of the other rail union, TSSA. (Too Scared to Say Anything) will come to work as usual.
Support from other workers is important. London readwishing good luck to the ticket collector.
Railway workers want a safe public service which Management want a series of railway businesses whose safety requirements are deter- alist areas. mined by profit maximisation.
croppies lie down.
to start talks immediately. Smarting from the open contempt shown to them by FOR ALL the sighs of re- the British over. among other lief in the British press that things, the Lee Clegg affair.
they also began to crank up the loyalist marches on July the threat of angry voices 12th had passed off without and marching feet only. to be seriously damaging the neatly snookered "peace process", one stark Taoiseach John Bruton's fact remains: the loyalist statement that more marches bigots once again banged would only make things their drums through nation. worse.
Whipped up by lan Paisley, they roared their tradi- Having thrown in their lot tional demand that the with Dublin, they now find themselves prisoners of the While there was undoube- very strategy they themselves edly a certain amount of pos- initiated. turing in the antics of David John Major may have deTrimble MP, who is angling feated the Tory right in the short term but he is still not in the Official Unionist Party La position, even if he wanted from the ageing James Moly- to, to confroot the unionist felneaux, there can hardly be low travellers who supported much doubt as to the real bal- "Rowerpot man" ance of forces in the Six wood.
Major occasionally throws Under pressure from the scraps to the nationalists like nationalist areas the Sinn Fein the transfer of some prisoners leadership persuaded Dublin to Ireland but is gencrally to put out a call to the British content to sit and wait for delican movement, hoping for a split.
It is clear that a Blair Government emerging from an election in which the Tories "rally to the flag" would not change the policy; indeed Maby jorie Mowlem has gone out of her way to reassure the Unionists that the union is safe in Labour hands.
So even if Sinn Fein ignored Dublin and restarted a campaign of street protests to demand the British begin talks, the agenda is a Unionist The irony is that the armed struggle originally resulted from the realisation that the Northern State could not be reformed: yet the very people who drew that conclusion in the first place are now demandins to be let into discusRed- sions about how it can be reformed.
History repeats itself...
Likewise, the make-believe socialists who think that "proper" class politics is a real possibility now that the fire, or who suddenly find staunch socialist hearts beating behind the red hand symbols the loyalist paramilitaries, have about the same grasp of reality as all the conciliators, intermediaries. mediators and reconciliation centres which were the great hope of English liberals in the confrontations around July 12th.
Sectarian
The Six County state was designed to be sectanan, and it has functioned like that for more than 70 years. It cannot be reformed. It is propped up by the British.
It cannot be dismantled until the British withdraw. Attempis al feror are not a "peace process" unless you define peace as the (temporary) absence of war.
Republicans and socialists should adopt a strategy of angry voices and macing icce ...to demand that Britain gets out of Ireland now.
SOCIALIST OUTLOOK No. 88, August 1995 Page 3