grandstanding over the Patten report on the RUC shows their position clearly.
They don't even want the changes: badges and photographs of the Queen in every station. Most Unionists want the old pre1972 Stormont back, and want to keep the RUC in its original pristine sectarian shape.
Even if the Republicans surrendered their arms and cheered Orange marches down every nationalist area, a sizeable section of Unionists would still not allow them into any position of power.
British backing But symbolic surrender by the Repubncans is wait tacy are arter and they know they can't lose -because in the end they have the SUNPUR of the British ruling class, including Blair.
will either make more concessions or they will be put out, and the Unionists and the British can resume the more favourable conditions Why then the attempted importation of arms by the IRA which the Unionists made so much o? One reason is to keep the more militaristic of their supporters happy: after all, the rank and file have been assured that "not Semtex" would.be handed over.
A more sinister motive is suggested by weapons intercepied police, taese were mostly short arms, and while it was reported that those arrested in the US had claimed they were for use againsi the Army and the RUC, it seems much more likely that they were for internal "security", i.c. against dissidents.
The dilemma of the Republican leadership is this: 25 years of armed struggle has yielded no more than 3 seat at the conference cable and a deal which they would have had under the 1974 Sunningdale Agreement Scamus Mallon, Deputy first Minister until resigning in protest at the antics of the Unionists, called the Stormont Agreement "Sunningdale tor slow learners"
The "cutting edge" against the Northern State and the British has, apart from a brief period around the Hunger Strikes in 19%, been the armed struggle Now they have to explain the futility of this to their supporters. Clever games such as betting that that the Unionists would refuse to of their supporters in the Dublin media) the idea that if they sit tight for demographic changes will give the nationalists a majority, are merely sops to a disgruntled membership. No alternative But there is no "Plan B": if abannegotiating fails, then there is no alternative to biting the bullet and making the best of it within a (mildly) | reformed six-County Agreement.
The essential principle which must be kept in mind is this: the Six Country state cannot be reformed, not by Tony Blair, not by Sinn Fein Ministers in the Executive. Sooner or later it must be destroyed.
While we support the cease-fire, we oppose the Stormont Agreement for what it represents: another British attempt to stabilise its rule in Ireland.
We oppose it because of the way it sets in concrete the sectarian divide in the North of Ireland and for the way in which the Republican leadership has betrayed its principles. Palestine under Arafat is a terrifying model for what could happen in Ireland if the "peace" treaty is imposed by the British.
The only brake on their doing so is the mass opposition of local communities and working cass organisations in Britain and Ireland.
ONY BLAIR's cagerness to ensure that his Defence Secretary George Robertson step in as the new Sec. retary General of the imperialist NATO alliance is a natural consequence of the "partnership" politics of New Labour at home. Blair argued at this year's TUC IG SOCIALIST OUTLOOK 1907: Rosa Luxemburg speaks at a mass meeting of the German SPD, on a platform carrying pictures of Karl Marx and Lassalle Congress in Brighton that work-. their international ambitions as eTs (and their trade unions) and the employers now have only interests in common and no rea. SOTTO OPPOSe Old If this was true, then it would make equal sense for workers (and their parliamentary representatives) to join forces with the same employers in promoting well, sometimes through political and military alliances.
But if the new cosy world of "partnership" bas in Blair's eyes eliminated conflict between worker and employer, it has not climinated the bitter conflict of competition between different sections of employers - at home and abroad.
Indeed it is in the name of this that Blair has become the most hawkish adrocate of increased "flexibility" of labour - a polite word for the acceptance of low pay, minimal poor working obligingly identified its interests identical to the "British" employers - should line up alongside them, and help them fight it out. But many of the "British" employers with whom right wing union leaders are most cager to partner up are also "foreign"
-whether they be Japanese, Korean, French, German or American.
"partnership"
D between Rover workers and their German bosses BMW mean they must hope to undercut and 'Throughout living memory social democracy has limited itself to seeking piecemeal reforms through parliamentary action within the framework of capitalism, and opposed any notion of class struggle or the overthrow of the system." the question of international military conflict. Imperialist countries preserve the trappings of democracy and relative prosperity for their own workers at home at the expense of the exploitation, oppression and misery of countless millions workers and peasants in dependent cconomies throughout the world. Their ruling classes and the military machine created to defend them have no intention of allowing that relationship of