around the declaration has involved arguments that have little to do with what the Declaration says or what its argument is, but concentrate on the dubious political character of some of its supporters, its supposed nefarious objective of mass murder and criticism of what it does not say, as opposed to what it does. A number of letters to ‘The Irish Times’ illustrate this.

It is claimed that the facts quoted are intended to mean that the deaths of older people are of less significance, although the point of the declaration is to make protection of the vulnerable the priority, while it has been the current strategy adopted that has demonstratively failed in this regard.

This fact is also construed to imply that these older people lived longer than they should have expected. In any case it is life-expectancy at 83 that matters, not at birth, which is six years for men and eight for women. But the first claim is without support from what the advertisement says and the second fact, while absolutely true, would require more information to demonstrate that at age 83 Covid-19 reduces the remaining life span of six or eight years from everyone who dies from it.

Another line of criticism is that sheltering will not work when there is widespread community transmission. But we have widespread community transmission now after lockdown and there is no reason why measures that are supposed to socially isolate everyone cannot be strengthened for those most at risk. From some on the left especially, the argument is simultaneously put that lockdowns should be more restrictive and would not work for a targeted minority.

The new lockdown in the North is an admission that the previous one failed. That there is the expectation of another one of some sort later is further evidence. That the population is treated as too ignorant to discuss these issues is a repeat on a massive scale of ‘trust me I’m a doctor.’ The modern notion of an ‘expert patient’ is gone.

If the failure of the current policy is unrecognised it is hard to have any confidence that the costs of the lockdown in future deaths will be acknowledged and accounted for. The only thing that will save the current policy from ignominy is if its central claim is untrue – that we face a massive death toll if some sort of society-wide lockdown is not the major plank of State policy.

Civil Rights and Socialist strategy 5 – New Left Review interview 1969

Posted on June 21, 2020 by irishmarxism

Two years after the formation of the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association and after the October demonstration in Derry, O’Neill’s reform package, the Burntollet march, and only a week before Terence O’Neill’s resignation, members of Peoples Democracy were interviewed by New Left Review (NLR) on 20 April 1969. It is an invaluable record of what left wing leaders were thinking at the time. As one participant, Cyril Toman, said “coming together for this interview is probably the first time people here have discussed problems in any depth for months.” Apparently, the interview was rather chaotic.

The interview is a contemporary record of the many problems discussed in these posts, expressing the confusion that existed among the participants. As Bernadette Devlin says “we are totally unorganised and totally without any form of discipline within ourselves. I’d say that there are hardly two of us who really agree . . .” While Michael Farrell stated near the end of the interview that “we cannot form any high level organisation. As we do not yet have the theoretical basis for any clearly determined policies, in fact we have not even discussed some elementary problems.”

The NLR interview asks some of these basic questions. One of the first is why socialists were raising reformist demands, and we have discussed this question in a previous post. Eamonn McCann argued that the “transformation of Irish society necessary to implement these reforms is a revolution” and that therefore “we are definitely in a pre-revolutionary situation in the north . . . by supporting these demands in a militant manner, we are supporting class demands . . .“ How does this judgement stand the test of time?

In other posts it has been noted that class demands were viewed as separate from the demands for civil rights and that there was not enough emphasis on the former. In this interview the participants appear to assume that socialists should attempt to lead the civil rights struggle although this, of course is not in itself an answer.

I have also expressed that, in my view, what existed at that time was not a ‘pre-revolutionary situation’, at least not as would refer to socialist revolution, and at most the grounds existed only for overthrow of the Unionist regime (not of British rule), which of course happened three years later.

While Michael Farrell argued for participation in the broad civil rights movement and the employment of civil rights demands to radicalise the Catholic working class, and to join these with agitation over ‘class’ issues that would have the potential to unite Protestant and Catholic workers; McCann states that “we have failed to get our message across.” “The consciousness of the people is still most definitely sectarian” he says, and argued that “the reason we have failed to get our position across is that we have failed to fight any sort of political struggle within the Civil Rights movement.”

This proved to be a major difference between McCann and Farrell, who argued that “we have radicalised the Catholic working class to quite a considerable extent and to some degree got across to them the necessity of non-sectarianism and even the fact that their Protestant fellow worker is almost as much exploited as they are. But we have failed to get across at all to the Protestant working class.” The rebuttal by Farrell is therefore not an unqualified one. Bernadette Devlin then argues that the real difficulty was “support from Catholic capitalists and bigots.”

The participants are asked to what extent they have leafleted Protestant areas, to which McCann argues that “all our failures spring from the lack of anything even resembling a revolutionary party.” This remark seems not to be a statement of the much-repeated non-explanation offered by many small left wing organisations for the lack of success in what they view as revolutionary situations. This is often a non-explanation, because such a party is the creation of the working class and if it has not been created this reflects not simply, or mainly, on socialists but in the under-developed class consciousness of the mass of workers.

In the case of Northern Ireland, the consciousness of workers was formed by sectarian division and support for nationalism and unionism. Too often the objective determinants of class consciousness are under-estimated, ironically by Marxists, and lessons drawn from a different set of historical circumstances, often ones where there has obviously been socialist radicalisation of mass sections of the working class. Lessons are then mechanically applied to circumstances where this is very definitely not the case.

Rather it seems to be a statement that independent intervention by socialists had not been coherent enough, that the civil rights movement would specifically not issue a leaflet and opposed issuing one. For McCann the lack of organisation stemmed from being dissolved politically into the Civil Rights movement – “a crucial error and a grievous one.”

Cyril Toman argued that the original difference between themselves and “the bourgeois Civil Rights leaders was that we advocated action and they didn’t” but that they have now “begun to advocate action themselves.” He then warns that such actions would propose “mindlessly militant actions across the province, and that instead of forming any socialist party (we) will have to chase all over the place trying to scrape up some meaningful debris from these actions.”

The interviewer poses the question whether socialists were performing a service for the Civil Rights Movement rather than vice versa, to which Toman replies that “yes, this is broadly true.”

Socialist activists across many struggles and campaigns have often been told that they must be the best builders of any campaign in order to win recruits to their ranks but the example of the Irish civil rights movement is that being the most militant fighter for a cause short of socialism, while good and often necessary, is not sufficient to advance the ultimate aim and does not necessarily entail the development of class consciousness in those participating in the struggle.

The struggle for civil rights did not engender a significant socialist movement and the struggle against imperialism that commenced following it didn’t either. Asserting the primacy of ‘anti-imperialist’ demands as the first step in approaching struggles, sometimes involving support for purely nationalist demands and movements, has also not proved fruitful for socialists.

Undoubtedly the complexity of the situation facing socialists at this time created much confusion, but this was caused more by the restriction of the struggle to the North of Ireland, which hampered its development in a socialist direction. The weakness of socialists was reflected in arguments over how sectarian the Catholic population was and how there was no movement in support from within the Protestant working class.

This led Farrell to speculate on dual power in Catholic areas versus pursuit of working class unity around reformist demands. It might be said that at this time socialists in effect fought for the latter and then later for the former, and both failed. This is not a question of blame but of recognition that socialists were subject to very unfavourable forces, that constrained them more than they shaped events.

McCann argued against any notion of ‘Catholic power’ which he argued existed in Catholic run councils, which although was a reasonable point, is not quite what Farrell speculated on. His alternative, in so far as he could express it in such an interview, was – giving the important example of housing – that socialists should demand nationalisation of the housing societies.

As expressed many times in this blog, nationalisation is not socialism, and in this case the nationalisation by the Unionist state, that socialists were fighting to destroy, could only mean nationalisation by the British state, whose power and rule they would later explicitly seek to remove.

The particular character of nationalisation in these circumstances makes clear the nature of such a demand: reliance on the capitalist state to do what socialism requires the workers to do themselves.

For McCann “we have failed to give a socialist perspective because we have failed to create any socialist organisation’, although he goes on to argue that “we cannot form a Bolshevik party overnight . . . we must try to set up some sort of radical socialist front between republicans and ourselves.”

As I have argued already, Irish republicanism is a form of militant nationalism and this proposal from McCann appears not to be consistent with drawing a clearer demarcation between socialists and the representatives of purely Catholic rights, which he also advocated. Nor does it appear consistent with the emphasis on seeking support from Protestant workers. The point here is not to damn McCann for inconsistency but to look at the arguments than recur again and again among Irish socialists.

So, in 1969 there was to develop a more or less open struggle within Irish republicanism about the way forward, between advocates of a more left-wing direction and more traditional republicans. The traditionalists opposed dropping the customary policy of abstentionism in the Dial and continued to advocate the overwhelming primacy of armed action.

In this situation McCann could be said to be correct to seek some form of approach to unity with left members of the republican movement in order to advance socialist politics and organisation. It is more than unfortunate that this leftward move was to take the form of Stalinism, which ironically represented an incomplete break with nationalism (see their descendants’ support for Brexit) and also ended up in a dogmatic adherence to limited reform of the North.

The problem with this approach was not that unity among the working class was to continue to be pursued, but that pursuit of this led more and more to capitulation to the unionist politics of the Protestant working class to which this unity was directed. When practical political unity seemed only possible through ditching politics that would have made such unity worthwhile and progressive, and in the interest of the working class as a whole, the Official Republicans ditched the politics while failing to achieve any unity around even a mildly reformist programme. If they have had some consolation, it is the poor one of seeing their Provisional rivals consummate the defeat of their alternative.

In answer to McCann, Farrell emphasised that “we have to explore the radical possibilities of the base that we do have, at this moment, among the working class, and that base is the Catholic section of the working class.” This too might seem to some degree obvious, as in having to start from where you are, but the question raised next in the interview was where that was – “you all seem to agree that the road to socialism in Ireland must pass via the Protestant working class. Is that so?”

Toman said “I would answer that by saying bluntly, yes”. Baxter qualifies this by saying “you cannot move in a socialist direction unless you have the support of some sections of the Protestant working class. Otherwise they will start a sectarian struggle, and all the forces of Catholic reaction will swamp us.”

Farrell answered differently by arguing that “Northern Ireland is completely unviable economically . . . The unification of Ireland into a socialist republic is not only necessary for the creation of a viable economy, it must also be an immediate demand, because only the concept of a socialist republic can ever reconcile Protestant workers, who rightly have a very deep-seated fear of a Roman Catholic republic, to the ending of the border.”

While it is true that there has always appeared little interest for Protestant workers in supporting a capitalist united Ireland, the fact remains that for many, their reactionary sectarian politics means that they are in complete opposition to any concept of socialism as well.

Decades of elections have demonstrated this, and while the more recent defeats of the Catholic Church in the South of Ireland have undoubtedly lessened antipathy of many Protestants to the Irish State, this has revealed Unionism as perhaps the strongest standard-bearer of reactionary social ideas that generations of socialists have claimed was the real cause of Protestant workers opposition to a united Ireland.

How difficult winning Protestant support would be was made clear at the time in a document produced by Eamonn McCann that recounted the experience of taking the civil rights and socialist message to Protestant workers in the Fountain area of Derry.

McCann and Bernadette Devlin went into the Fountain and found themselves talking in front of a small audience in a kitchen, during which McCann explained that the civil rights line was one of “justice for all sections of the Community etc., and put it to them that the minority rule of Derry Corporation was indefensible. How could they justify it? A middle-aged woman told me immediately: “But if you Catholics were in control there would be no life for us here. We would have to leave our homes and get out.”

McCann told them that this was ridiculous and that they had been brain-washed by the Unionist Party, but he gives them an alibi, that the movement had not made it clear what it was for, it had attacked unionism – the political philosophy accepted by most Protestants – but not any form of nationalism or any Catholic, which within the movement would be “howled down.”

As we have seen in the previous post, this was put forward as a real problem but it was not one that could be solved by any organisational change, but reflected the interests of the middle class leadership of the Derry Citizens Action Committee and the mass of Catholic workers unwillingness at that point to challenge it. Inside or outside the DCAC it would still have to be challenged and it is at least arguable that socialists were in too much of a minority to stand outside making the argument.

Above all, this episode illustrates the central tragedy of the civil rights movement and its anti-sectarian objectives. Faced with the argument that minority rule in Derry was unjust the Protestant woman explained that it was justified and that Catholics could not possibly be in control. Equality was not acceptable. This was the message that led the civil rights struggle to be submerged by sectarian division.

Concluded

Back to part 4

	Boffy on The War in Ukraine (3) –…
	Boffy on The War in Ukraine (2) –…
	Boffy on The War in Ukraine (2) –…
	Boffy on The war in Ukraine (1) –…
	Boffy on The war in Ukraine (1) –…

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