British solution
IN DEPTH 3617 Andrew Moore/Reflex By the Summer of 1969, almost a year of peaceful civil rights marches in the six counties had been assaulted and banned. The run up to an annual celebration of Protestant ascendancy - the August 12 Apprentice Boys parade in Derry - had seen a month of provocative Orange marches through and by catholic areas. Rioting was a commonplace result, with the RUC shooting and killing civilians in its unashamed defence of the sectarian status quo. In Belfast catholic families were already being forced out of their homes.
The August 12 parade was stoned as it passed the edge of catholic Bogside. The RUC baton charged and the Bogside Defence Association built barricades around the area. The RUC used armoured cars and CS gas and local youths retaliated with petrol bombs. The area was under siege and a pitched battle ensued.
The effect on the political set-up was volcanic. The moderate civil rights leaders were swept aside by Republican and left activists. 21 year old Bernadette Devlin (now MacAliskey) - *the street-fighting MP for Mid-Ulster' - was behind the barricades urging on the militants. The Starry Plough - flag of James Connolly's workers' militia, the Citizen's Army - was flown from local flats. Across the six counties, riots and Tallies were organised to stretch the police to its maximum.
By August 14, the North was on the edge of war. The exhausted RUC were being replaced by the B-Specials (a hated sectaraian militia that was scrapped and replaced by the identical 'UDR"). Under strong pressure to intervene directly, the southern Irish army sent field hospitals to the border.
At 5pm on August 14, British soldiers were moved into Derry. The British commander agreed to pull the B Specials and RUC behind his own troops and not to enter the Bogside.
This temporarily defused the crisis in Derry, but in Belfast a massive pogrom was underway - leaving six dead over 24 hours - with attacks, shootings and the burning of catholic houses, actively involving the RUC and B-Specials. Barricades were built on the Falls Rd and the SOCIALIST OUTLOOK no 17, Summer 1989
Ireland 1969-1989: army was sent in. But by the end of September 1,820 families had been forced to flee - 82.7 per cent of them catholic.
The Labour goverment's deployment of the troops appeared contradictory in character. For a brief period the army was welcomed by the catholic ghetto-dwellers. It was seen as symbolic of a victory over the sectarian forces of the Northern Ireland statelet and the hope that intervention would lead to reforms.
But this ambiguity was superficial, as republicans and socialists warned at the time. The only role of the army could be - and has been since - to support the civil administration. It was a last ditch attempt to save the six county statelet from terminal crisis. Because the function of the intervention was to stablise the partitionist status quo - it inevitably led the conflict from its focus on basic civil rights reforms to include the existence and basis of that status quo.
The unravelling of this situation didn't take long. By the Autumn of 1969, the moderate catholic leadership was re-asserting itself and barricades were coming down. But the inability of Stormont to make any real concessions (having for almost 50 years cultivated a mass base through the ideology and practice of protestant ascendancy) and the inability of the British state to defend Stormont led to renewed crisis.
In 1970, confrontations escalated as the army attacked nationalist areas through the Summer, with saturation raids and violence. The July curfew of the Falls Road was a turning point in hardening out this process into a direct struggle between continued British rule and a reemergent Irish nationalism. It was only in August 1970 that the IRA, which had been re-arming after years of inactivity, began its military campaign - not killing the first British soldier until Febuary 1971.
The Social Democratic and Labour Party was launched - unifying the moderate middle class nationalist parties - in an attempt to head off this escalating polarisation. But to little avail. The IRA campaign was in full swing by the Spring of 1971 and in August 1971 internment was introduced. This was met by the setting up of 'no go' areas in Derry, guarded by openly armed IRA volunteers, into which the British army and the RUC did not enter for a year. A rent and rate strike against in-
Page 21
IN DEPTH terment was supported by tens of thousands of families. A war had erupted.
Twenty years on, what is the balance sheet of Britain's intervention? Brigadier Frank Kitson, commander of the British army in Belfast from 1970 to 1972, summarised the state's immediate aims in such situations as being to 'regain... and then retain the allegiance of the population, and for this purpose it must eliminate those involved in subversion. But [to do so] ... it must gain control of the population. Judged on these terms there have been twenty years of failure: with unabated mass resistance exemplified by the 1981 hunger strikes and the electoral. rise of Sinn Fein.
But has the British state secured more strategic interests? The answer is period from 1922 to 1969 signified the success of the partition project as a means of protecting British interests. The southern Irish bourgeoisie was increasingly quiescent and unwilling to challenge the border. The northern statelet was run by a wing of the British ruling class - utilising supremacist ideology and minor material advantages for protestant workers - through the monolithic and seemingly permanent Unionist Party.
But the combination of rising catholic expectations in the north, the ending of the post-war boom, the weakness of the Irish economy and the international upsurge of struggle in the 1960s undermined this stability. In particular the unionist monolith has broken up - partly on class lines and partly due to a dimunition in its privileged relations with
Britain saw reforms and a rapprochement with the catholic middle class as the best means of bolstering partition. The latter led to the continued attempts at power sharing from 1973 onwards. The British ruling class sought to utilise not only the Southern capitalist state, but also growing US, Japanese and European economic interests in the island.
There were also political and military interests at stake. Northern Ireland is part of the British state. Although historically a colonial relationship, it has been integral to the development of the 'domestic' class structure and political apparatus. Hence the fear of any potential destabilisation spilling over into Britain, and the need to control this -one reason for the strategy of Ulsterisation, normalisation and criminalisation inaugurated in the late 1970s. And the anomaly of a potentially neutral and independent Ireland on the western flank of NATO Europe - in a key position regarding British defence strategy -was highlighted by Dublin's refusal to back Thatcher in the Malvinas adventure.
Thus successive governments have sought strategies that took account of these interests. Currently faith is placed in the Hillsborough Accord, 'anti-terrorist' co-operation and the military, political and economic tying up of the 26 counties through the Single European Act. But, while 1992 may yet succeed where other policies have failed, Britain is still far from stemming the failure of the last two decades.
This failure has had several consequences. Firstly, there has been an inevitable strengthening of the argument that there is, literally, no British solution. The longer Britain has held on, the less the credibility of its rule. An indicator has been the success of the McBride campaign in the USA, where major states (now including California) will now not invest in the north of Ireland due to the rampant discrimination. Although in some quarters simply expressed as a cry of despair and pessimism - the natural conclusion is that the Irish people themselves should decide their own future. The issue of self-determination is therefore increasingly relevant. Page 22
Secondly the class content of the situation has come more sharply into focus. Unionism has broken up. And the social base of the anti-imperialist movement during the 1970s moved firmly into the working class, with this politically reflected in leftward developments in the 1980s. The longer time scale of the struggle has placed the need for class alliances - particularly with the southern working class and the women's movement - higher on the agenda. Finally, British unity behind the parPROVON tition project of 1921 has begun to erode
- even if only at the edges. Such division is not entirely new. For almost 50 years before 1921, the ruling class was deeply divided on the Irish question. This time, without a solution based on stable capitalist rule north and south, there is no chance of the ruling class adopting a unification or withdrawal policy. Indeed gaps in credibility and confidence will necessarily be filled by a policy of repression - the nakedness of the coercive state reflecting the weakness of its political base.
Nonetheless this has led, particularly since 1981, to an increasingly open conflict within ruling circles with - the canvassing of alternative strategies within the framework of British interests.
An opening drama in this crisis of perspectives was the internecine conflict between MI5 and MI6 over Ireland in the mid 1970s which counterposed purely military solutions to the need for political initiative. MIS won - leading to the torture, shoot to kill and criminalisation policies of Labour's Roy Mason years in the late 1970s. But the failure of this approach inevitably led to the re-emergence of the "political' wing, with the Anglo-Irish talks of 1980, the now-defunct Northern Ireland Assembly and the Hillsborough Accord of 1985.
With a strategic solution eluding Britain's rulers, some have canvassed solutions outside the traditional partitionist framework. Such approaches look towards the total re-organisation of Anglo-Irish relations - a kind of new neo-colonial settlement - with the emphasis on the socio-economic integration of the two countries. This scenario would be greatly facilitated by 1992 and its straitjacketing of the 26 counties' neutrality and independence within the pro-capitalist confines of an IMF and NATO-dominated Europe. Within such a set-up, a nominally independent Ireland could be tolerated so long as there was a degree of bourgeois consensus.
This type of line is being peddled by the SDLP in the north and right wing parties in south. These forces look to the Accord as the first stage of such a process. In many respects it parallels the bourgeois nationalist perspective of the SNP's platform of 'independence within the European Community'.
Traditionally the British Labour bureaucracy has been a loyal supporter of the imperialist consensus on Ireland. But since Labour's adoption of 'Irish unity by consent' in 1981 it has played a role of canvassing such alternatives - generally linked to a programme of economic reflation and the return of a Labour government. This has led to a convergence with the positions of the Irish capitalist parties.
This "tendency' in Anglo-Irish politics doesn't back withdrawal as a policy and is most unlikely to outside of a restabilisation. Instead, in Labour's case, it seeks a 'harmonisation' of the socio-economic structures North and South as a way of avoiding any challenge to partition. Furthermore this perspective dovetails neatly into the Tories Accord offensive and will do so even more in the run up to 1992 - to the extent that we may fnd a new resurgence of bi-partisanship in the early 1990s... whoever wins the next election.
Nonetheless, Labour's 1981 break represented a welcome shift that
SOCIALIST OUTLOOK no 17, Summer 1989
IN DEPTH symbolised the beginnings of glasnost on the issue after years in which discussion was silenced in the labour movement. But it is un- likely that the establishment would have tolerated this (compare the relentless struggle against unilateralism) if it wasn't regarded as a serious discussion within its own circles. Despite all this, the ruling class and its Labour lieutenants are still firmly wedded to a line of division and repression as the only guaranteed way of shoring up British interests in the short term. But there's no doubt that openings have developed for major debates on the issue for the first time in decades. This has been reflected by public rows within the higher echelons of the media and the legal es- tablishment about the Stalker affair; the Bir- mingham Six and Guildford Four; Gibraltar and media censorship - identical issues to those studiously ignored by these circles ten years ago. Irish solidarity activists should intervene and use the opportunity to take new steps in laying the foundations of a withdrawal move- ment. However the process has been, and will be, very contradictory. Although in recent years the Bakers' Union, Nalgo, NUM, UCATT, NUR, the National Union of Students and sections of the Labour Party have adopted withdrawal policies of various types - there have been retreats and there is a continued tendency to impose a framework based on an im- perialist settlement and the denial of self determination. Indeed, if one thing unites all the various tendencies within ruling circles it is the need to deny Irish self determination. This, more than anything, is the cement that unites the Tories, Labour and the Irish capitalist parties in their support for the Accord and post-1992 Europe. Thus qualitatively broadening the support for withdrawal must be com- bined with a vigorous fight for the democratic right of Irish self deter- mination. There can be an open discussion on all these issues, a dialogue with those who don't agree with self determination. But the basis for a Last year saw the launch of a new initiative on Ireland, Time To Go! It promised a qualitative breakthrough into new broad layers of support that had not previously backed withdrawal, and that it would hold a major march and carnival on the anniversary of the troop deployment. One year on, the results are, to say the least, mixed. It began with a lot of more or less famous people putting their names to a Charter which admitted that it was necessary for Britain to leave Ireland. A good start. Then it began to run into heavy ground because of its leadership's attitude to the Troops Out Movement and the Irish in Britain Representation Group. All over England, Scotland and Wales, Time To Go (TTG) and Year of Action groups were created, and where they existed in the same area they sometimes worked constructively together - and sometimes were mortal rivals. As a rule Year of Action groups last longer and are more active than their TTG equivalents. This is due in no small measure to the fact that they do not impose support for the Charter as a condition of membership, but simply support for British withdrawal and Irish self determination. SOCIALIST OUTLOOK no 17, Summer 1989
TREE THE BIRMINCHAM SIX movement cannot be the framework of British people debating their favoured options for Ireland's future. Whatever the intentions of its propagators this would ultimately undermine the cause of Irish self determination. Rather we should seek the opposite: that such a dialogue be a tactic within subordianated to the framework of a fight for unconditional withdrawal.
There are precedents for mass moyements based on principled demands of this type but successfully mobilising masses around basic broad slogans - CND being the most obvious. Socialists must take advantage of the impasse in British strategy after the last two decades and make the building of such a united movement on Ireland a number one priority.
Piers Mostyn Irish