Emancipation & Liberation

(This is a reposting of the article originally posted in September, which appeared to have become contaminated. Since it is a frequently visited posting, and still has relevance, particularly in the light of the announced date for the Scottish Independence referendum, it has been reposted.)

i) Why are there significant nationalist parties and a National Question in the UK in the twenty-first century?

In Scotland, the SNP is now the leading political party; in Wales, Plaid Cymru is the third (until recently, the second) placed party; whilst in Northern Ireland the top six parties identify themselves as either British unionist or Irish nationalist.  The answers to the questions posed above are to do with the nature of the UK state.

The UK state was formed in a number of key stages. These were marked initially by the demise of the Welsh mixed feudal and kinship-based order in 1284, after its conquest by Edward I, the Plantagenet king of England and overlord of Gascony. In 1536, Wales was absorbed into the centralised feudal English state under the Tudors and divided into counties. What remained of the old Welsh ruling class gained representation in the English Parliament and eventually became part of the wider English ruling class. Wales ceased to exist as a political entity until the end of the nineteenth century, and was administered as if it was part of England under English law. However, the majority of the population remained Welsh speaking until the beginning of the twentieth century, a considerably higher proportion than Gaelic speakers in either Ireland or Scotland.

Scotland’s regal union with England under the Stuarts followed in 1603. The continued political interests of the Scottish aristocracy were served by their influential position within the Church of Scotland and the Scottish Parliament.  Scotland retained its own legal system and currency.  However, after a failed attempt to pursue an independent Scottish colonial policy through the Darien Scheme, and a series of famine years in the late 1690’s, the Scottish ruling class voted to end its own parliament in Edinburgh. They settled instead for direct representation in the Union Parliament in London in 1707. First though, they secured their autonomous control of the Church of Scotland and the Scottish legal system.  These arrangements were made in the class interests of the majority of the Scottish aristocracy, who had increasingly become commercial landlords, and of the rising class of Scottish merchants seeking imperial outlets. The new Union also helped to secure the UK state, and both its influential English and Scottish supporters, from French-backed Jacobite threats to the new post-1714 Hanoverian order.

Ireland entered a regal union with England under the Tudors in 1542, after earlier attempts at conquest had been rolled back to the English controlled Pale around Dublin. However, Ireland was not effectively brought under the monarchy’s control until the final crushing of the mixed Irish feudal and kinship order. This order still prevailed in most areas of Ireland outside the old Pale up until 1607.  The political and military opportunity for this suppression was provided by the Union of the English and Scottish Crowns under the Stuart dynasty. The heartland of the old Gaelic order in Ulster was destroyed and thoroughly planted. These new Plantations followed from the earlier more tentative policy of English and Scots Plantations in Ireland, which had begun in the sixteenth century. The ongoing process of dispossession culminated in the Penal Laws, which were enacted from 1695.  What remained of the old Irish ruling class was faced with the choice of converting to the established Anglican Protestant religion, or of losing its lands. Only those Church of Ireland (Anglican) members of the ‘Anglo-Irish’ Ascendancy were represented in the Irish Parliament.

In 1801, the Union of the British and Irish Parliaments was made in the shared interests of the British ruling class and the ‘Anglo-Irish’ Ascendancy, which by now owned virtually all of Ireland’s land. This was done to ward off the possible reoccurrence of the revolutionary democratic challenge, which had recently been presented by the United Irishmen – Catholic, Protestant and Dissenter – allied to revolutionary France. It also meant that the existing Irish Protestant elite could preempt the threat represented by any possible future Catholic voting majority in Ireland.  The United Kingdom now reached its maximum territorial extent, including England (with Wales), Scotland and Ireland. The parliament at Westminster dealt with the politics of both the British Union (UK) and Empire. Its business was confined to the members of a British ruling class drawn from all four countries.

The elimination or cooption of non-English elites did not produce a united British nation though. Under the terms of the parliamentary unions, the Scottish and the ‘Anglo-Irish’ ruling groups were still able to maintain their own protected national institutions (e.g. the Church of Scotland and the Irish Yeomanry). At the same time, they worked as junior partners to the English members of the new British ruling class. Together, they further developed their now shared UK state. This enabled them jointly to pursue the profits to be made from the British Empire. Although the new unified British ruling class was able to forge a top-down, British national identity for itself, it did not create a new unitary British nation incorporating all the peoples of these islands – English, Irish, Scottish or Welsh; or a unitary British state, which reduced an older Scotland and Ireland to mere historical terms, like Aquitaine or Picardie in France, after the French Revolution.

During the Industrial Revolution, a new middle class was formed from the owners of industrial, commercial and financial capital.  It gained entry to a further extended British ruling class between the 1832 parliamentary Reform Act and the abolition of the Corn Laws in 1845. However, these newcomers did not promote a unitary British state either, in the manner of the French middle class after 1789. They were much more cautious.  This was because of the challenge from first, the plebian Radical movement after 1815, then from the new industrial working class wing of Chartism after 1837. Both these movements were seen as threats to the rule of property, whether it was in capital or in land. Therefore, in the face of these dangers, those new liberal members of the ruling class, representing the rising industrial order, allied themselves with the old conservative ruling class, representing commercial landed interests. They accepted the inherited British unionist nature of the UK state, with its coercive Crown Powers, helpful for keeping control of the ‘lower orders’.

The new members of the ruling class, representing industrial capital, were also looking for more effective ways to profit from empire. Under the prevailing mercantile capitalism of the seventeenth century, Spain and Holland had vied for domination; followed in the eighteenth century by France and the UK. With mercantile capitalism, each imperial power sought its own monopoly on trade within an empire jealously guarded by navies and armies. However, by the mid-nineteenth century, British industrial capital economically dominated the world and enforced a regime of ‘free trade imperialism’. Where economic might alone was not sufficient, then it could be supplemented by a little ‘gunboat diplomacy’. British hegemony was not confined to its formal colonial and commercial empire. Its economic tentacles extended all around the world. The British ruling class managed all this politically through its control of the Imperial Parliament at Westminster with its Home and Foreign Offices, and its domination of ‘law and order’ and local government; economically through its ownership of banking, commercial and trading houses in the City, and of industry and land; and militarily through the Royal Navy and British and colonial armed forces.

However, the rise of a new industrial capitalist order had not gone unchallenged. A counter to these developments initially arose in the revolutionary democratic movements in the UK associated with the International Revolutionary Wave, which developed from the French Revolution initiated in 1789. At this time, a full-blown industrial capitalist order did not exist. Attempts to enclose the commons, evict tenants, to impose generalised wage labour, to end customary prices for basic foodstuffs and for labour performed, and to abolish outdoor relief were all fiercely resisted.

From 1792, many joined the United Irishmen, the United Scotsmen, the London Corresponding Society and other organisations, in an ‘internationalism from below’ alliance, before this was finally defeated in 1798 in Ireland.  Later, the Radical wing of the Chartists supported the break-up of the British and Irish Union. However, with the defeat of the Chartists in 1849, the recently extended British ruling class gained the ascendancy now that the new industrial capitalist order had finally triumphed. The UK clearly became the most powerful state in the world. The effect of British ruling class hegemony was to tame the earlier Radical and working class movements. The overwhelming majority no longer sought a new social order, but looked for a ‘fair day’s pay for a fair day’s work’ within a capitalist system, and for opportunities of personal advance within the British Union or wider Empire.

Therefore, the failure to create a unitary British state and national identity has largely been a reflection of the choices made by the British ruling class, including its distinct Scottish and Protestant Irish components, to opt for a unionist state instead, the better to maintain their pro-property alliance. The UK set-up has allowed for subordinate national elites, and newly enfranchised sections from the ‘lower orders’ in Scotland, Ireland and Wales, to hold on to, or to create new perceived nationalities, but as subordinate elements of a hybrid British identity – Scottish-British, Irish-British (more recently Ulster-British) and Welsh-British. In Ireland, it was the repeal of the Test Acts (1828) and the disestablishment of the Church of Ireland (1869) that helped to widen the earlier more exclusive ‘Anglo-Irish’ identity by creating a new Irish-British identity, which could be adopted by members of non-established Protestant denominations, and even by some better off Catholics, after Catholic emancipation in 1829.

During the century of British imperial world domination (1815-1914), no UK political party considered bringing an end to the distinct forms of national rule resulting from the unionist form of the state, which sustained those hybrid British identities found in Scotland, Ireland and Wales. These were central to maintaining wider support for the UK as a unionist, as opposed to a unitary British state, even through the period of High Imperialism (1895-1916).  The divisions which arose between the liberal unionists (Liberal Party and their Irish constitutional nationalist allies) and the conservative unionists (Conservative and Liberal Unionist parties), from the 1880′s, were over the best way to preserve the Union and Empire – political Home Rule or administrative Home Rule.

These divisions amongst the British ruling class were also accentuated as the British Empire began to face serious challenges, initially from France, then from Prussia/Germany in particular. British capitalists’ support for ‘free trade’ had remained unquestioned, as long they enjoyed the massive profits arising from being the first country to have undergone a successful industrial revolution. When inter-imperial conflicts intensified, voices advocating such protectionist measures as imperial preference began to be heard in the UK. Furthermore, many amongst the ruling class, who had recently accepted the disestablishment of the Church of Ireland, began to harden their opposition to any further liberal unionist constitutional reform. This was because of the ruling class’s increasing doubts about their previously unquestioning belief in the  ’natural supremacy’ of the UK and British Empire.

Today, the UK still remains a state promoting the interests of capital. Furthermore, it remains a unionist and imperial constitutional monarchy, presiding over English, Scottish and Welsh nations, part of the Irish nation (‘the Six Counties’), various Crown Dependencies (i.e. the Channel Islands and the Isle of Man) and those remaining imperial Overseas Territories (e.g. the British Virgin Islands, the Falkland Islands and the Chagos Archipelago). British ruling class attempts – whether its members thought themselves to be British or hybrid-British – to preserve their Union throughout these islands have been linked to their determination to maintain a wider imperial role. The British ruling class, through the City, has insisted upon keeping sterling as the UK’s own international currency.  It has held on to various Crown Dependencies and Overseas Territories, which provide it with tax havens beyond any effective UK government scrutiny. It maintains an overblown British military capacity, which includes nuclear weapons. It hangs on to its costly, top-heavy political, judicial and administrative system, with its royal court, aristocratic House of Lords, bemedalled military officers, bewigged judges, and aloof senior civil servants, all surrounded by pomp and ceremony. These people all declare their oath of loyalty to the Crown, not to Parliament, and certainly not to the people. This is because the Crown Powers provide the British ruling class with the constitutional means to bypass any formal democratic procedures, including Parliament, whenever this proves to be necessary for them.

 

ii)  The creation and expansion of hybrid British national identities amongst the different classes in these islands and the Empire

It has been shown that the specifically unionist form of the UK state allowed Irish-British and Scottish-British national identities to continue at elite level. These national identities were given a wider base of class support as the franchise was extended downwards to encompass different classes amongst the ‘lower orders’ in Ireland, Scotland, and Wales. In the prolonged period from 1801-1921, when it at was at its fullest territorial extent, the UK had a single imperial and unionist parliament at Westminster. Yet, during this period, there was still a further development of the existing devolved Irish and Scottish administrations, and the first elements of a new Welsh administration were established.

Since the old Welsh ruling class had been absorbed into the wider English ruing class, when Wales had been incorporated into England, there was no political recognition of the Welsh-British until the franchise was extended to the Welsh middle class in the nineteenth century. Many from the ‘lower orders’ still spoke the Welsh language, which, along with membership of a number of Welsh, non-established, Protestant denominations, contributed to the emergence of a new Welsh-British identity. An alternative Welsh-British identity was also able to develop amongst an increasingly English-speaking working class, particularly in South Wales. A more conscious ‘Anglo-Welsh’ identity emerged in reaction to these developments, particularly amongst the English-speaking, larger landowning and middle classes. This ‘Anglo-Welsh’ identity was also sustained by the Anglican Church of Wales, which remained established until 1920.

England was the dominant nation within the UK, with its own population exceeding the combined total of the other three constituent nations several times over. This meant that the emergence of an English-British identity was less clear-cut. For many English people, Britain/British meant England/English, and the two sets of terms were interchangeable.

Despite remaining and continuing national differences, it was clearly the British Empire that provided the real economic and ideological cement that held British, English and hybrid British identities together within the Union. This remained the case so long as the UK was a major independent imperial power. Class still divided those adopting these hybrid British identities. Different classes imbued these hybrid identities with different meanings, celebrating their own alternative histories. Nevertheless, the wider political potential of any opposition, emanating from ‘lower order’ Radicals, Lib-Labs, Labourists and later, British Socialists, was constantly undermined by these parties’ acceptance of Union and Empire and the existing constitutional order.

The promotion of hybrid British identities has remained an important feature of unionist and imperial politics. This could be seen in appeals targeted at ‘Paddy’, ‘Jock’ and ‘Taffy’ to enlist before the First World War. Imperial wars have also been used to gain wider support for UK state institutions. This was highlighted when Irish Home Rule leaders, such as John Redmond and Joe Devlin, acted as recruiting sergeants for the carnage of the First World War. Today the SNP supports Scottish regiments, which have long served British (and now US/British) imperial interests throughout the world.

 

iii)  The appearance of independent national political organisations within the UK

In Ireland, the defeat of the 1798 Rising, and the subsequent 1801 Act of Union, broke the United Irishmen, the key force behind the early revolutionary democratic challenge to the UK state. The United Irishmen had represented the first attempt to create an independent national political organisation in these islands. Daniel O’Connell led a later struggle for Catholic Emancipation. This was achieved in 1829.  However, whilst having its mass base in Ireland, this campaign was aimed at reform of the constitution throughout the UK, not just in Ireland. O’Connell worked in conjunction with the Whigs. He even considered the possibility of the Irish becoming ‘West Britons’.  O’Connell’s later attempt, through the Repeal Association, to remove Ireland from the parliamentary union, but still keep it under the Crown, failed in 1843. His politics remained subordinate to those of the Whigs. He was strongly opposed to any of the Chartists who showed more sympathy with those seeking to end the Union. This was because of the particular class challenge they represented.

During the mid-nineteenth century heyday of British ‘free trade imperialism’, political competition throughout these islands was largely conducted between sections of the British upper and middle classes under Tory/Conservative and Whig/Liberal banners. This was true whether they came from England, Scotland, Wales or Ireland. The particular national poles of those hybrid identities, found amongst the upper and middle class Irish-British, Scottish-British and Welsh-British, were largely reserved for private, social and cultural occasions. Both the existing and would-be members of the British ruling class were confident about their shared future, as they basked in an “Empire upon which the sun never sets”. This was why these hybrid British national identities did not take on any party political form at the time.

It took until the 1880’s for new independent national political organisations to appear in Ireland. The launching of the quasi-revolutionary Irish Land League (ILL) brought the mass of tenant farmers into active politics. However, one of the ILL’s key leaders, Charles Parnell, brought about his own ‘counter-revolution within the revolution’ with the backing of the Irish middle class and better-off farmers. In 1882, after agreeing to call off the rent strike and other forms of non-legal action, Parnell established the Irish National League (INL) as a constitutional nationalist party.  The INL pressed for a tenant buyout of Ascendancy-owned land, backed Irish-owned industry, and campaigned for Irish Home Rule. However, an underground of committed Irish republicans still remained.

In Scotland, the Highland Land League (HLL) made the first attempt to break through the established two party system of the Conservatives and Liberals in 1885. The formation of the HLL had been inspired by the socio-economic gains of the ILL, and by the political advances made by the INL. The HLL put up independent Crofter candidates and won four seats. They gained support from workers and Radicals in the Central Belt. The HLL favoured Scottish and Irish Home Rule, with its most Radical leaders linking this to a vision of  ‘land for the people’.

Scottish workers were, in turn, inspired by the successful election of Crofter MPs. Scottish miners, in particular, extended the earlier, largely agrarian inspired notion of ‘land for the people’ to cover all land, including its mineral resources. This demand was to be promoted either by means of the taxation of mineral royalties (a Radical policy inspired by Henry George), or by land nationalisation (a Socialist policy advocated by the Social Democratic Federation). The miners, in their turn, led by Keir Hardie, were influential in forming the Scottish Labour Party in 1888, five years before the (intended all-UK) Independent Labour Party was launched in Bradford.

The rising middle classes of Ireland, Scotland and Wales (as well as in the ‘White’ British colonies) used their growing economic power to make increasing political claims for themselves. Key sections pressed for Home Rule within the UK (or British Empire) for their own nations. Their particular Home Rule reforms would provide them with ‘protected’ jobs in these nations, whilst still guaranteeing them access to the wider jobs and spoils of Union and Empire. The middle class supporters of Home Rule within the UK, and of White colonial self-government within the wider British Empire, hoped that their suggested political reforms would satisfy the ‘lower orders’.

However, they were constantly looking over their shoulders. They feared those workers and small tenant farmers, who might raise their own economic and social demands, and push for more advanced political change. They might create their own independent political organisations to achieve these ends, based on either a social republican, or later, a socialist republican perspective, which fundamentally challenged the UK state and British Empire.

 

iv)  The retreat of hybrid British identities in Ireland in the face of new challenges and their maintenance in Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales, as long as British imperialism remained relatively strong

In Ireland, the possibility of an Irish-British national identity gaining more widespread acceptance was greatly reduced in the aftermath of the disastrous Great Famine (1845-9), especially amongst Catholic tenants.  However, Irish-British identity still commanded significant support from the ‘Anglo-Irish’ Ascendancy, and amongst the Protestant middle class, tenant farmers and artisans. This was particularly the case in industrial north-east Ulster, which played an important role in the British imperial economy. This link also helped to push the majority of working class Protestants into giving their eager support to the Union and Empire, encouraged by the Conservatives (and later the Liberal Unionists), the Orange Order, the (Anglican) Church of Ireland and Presbyterian street corner demagogues.

Amongst those largely Catholic Irish, the specifically Irish aspect of their national identities took on a greater significance.  Middle class Home Rulers, though, still retained some attachment to the wider British Empire, buttressed by the Catholic hierarchy’s support.  The United Irish League’s (successor to the split INL, after the Parnell/Kitty O’Shea scandal) opposition to the British imperial Boer War (1899-1902) (also matched by some British Liberals, and most ILP members and Socialists) was not upheld when it came to the First World War (1914-18).

However, a significant minority amongst the ‘lower orders’ rejected the imperial notion of a shared British national identity altogether, whether hyphenated or not. The Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB) (first founded in 1858 and reconstituted in 1867) had promoted the notion of an independent Irish republic, based on an Irish nation (initially formed by uniting Catholics, Protestants and Dissenters as the Irish-Irish, as opposed to Irish-British, in the context of an Ireland still within the Union).

When the IRB accepted the ‘New Departure’ in 1878, encouraged particularly by Michael Davitt, this led to the formation of the Irish Land League. The ensuing Land War provided the idea of an Irish republic with a wider political base of support. Republicans in Ireland differed amongst themselves over their visions of a future society. The most advanced amongst them sought popular democratic control over their nation’s natural resources, especially land, and sometimes over its principal industries and transport. In their thinking, this would lead to the formation of a social republic (e.g. Michael Davitt) or, later on, a socialist republic (e.g. James Connolly).

The strength of the British Empire continued to buttress Scottish-British and Welsh-British identities for a considerably longer period than a hybrid British identity did in most of Ireland. Like north-east Ulster, industrial Clydeside and South Wales played important parts in the British imperial economy. After a succession of economic, social, cultural and political reforms, made to accommodate the ‘lower orders’, the UK state gained the support of Liberals and Radicals, Lib-Labs, and later of Empire-accepting Labour Party members and Socialists. They all pressed for their desired economic, social and cultural reforms within the existing unionist and imperial order.

In Ireland, it took the shock of the First World War, with its exposure of British imperial weakness, to push small farmers, labourers and workers into concerted action to break from their previous majority support for Irish constitutional nationalism and to fight for an Irish Republic. The socialist republican, James Connolly, along with the Irish Citizen Army, a workers’ militia initially formed during the 1913 Dublin Lock-out, played key roles in initiating this Republican struggle, marked by the 1916 Easter Rising in Dublin.

Following on from this example, John Maclean introduced the idea of the break-up of the Union and Empire to the Scottish working class. Previously adhering to the ‘British road to socialism’ of the British Socialist Party (BSP), Maclean first adopted James Connolly’s strategy in 1919. In that year he witnessed the resilience of the Irish Republican opposition (including the Limerick Soviet) fighting for political aims, and compared this with the relative weakness of the trade union opposition fighting for economic demands (the 40 hour week struggle of engineering workers) on Clydeside.

Having rejected the shortcomings of existing British socialist organisations, particularly the BSP, he formed the Tramp Trust Unlimited, and toured Scotland to promote his pamphlet, Ireland’s Tragedy – Scotland’s Disgrace.  Maclean’s endeavours, in this regard, eventually led to the foundation of the Scottish Workers Republican Party in 1922. They were partly curtailed by his early death in 1923. However, Maclean’s final years also coincided with the ending of the 1916-21 International Revolutionary Wave, marked by the crushing of the Kronstadt Soviet in the infant USSR.

This same period of political and economic setbacks witnessed the success of the British ruling class attempt to reassert its control over the working class upsurge, which followed the First World War and the Russian Revolution.  In 1919, the challenge of the 40 Hours Strike of engineers on Clydeside and the Laganside was faced down. Tanks and English troops were used in Glasgow, whilst Loyalists evicted militants and Catholic workers from the Belfast shipyards. In 1921, militant miners, whose leaders were originally bought off by the Sankey Commission (hinting at the possibility of the nationalisation of the coal mines), were left isolated by the other members of the Triple Alliance of miners’, railworkers’ and transport workers’ unions on Black Friday, after the Commission failed to deliver.

Meeting considerably more resistance in Ireland, the British ruling class was finally able to reassert its control over the situation following the War of Independence. This war had come about after the UK government’s refusal to recognise Sinn Fein’s overwhelming electoral victory in the 1918 General Election.  The Black and Tans were launched against the Irish population in 1920. British state backing was given to the Unionist pogroms in Belfast between 1920-22.

Eventually, a partitionist Anglo-Irish Treaty was imposed in 1922. This recognised a now separate Irish Free State under the Crown in 26 counties. Home Rule within the UK for Northern Ireland was provided for 6 of Ireland’s counties, where a new Stormont was constituted. The new Ulster Unionist Party ensured that it became, in effect, ‘a Protestant Parliament for a Protestant People’. A new Northern Ireland statelet was created for the Protestant majority who were to form a new hybrid national identity there. They became the Ulster-British (albeit at the cost of abandoning 3 Ulster counties), now that the old Irish-British leadership had lost its political ascendancy over the other 26 counties, and the Irish-Irish had become Irish.  The British state armed the pro-Treaty forces in the 26 counties in order to crush the Republican resistance in the Irish Civil War (1922-3), and to keep the Irish Free State under the Crown.

In Scotland, at this time, the growing Labour Party was taking on more significance than its pro-Home Rule affiliate, the Independent Labour Party, which had been founded earlier. The Labour Party took less interest in constitutional reform and concentrated on Westminster as the focus for its economic and social reforms, especially after the defeat of a Scottish Home Rule Bill during the first minority Labour government in 1924. The infant CPGB, which had a significant base in Scotland, took inspiration from another unionist state, the USSR. Here the CPSU leadership, drawn from a number of the Union’s republics, played an analogous integrating role in the USSR, to that of the British ruling class in the UK state. The CPSU was hostile to any meaningful exercise of national self-determination within its territorial boundaries. The early CPGB adopted a similar attitude to any move for national democracy in Scotland (and also in Wales).

Therefore, the first fractures in the British unionist and imperialist set-up, which had been highlighted during the 1916-21 International Revolutionary Wave, were prevented from opening up further.  The British ruling class was able to reimpose its control over these islands, and indeed throughout its Empire. The British Empire reached its maximum territorial extent as result of the imperialist carve-up and redivision, which occurred after the First World War.  The Nationalist parties, which did emerge in Northern Ireland (the rump Nationalist Party began to take its seats in Stormont in 1924), in Wales (Plaid Cymru in 1925), and in Scotland (the SNP in 1934), remained fairly marginal, apart from occasional short-lived spurts (e.g. Robert MacIntyre’s SNP victory in the Motherwell by-election in 1945) until the 1960’s.

 

v)  British ruling class attempts to buttress their power through reform of the union in the face of the imperial decline and the further retreat of hybrid British identities, especially amongst the working class

In their attempt to coopt other classes in support of their wider imperial aims, it can be seen that the British ruling class was forced to concede reforms of its Empire and Union, whenever it has faced strong enough national democratic challenges. In the case of Ireland, where direct political control was lost over 26 counties, after the War of Independence, the British ruling class first developed what would later be known as neo-colonial methods of control, exercised at a distance, through local parties that still accepted the wider British imperial hegemony. Within the UK (and even in those parts of the Empire where direct British colonial control still remained) reforms had been, or were later,  introduced which gave greater recognition to the national poles of the various hybrid British identities – Irish, Scottish and Welsh (and Canadian, Australian and New Zealander).

In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, administrative devolutionary measures had been considered enough to achieve this within the UK itself (e.g. a Secretary of State for Scotland in 1885, a Welsh Department of the Board of Education in 1907). During the era of High Imperialism, the conservative unionist majority (Conservatives and Liberal Unionists) amongst the British ruling class could still confidently obstruct any specifically political Home Rule proposals advocated by liberal unionists or constitutional nationalists (Liberals, Radicals, Lib-Labs, Labourists, the INL and its successors), although they sometimes supported measures of administrative Home Rule.

However, Conservative unionist intransigent opposition to constitutional reform had proved impossible to maintain during the International Revolutionary Crisis from 1916-21 and the Irish Republican challenge to British rule. Therefore unwittingly, the earlier majority British ruling class hostility towards political Home Rule had contributed to the first phase of the break-up of the UK state, leading to the departure of the Irish Free State (albeit still under the Crown until 1948).

As British imperialism went into further decline, in the aftermath of the Second World War, and particularly from the 1960′s, the underlying historical trend towards the political break-up of the British Empire and the UK state and  the erosion of ‘Britishness’ began to reassert itself.  In the UK, this occurred despite continued economic integration throughout these islands, with big business (British, American and European) taking over previous nationally based businesses, or driving them to the wall; and, as the network of shared transport, communication and media, which linked the constituent nations of the UK, drew ever closer.

This continued imperial decline has taken place over a protracted period. The British ruling class has conducted a concerted rearguard defence of both Empire and Union, especially when it faced particularly severe challenges, e.g. during the Second World War (1939-45). Nevertheless, particularly since the 1960’s, as the territorial extent (with the loss of most of its colonies) and the effective political reach of British imperialism have gone into rapid decline, greater numbers of workers and others in Scotland began to downgrade the British imperial part of their hybrid national identities and upgrade the specific Scottish national part. The first political indications of this were the SNP electoral breakthroughs. Winnie Ewing was elected to Westminster in the Hamilton by-election in 1967.

In Wales, during the 1950’s, this process revealed itself a little earlier, partly due to the continued political significance of the Welsh language, but it was then held back.  The UK state was able to promote ethnic (cultural) enmity along language lines to divide English and Welsh speakers. Those Welsh cultural nationalists, who prioritised the defence of the Welsh language over democratic political reform, gave unwitting support to the UK state in its divide-and-rule endeavours. Nevertheless it was the impact of Plaid Cymru that first highlighted the rise of new nationalist parties in the UK. Gwynfor Evans was elected to Westminster in the Carmarthen by-election in 1966.

It was only in the Northern Ireland, that a continued strong British identity – Ulster-British – was able to vigorously maintain itself, albeit almost entirely amongst the Protestant section of the population.  Significantly, this Ulster-Britishness has always been strongly associated with an exaggerated support for the Empire, Union, King (or Queen) and the established Protestant religion. Furthermore, it required a starkly repressive Orange statelet (financed by UK state subventions), with its gerrymandered Stormont, a draconian Special Powers Act, a Protestant unionist dominated RUC, and a variety of Special forces drawn from Orange and other Loyalist organisations, to maintain this.

However, amongst the Irish section [1] of the population living in ‘the Six Counties’, a more confident Irish nationalism began to assert itself in the late 1960’s. Local liberal and labour unionist attempts to woo those with an Irish identity in Northern Ireland were never that convincing, since their advocates quickly bowed to pressure from the conservative Ulster Unionists backed by various Loyalist organisations. These reactionary forces were determined to exclude Irish/Catholics (usually seen by them as being identical) from any political say in Stormont and most of Northern Ireland’s local councils. The unionist Northern Ireland Labour Party (NILP) did win some limited Catholic support (which hinted at a possibility of cementing an Irish-British, as opposed to an Irish national identity in the North), but not in the West Belfast heartland, where Irish workers voted for Republican Labour candidates. The NILP remained committed to unionism.

The initiators of the Civil Rights Movement sought the reform of Stormont, hoping to win working class Protestant support. However, a significant section of the Republican Movement (later to emerge as the Official wing), who had been influenced by the Communist Party of Ireland (itself partitioned until 1970), saw this as but the first stage to achieving a united Ireland (a strategy taken up again by today’s Sinn Fein). Many, though, on the most radical wing of the Civil Rights Movement, led by Peoples Democracy (PD), had been influenced by the direct action wing of American Civil Rights Movement and by the heady days of ‘68’. Some PD leaders saw their struggle as the first phase of wider international revolution.

As in the period between 1920-2, any opposition emanating from the Irish national communities was met by a Loyalist counter-offensive, backed in 1969 by the RUC and the B Specials. The RUC attacked the Bogside in Derry, a Loyalist pogrom (including out-of-uniform Specials) was launched in streets off the Lower Falls Road in West Belfast, whilst the isolated Short Strand in East Belfast also came under armed Loyalist assault in 1970.

In the late 1960’s, a determined UK state-backed, liberal unionist attempt to integrate the Catholic Irish economically, socially, culturally and politically into Northern Ireland, might have split any renewed specifically Irish national challenge.  If the Catholic Irish might still have found it hard to become Ulster-British, they could possibly have been won over to a wider Irish-British identity, in a similar manner to those considerable numbers of Catholic Irish who had moved to Scotland.

Such an attempt might have been possible if Stormont had been abolished immediately and a UK state programme of civil rights imposed upon Northern Ireland, in an analogous manner to the attempt by the US Federal Government to enforce civil rights in the South. However, the rise of national democratic movements elsewhere in the UK initially made the British ruling class nervous about the uncertainties opened up by constitutional reform, especially when they lacked reliable local moderate unionists to help maintain UK state control in Northern Ireland. Therefore, the UK state continued to give backing to the intransigent but reliably loyal Ulster Unionists. The British ruling class also faced the added worry that Northern Ireland lay strategically on the northern gateway to the Atlantic, in the context of the ongoing Cold War, and Ireland was not signed up to NATO (although still very pro-US and anti-Communist).

In Scotland, it had been the Labour Party, which provided those from a Catholic Irish background with a political conduit into local government and Westminster.  Many had been won over to support for the Union in Britain, and for a long time, they opposed any political Devolution (as Home Rule came to be called) for Scotland. Scotland still remained a more hostile environment for the Catholic Irish, whereas such feelings tended to be more locally restricted in England, e.g. Liverpool – at least until the emergence of ‘The Troubles’. It took some time before Scottish society began to open itself enough to permit the development of an alternative Scottish-British or Irish-Scottish identities for those from a Catholic Irish background. Before this many  considered themselves to be Irish-British. They provided the strongest working class support for the unionist British Labour Party in Scotland.  This was partly as an insurance against their fears that any future Scottish Parliament could perhaps become another ‘Stormont’.

Liberal and labour unionism remained weak in Northern Ireland though. The one-party Orange sectarian regime had both regular and irregular Unionist armed forces at its disposal, whilst also being able to call upon bigoted Loyalist forces when necessary. Ulster Unionist and Loyalist intransigence blocked the door to any meaningful reform of Stormont, which could integrate the Irish and lead to their acceptance of an Irish-British identity.

In the absence of any other reliable support for continued UK rule, the British government sent troops to Northern Ireland, in 1969, to uphold the position of the now strongly challenged Ulster Unionists and their Orange statelet. Both the Labour government, and the following Conservative government elected in 1970, recommended some liberal unionist concessions to split the Civil Rights Movement, and to win over moderate middle class Catholic support. But this was a bridge too far for most Ulster Unionists. They stuck by the old Loyalist certainties – “No surrender”, “Not an Inch”. And, as an indication that the Unionist regime enjoyed continued UK government support, it was permitted to introduce internment without trial. Arrests were confined solely to the Irish (Republican, Nationalist and Socialist), despite the murders, pogroms and other attacks made by Loyalists.

 

vi)  The initial failure of liberal unionist political devolution and the entrenchment of Westminster Direct Rule by 1979

The British ruling class has a long collective memory, and the re-emergence of national democratic challenges in the 1960’s reminded some of them of the old Home Rule policies, which had emerged amongst the liberal unionists in the Liberal Party (not to be confused with the conservative unionist, anti-Home Rule, Liberal Unionists), in the face of challenges from the Land Leagues, the Irish National League and its successors in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.  Therefore, in response to the growing national democratic movements in the 1960’s, Harold Wilson’s Labour government set up the Crowther (later to be called the Kilbrandon) Commission in 1969.  Its work continued under Heath’s Conservative government and it reported in 1973. The Kilbrandon Commission recommended liberal unionist reform of the UK constitution. What had once been termed ‘Home Rule’  was now to be called ‘Devolution’.  Yet, the Conservative government and the Labour opposition saw no great urgency to implement these recommendations following the failure of the SNP or Plaid Cymru to make any further breakthroughs in the 1970 General Election.

However, the polarised situation in Northern Ireland, with the re-emergence of an armed Republican resistance, particularly after Bloody Sunday in Derry in 1972; a more vigorous Nationalist party – the Social Democratic & Labour Party (SDLP); the rapid development of Loyalist gangs and paramilitaries; and further right Unionist parties – the right populist, Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) and the semi-fascist, Vanguard Progressive Unionist Party (VPUP) – eventually forced the Conservative government to initiate constitutional reform (with Westminster cross party support) and pass the Northern Ireland Constitution Act in 1973. It brought about the abolition of Stormont. However, this was only meant to be a temporary measure, before the setting up of a new power-sharing devolved assembly in Northern Ireland. A somewhat reluctant Brian Faulkner, leader of the conservative unionist Ulster Unionist Party (UUP), along with the Oliver Napier of the liberal unionist Alliance, and Gerry Fitt of the constitutional nationalist SDLP, signed the Sunningdale Agreement, hoping to bring about this reform of Stormont.

Once again, most conservative and reactionary Unionists and Loyalists strongly opposed any liberal unionist constitutional reform. They formed the United Ulster Unionist Council (with the rejectionist, further right section of the UUP led by Harry West, the DUP led by Ian Paisley, and the VPUP led by William Craig). The Ulster Army Council (UVF and UDA), and the Loyalist paramilitary-led Ulster Workers Council were also formed. These three organisations coordinated a campaign of political opposition, paramilitary intimidation and strike action that brought down the Sunningdale Agreement. This agreement, initially drawn up under Heath’s Conservative government, had become the responsibility of Harold Wilson’s incoming Labour government in 1974, highlighting these parties’ shared unionist approach.

Following the collapse of Sunningdale, Northern Ireland, like Scotland and Wales, became subject to Westminster Direct Rule, albeit without a UK-wide party with direct representation at Westminster.  The Conservatives, Labour and Liberals provided Britain-wide parties in England, Scotland and Wales to address the interests of their various class backers within these constituent nations of the UK. (The UUP broke its last organisational links with the Conservatives in protest against Sunningdale.) Indeed, much of the running of the Northern Ireland statelet was handed over to the security services, with consecutive Northern Irish Secretaries of State acting like colonial governors.

In contrast, though, electoral gains by both the constitutional nationalist SNP and Plaid Cymru, in the two 1974 general elections, persuaded the new Labour government to continue pursuing liberal unionist constitutional reform in Scotland and Wales. In 1978, they introduced Devolution Bills for the two nations. Both the SNP and Plaid Cymru supported these bills. However, Labour was presiding over growing British economic and wider imperial decline. Sections of the British ruling class began to mount strong opposition to any prospects of further ‘dangerous’ liberal reform. They wanted to batten down the hatches of UK plc in the face of an increasingly turbulent international economic situation.

The repressive methods used to assert UK state control in Northern Ireland, in the attempt to break continuing Irish Republican resistance, appealed to some sections of the British ruling class. They thought that some of these techniques might have a wider application in the future.  They looked to the Conservative Party, pushing for a new right wing leadership under Margaret Thatcher. Labour’s incumbent Northern Ireland Secretary of State, Roy ‘Stone’ Mason, was also an advocate of UK state repression and a leading figure in Labour’s shift to the Right under Callaghan after his government kowtowed to the IMF.

Therefore, it was not surprising that there was a sizeable section of the Labour Party, particularly in Scotland and Wales, which opposed any liberal unionist constitutional reform. They were permitted to campaign openly against the Labour government’s Devolution Bills. They were assisted by the Left British unionists. In Scotland, Labour’s Tam Dayell, Robin Cook and Brian Wilson (who adopted a pro-Highland, anti-Central Belt position), and in Wales, Labour’s Neil Kinnock and Leo Abse (who adopted anti-Welsh speaking Wales positions), supported by some of the far Left (e.g. initially the ‘revolution not devolution’ SWP), tried to put a Leftist gloss on the conservative unionist counter-attack on liberal constitutional reform.

Those members of the ruling class opposing the Devolution Bills enjoyed a decided advantage. Under the Crown Powers, the UK constitution allows the ruling class’s agents in Westminster, the judiciary, the senior civil service and the military and security officers to bypass parliamentary scrutiny and to resort to some decidedly anti-democratic methods. These could be seen most clearly in Northern Ireland, where, in an attempt to defeat the Republican opposition and to cow the Irish section of the population, Diplock courts (with normal defenders’ rights suspended), internment without trial, shoot-to-kill and state backing for Loyalist death squads had been introduced.

Such draconian measures were not needed though in Scotland and Wales to face down the loose alliance of pro-devolution liberal unionists and constitutional nationalists. Instead, the anti-devolutionists got Labour MP, George Cunningham, to put an amendment requiring the support of 40% of the total electorate before Devolution would be enacted. They wheeled out former Conservative Prime Minister, Lord Douglas-Hume, to promise a better devolutionary deal in Scotland under a Tory government in the future. Senior civil servants were told to bury any government reports or papers which might aid the nationalists.  Some mock military exercises were targeted at putative armed nationalist forces, and agent provocateur activity was promoted on the Scottish nationalist fringe. Attempts were made to divide English and Welsh speakers in Wales.  ‘Non-political’ ‘Elizabrit’ was persuaded to make an anti-nationalist Christmas Speech in 1977. The two Devolution Bills were defeated in referenda held in 1979. This prompted a general election, which led to a Conservative government under Thatcher.

The liberal unionist political impulse had been brought to a juddering halt. Thatcher was a conservative ultra-unionist, who warmly admired the political methods of the rejectionist Ulster Unionists. She enjoyed close links with the imperially trained British security services. Her new government, elected in 1979, soon stepped up the combined employer, unionist and imperialist offensives.

 

vii)  A failed liberal unitary Britain attempt to reform politics in Northern Ireland

It might have been thought that, after the latest challenge from the Irish community and the failure of UUP one-party statelet, which had controlled Northern Ireland from 1922 until the abolition of Stormont  in 1972, unionists in Northern Ireland would have appreciated the closer political links to the rest of the UK brought about by Westminster Direct Rule. Back in 1801, their Irish unionist antecedents had overcome Orange Order objections and accepted the abolition of the Irish Parliament, although they had continued to give (sometimes clandestine) support to the Orange Order, as an insurance policy against Irish national ‘lower order’ challenges. Furthermore, in Northern Ireland, even after the abolition of Stormont, as in Ireland after the Act of Union, devolved administrative institutions still remained in place; so Ulster-British identities could still have been preserved, under continued Direct Rule, just as Scottish-British and Welsh-British identities had received continued institutional support.

In an attempt to make political capital out of such possibilities, the Campaign for Equal Citizenship was launched in the 1980′s with the involvement the British and Irish Communist Organisation and the prominent dissident Ulster unionists, Robert McCartney and Clifford Smyth. Campaigns were also launched within both the British Labour and Conservative parties, to get these two ‘mainland’ parties to organise directly in Northern Ireland, so that British ‘national’ politics could be conducted solely through Westminster. After making some initial headway, these campaigns to encourage greater British political integration fell away.  The majority of traditional Ulster Unionists – whether UUP or DUP – were still wanting to maintain Protestant supremacy and not confuse matters by recognising Irish Catholic rights throughout the UK.

The new Westminster Direct Rule arrangements in Northern Ireland hardly provided a successful liberal, or even a conservative precedent for any would-be British nationalists making the first tentative moves towards a more unitary British state. Successive British governments ensured that effective control in the province was given over to the British armed forces and security services. Their powers to intervene even included the right to approve new building projects (this was to ensure the unimpeded movement of troops in Irish peopled areas). Any economic and social concessions were only made in an attempt to placate workers and others who were often beyond effective state control throughout ‘The   Troubles’. Ironically, the one thing which united the mainstream Unionist and Nationalist parties in Northern Ireland, from the late 1980’s, was an insistence on the return of Stormont, even if they supported this for diametrically opposed reasons.

 

viii)  The Irish Hunger Strike (1981) and the Miners Strike (1984-5) – a comparison between their long-term political impacts

The 1970’s had initially seen a liberal state response to an increasing working class challenge, as well as to the rise of new national democratic movements. The successful 1974 Miners’ Strike, which had brought down the Conservative government, led to a period of debate amongst the ruling class about how the working class challenge could best be contained. The incoming Labour government initiated the Bullock Report published in 1977. This adopted a liberal approach to industrial relations and recommended ‘worker participation’ in the running of industry. In reality, these ‘workers’ would more likely have been trade union officials, especially at the higher levels of industrial management. Most of the Left opposed worker participation at the time, because it was understood to represent an opening to corporatism, under the auspices of the state, the employers and the trade union bureaucracy. Workers’ control of, not participation in, the management of industry was the answer for many on the Left.

Furthermore, just as the Labour government bowed to right wing pressure over liberal reform of Northern Ireland, so it ignored Bullock’s liberal ‘worker participation’ recommendations. Instead, under pressure from the IMF, the CBI, and an increasingly right wing Conservative Party, Callaghan’s Labour government tried to roll back workers’ pay demands in a period of rampant inflation. Under the Social Contract from 1974, and the Concordat, following the 1978-9 ‘Winter of Discontent’, Labour looked for help from the TUC and trade union bureaucracy to discipline any shop steward and rank and file worker initiated independent (unofficial) action.

When the Labour government collapsed in 1979, after its Scottish and Welsh Devolution referenda debacles, the Conservatives were returned. Thatcher soon initiated a relentless campaign to break independent trade union power. Defeats of selected groups, such as the steel workers in 1980, and the Warrington print workers in 1983, paved the way for comprehensive anti-trade union laws. ‘Anti-trade union’ is a bit of a misnomer here, since the effect of these laws has been very different upon the trade union bureaucracy compared to the rank and file. The former has greatly increased its privileges at the expense of, and its power over, the latter. This bureaucracy has jealously protected its position by clamping down on any attempts to organise effective industrial action, which might jeopardise its position.

The Conservatives did impose a ban to prevent GCHQ workers from remaining members of their union in 1984. However, they also provided state funding for official trade union courses to encourage employee ‘responsibility’. They worked closely with right wing trade union leaders, such as those in the EEPTU, who signed deals that signed their members up to private health schemes. The Conservatives’ real victory over the whole Trade Union Movement though came as result of the defeat of the 1984-5 Miners’ Strike. This was a titanic battle, and its leader, Arthur Scargill, attempted to thwart the draconian anti-trade union laws and state backing for scab unions – the UDM and EEPTU. However, he also thought that victory would come through winning the official support of the TUC and the Labour Party, rather than the independent organisation of those many trade unionists and supporters who might have defied their obstructive tactics.

Thatcher made it very clear that she considered the miners to be “the enemy within”, and that the miners’ industrial action threatened the UK state. Therefore, the worried leaderships of the very constitutional Labour Party and TUC did what they could to marginalise the miners. The Conservative government, in the meantime, made concessions to Scottish teachers, dockers and Militant Labour-led Liverpool Council to avoid fighting on too many fronts, knowing that, once the miners were defeated, they could pick off these groups later.

It had been but eight years between the British ruling class’s tentative support for the liberal industrial relations reforms suggested by Bullock to their total support for anti-trade union laws and state repression of the miners. So, how did their initial support for liberal unionist constitutional reform of the UK fare over much the same period? The British ruling class’s strongest commitment to such liberal reform was shown between 1973 (the Northern Ireland Constitution Act and the Sunningdale Agreement) and 1978 (the Scottish and Welsh Bills to introduce Devolution). However, it has already been shown that ruling class support for liberal constitutional measures was dead in the water by 1979.  The conservative unionists had apparently triumphed earlier on the political front than they were later to on the industrial front.

However, in Northern Ireland, events then took a different course, leading to another British ruling class response. The Republican Movement, having suffered considerable setbacks, under both the Labour and Conservative governments’ criminalisation offensive, was able to win back wide support from the Irish community during the 1981 Hunger Strikes. This culminated in the election of IRA prisoner, Bobby Sands, to Westminster. Furthermore, the ensuing death of Sands and nine other hunger strikers did not represent the same massive defeat for the Republican Movement, as did the defeat of the miners, four years later, for the wider British Trade Union Movement. After the Hunger Strikes, the Republican Movement was able to make significant political gains largely because, unlike the British Labour Party, it did not depend on the support of those who accepted the political limitations of the existing UK constitutional order. Between 1984-5, a minority amongst the South Yorkshire miners came to understand that the British state’s police occupation of their villages bore a striking resemblance to the British state’s army occupation of the Irish peopled villages in South Armagh. In a sense, they were coming to a similar conclusion to that of John Maclean 66 years earlier in 1919, when he realised that open political struggles against the state could sustain themselves more effectively than indirect economic struggles.

And in Ireland, by the 1990′s, as in the 1920′s, the British ruling class was forced to go beyond its initial preferred policy of isolation and repression used to break the power of any major opposition it faced. It had to make some real concessions to the Irish Republicans. This outcome contrasted with the more thorough defeat of organised labour. In 1921, the British ruling class had been able to build upon its initial success, in getting the Triple Alliance leaders to climb-down on Black Friday, to go on to crush the General Strike in 1926; just as they built on their defeat of the Steelworkers’ Strike in 1980 to go on to break the National Union of Miners between 1984-5. However, when it came to the challenge represented by the Irish Republicans, in the two periods, the British ruling class had to make greater concessions than their original 1920 Government of Ireland Act, when they came up with the 1922 Anglo-Irish Treaty; just as they eventually had to move beyond the 1985 Anglo-Irish Agreement to accepting the 1998 Good Friday Agreement, despite initially resorting to armed repression in both cases.

 

ix)  The British ruling class’s ‘New Unionist’ strategy to cover the whole of these islands starts and stalls under the Conservatives

Once Thatcher had taken office in 1979, she had originally confidently dismissed the constitutional nationalist SDLP in Northern Ireland and later, the 1984 New Ireland Forum proposals of Garret Fitzgerald’s centre right Fine Gael government in Ireland. These had offered the British government either a confederal or a joint authority solution for Northern Ireland. Thatcher, though, still remained closely allied to the rejectionist UUP.

However, continued Irish Republican resistance, including the 1984 Brighton Bombing, and Sinn Fein successes in local council and Westminster elections, forced the British ruling class into a rethink. As a result, ‘the lady who was not for turning’ made a spectacular U-turn in 1985. She signed the Anglo-Irish Agreement, which involved precisely those Irish parties that Thatcher had so vehemently sidelined the previous year. It also meant distancing the Conservative government from the rejectionist Ulster Unionists.

The Anglo-Irish Agreement (the very name of which showed the low priority Thatcher’s Conservatives gave to the notion of administering three and a bit nations within the UK) revived the idea of a power-sharing Northern Ireland assembly. The Ulster-British would get the backing of the UK government, and the Irish government would provide some guarantees of representation to Irish living in ‘the Six Counties’, through the opening up of an office in Maryfield in Belfast. The Anglo-Irish Agreement represented the first hesitant step towards a British ruling class ‘New Unionist’ strategy of constitutional reform to buttress its position throughout these islands.

In protest, all the rejectionist UUP and DUP MPs resigned their seats at Westminster. Their party leaders, Jim Molyneux and Ian Paisley, organised massive ‘Ulster says No’ rallies against the Anglo-Irish Agreement. They hoped to repeat the success of those conservative and reactionary unionists, when they had defeated the Sunningdale Agreement in 1974. The Ulster Clubs brought together similar forces to the United Ulster Unionist Council, whilst Ulster Resistance was set up as a paramilitary force like the Ulster Army Council, but this time openly uniting Paisley’s DUP with the Loyalist UVF and UDA. However, with unemployment widespread, even amongst the unionist population, there was no equivalent of the Ulster Workers Council this time.

The British military forces did not give the Loyalist paramilitaries the same free rein to intimidate, which they had enjoyed in 1974.  The security forces also continued to target the Republican Movement, resorting to the full range of repressive measures that they had been using against them for years. The Conservative government wanted to create the space for more moderate Unionist and Nationalist political forces to emerge. As it happened, the moderate constitutional nationalist SDLP gained one seat, Armagh and Newry, from the UUP, in 1986, in the string of by-elections prompted by the UUP, DUP and other Unionist resignations. This was not exactly the outcome sought by the rejectionists. Thatcher suddenly became a hate figure amongst Ulster Unionists.

In Scotland, this was the final straw for the remaining Orange Order and UUP-supporting members in the Conservative and Unionist Party (there had been an organisational break between the C&UP and the UUP in 1974).  The Federation of Conservative Students had tried to make links with UUP rejectionists, and some Scottish members hoped to re-establish the party’s traditional links to the Orange Order in Glasgow, to shore up sliding Conservative electoral support. The Orange Order, though, transferred its support to the new Scottish Unionist Party. This remained a strongly pro-Ulster unionist organisation and continued to reject Scottish Devolution, even after the Conservatives came to accept it following the 1997 Devolution referenda results.

The Anglo-Irish Agreement only improved the electoral position of the constitutional nationalist SDLP and the liberal unionist Alliance for a short time. The rejectionist Ulster Unionists remained entrenched, with support moving from the UUP to the even more hardline DUP. However, despite the stepped up repression of the Republican Movement, and some initial setbacks for Sinn Fein, both in local council elections and at Westminster, the IRA was able to continue its armed resistance, and Sinn Fein retained considerable support amongst the Irish section of the population.

Therefore, once Thatcher had been forced to stand down, in November 1990, in the aftermath of the Conservatives’ poll tax defeat, John Major’s incoming Conservative government dramatically extended the scope of ‘New Unionism’.  A further consideration in the Conservatives’ tentative moves towards ‘New Unionism’ was the collapse of the Warsaw Pact in 1989. With the threat from the USSR rapidly receding, the British ruling class could reassess its strategic reasons for upholding Ulster Unionist ascendancy (however awkward that proved to be due to their inflexibility) in Northern Ireland. Already, in November 1990, Peter Brooke, the Conservative Northern Ireland Secretary, issued a statement that “Britain has no selfish strategic or economic interest” in Northern Ireland. Much has been made of the ambiguity of that word “selfish”. However, more revealingly, is what the statement misses out – not so much the “strategic or economic”, but the UK state’s political interest in holding on to Northern Ireland.

Continued UK control of Northern Ireland provides the British ruling class with some political purchase over 26 counties Irish governments. More importantly, it underpins the British ruling class need to maintain the full extent of its wider UK state, if it is to continue to uphold an imperial role in the world. A state that can not hold together its own territory is hardly likely to be seen as an imperial contender by others. The threat from the USSR had been one of the main concerns in the late 1960’s and the 1970’s, when both Labour and Conservative governments decided to buttress the Ulster Unionist regime in Northern Ireland. However, with that threat now removed, after the collapse of the USSR in 1991, the maintenance of the UK state’s full territorial extent, in the face of the threat posed by national democratic movements, including those now reviving in Scotland and Wales, moved once more to the centre of British ruling class attentions.

Under the Downing Street Declaration of 1993, signed by John Major, the UK Prime Minister, and Albert Reynolds, the Irish Fianna Fail Taoiseach, the Republican Movement was invited to help set up and participate in a new power-sharing Northern Ireland Assembly, on the condition of their verified disarmament. The Loyalists were also invited. The Declaration was met by opposition from both major Ulster unionist parties, big sections of the Loyalists, and from some in the Conservative Party. With Major’s authority slipping daily, he was unable to deliver. The IRA leadership still faced internal pressure, as well as the possibility of dissident breakaways. With little apparent progress, the IRA called off its ceasefire and undertook the Canary Wharf Bombing in 1996.

The Conservatives had tried to bottle-up constitutional reform within Northern Ireland. In Scotland and Wales they still retained a traditional conservative unionist approach to such reform by completely opposing political Devolution. However, the combination of the devastating impact of Conservative de-industrialisation policy in Scotland, and their decision to test out the poll tax here first, put the Scottish Conservative vote into tailspin, especially after 1992. The Thatcherite loyalist, Michael Forsyth, now Scottish Secretary, took a leaf from the Welsh Conservatives, hoping that a little cultural nationalism could head off the growing demand for political reform. The Stone of Destiny, removed from Scone Palace by Edward I and installed in Westminster Abbey in 1296, was returned to Scotland on the seventh centennial anniversary of its removal. This theatrical gesture impressed very few people.  Conservative support in Scotland continued to fall. Voices demanding more democracy for Scotland grew.

There was not the same sense of impending electoral collapse in Wales, but support for the Conservatives, which had held up better outside the traditional (but now rapidly declining) industrial areas, than in Scotland, began to fall-off. Furthermore, Welsh Conservative attempts to make inroads into Welsh-speaking Wales were being reversed, due to the devastating impact of their economic policies in rural central and northern Wales. Conservative support became more confined to the English speaking Welsh Border, and their extensions along the North coast and South coast (Vale of Glamorgan and south Pembrokeshire) and the better-off Cardiff commuter belt.

 

x)  Welsh workers slowly learn the need to confront conservative unionist divide-and-rule tactics

Those defining themselves as Welsh-British, whether in North or South Wales, had been the slowest (apart from the Ulster-British) to downgrade or abandon support for the British pole of their hybrid national identities. The newfound support for Devolution, which emerged in Scotland, particularly after the Conservatives tested out their hated poll tax here in 1989, was slower to show itself in Wales. To split English and Welsh speakers, the Conservatives continued to promote a divide-and-rule agenda after its possibilities had been shown during the 1979 Welsh Devolution referendum.

Due to the continued strength of the Welsh Language Movement, the Conservatives had begun to move away from their traditional Anglo-Welsh approach, hoping to benefit from playing up a linguistic divide. They started to make concessions to Welsh cultural nationalism. The Conservative gain of the Anglesey/Ynys Mon parliamentary seat in North Wales by a Welsh language learner, in 1979, had signalled the tentative beginnings of this process of rapprochement. After Gywnfor Evans’ hunger strike in 1980, the Welsh language, Sianel Pedwar/Channel Four TV station had been set up; and after persistent campaigning by Cymdeithas yr Iaith Gymraeg/Welsh Language Society, the Welsh Language Act was enacted in 1993, both under Conservative governments. This rapprochement, signaling a partial abandonment of the traditional Conservative Anglo-Welsh approach, was perhaps most publicly consummated in the marriage of Conservative leader, William Hague, to Welsh speaking Ffion Jenkins in 1997.

The Conservatives’ growing support for measures of cultural Devolution was not matched, however, by any commitment to promoting the socio-economic conditions under which either English or Welsh speaking workers or small farmers could thrive. In the 1980’s, it took the mutual recognition of shared economic interests, by the largely English-speaking South Wales miners (on strike from 1984-5) and by the Welsh-speaking North Wales slate quarriers (on strike in Blaenau Ffestiniog from 1985-6), in the face of relentless Conservative attacks, to begin the process by which Welsh workers’ North/South, ‘Gogs’/'Taffs’ antipathies, and their majority previously shared hostility to the exercise of Welsh national self-determination, encouraged by many Welsh Labour leaders, began to be overcome. Support for Welsh Devolution, which was very much a minority interest in 1979, began to rise in trade union and Labour circles.

 

xi)  New Labour fleshes out ‘New Unionism’ with its ‘Devolution-all-round’ proposals

Once the Conservatives had been exposed as increasingly corrupt and divided, following four terms in office, Blair managed, by 1997, to persuade the majority of the British ruling class that New Labour would be the best bet for maintaining their influence. New Labour would continue and extend neo-liberal economic policies, but these would need to be repackaged (sometimes a mere relabelling was enough – from Private Finance Initiative/PFI to Public Private Partnership/PPP). The trade union leaderships had long been tamed, so could be safely brought on board in a distinctly subordinate role. After the defeat of the miners, Labour had abandoned even the token actions they had mounted against the Tories under the rubric of ‘New Realism’. Now New Labour, taking a leaf from Fianna Fail governments in Ireland, encouraged ‘Social Partnership’ deals between the government, employers and trade union leaders. Social partnerships largely reduced trade union leaders to acting as a free personnel management service for the bosses.

Backed by both the majority of the ruling class and workers, New Labour gained a massive electoral victory in May 1997. They showed more commitment to constitutional reform than the conservatives had. The House of Lords was reformed in order to create a major source of patronage for the New Labour government.  Blair’s government had inherited the Conservatives’ ‘New Unionist’ combined ‘Peace Process’ and constitutional reform strategy for Northern Ireland. However, New Labour fleshed out this ‘New Unionism’ to cover the whole of the UK. The central constitutional reform, though, was ‘Devolution-all-round’, coupled to the ongoing ‘Peace Process’. Together, these were designed to create the optimum political conditions throughout these islands to maximise corporate profits. The ICTU with its Northern Ireland Committee, the STUC and WTUC, all wedded to social partnership, endorsed these new political partnership proposals, with their equivalent imbalance of power between those participating.

Northern Ireland remained at the heart of New Labour’s concerns, precisely because the national democratic challenge had been most intractable there. Blair was able to take advantage of the refusal of the UUP to enter into direct negotiations with Sinn Fein. He privately persuaded the previously rejectionist David Trimble, leader of the UUP, that under New Labour’s proposals, Ulster Unionists had the fullest UK government backing for maintenance of the Union, and that Blair would stand firm against any Republican Movement departure from the ‘New Unionist’ script he had set out for them under the ongoing ‘Peace Process’. Heavily prompted by Blair, but still with considerable hesitation, Trimble brought the majority of the UUP on board. He remained concerned though that he might end up in a similar position to Brian Faulkner, the ditched pro-Sunningdale UUP leader of 1974. Therefore, against the DUP, Trimble used the argument that the ‘inclusive’ intentions, of what came to be known as the 1998 Good Friday Agreement, could better be thwarted from inside rather than outside New Labour’s proposed institutions, as Paisley was arguing.

With the Republican Movement, Blair emphasised that there was constitutional provision should a majority in Northern Ireland ever express its desire to join the Irish Republic. He, no doubt, remained confident that the original 1921 Partition boundaries, drawn up to prevent such an eventuality, would still do their job. Furthermore, by tying the official acceptance of Republican participation in the running of Northern Ireland, to the ending of the 26 counties Irish state claim, under Articles 2 and 3 of the Irish Constitution, Blair was also ensuring that future Irish governments would continue to confine their Northern Irish policy to what was acceptable to the UK state.

Scotland played a pivotal part in New Labour’s extension of ‘New Unionism’. Support for constitutional reform was strongest here, and Labour was the dominant party, so it could hope to control any changes. ‘Sectarian’ – in reality ethnic/cultural – divisions were much less marked compared to Northern Ireland. Whatever their national/religious identity or party politics, the overwhelming majority of people in Scotland consider themselves to be Scottish (whether hyphenated with British or not), which was not the case in Northern Ireland, where there remains a division between those considering themselves to be Ulster-British or Irish. The Scottish Unionist Party, which had tried to build on those ‘sectarian’ divisions that still exist, has had little wider influence. Even the Orange Order eventually transferred its support to the British Labour Party in Scotland, seeing it as the largest and most effective upholder of the Union.

After the bitter disappointment of the earlier 1992 election, Scottish Labour leader, Donald Dewar, had set about heading off any prospects of radical constitutional reform. He insisted that the radically inclined Scottish Constitutional Convention, set up in 1989, which had produced the Claim of Right, should fall in behind British Labour’s more moderate liberal Scottish Devolution proposals. In particular, he rejected any notion of a multi-option referendum, allowing for a vote for independence, which the SNP wanted.

In Wales, Plaid Cymru was more than happy to fall in behind Labour in supporting Welsh Devolution. Plaid Cymru remained relatively weak in the populous traditional industrial South, where Labour dominated. There still remained considerable internal conservative unionist opposition to Devolution within the Welsh Labour Party. These people went on to front the ‘No’ campaign, which also included the Conservative Party. New Labour was taking a chance in Wales, but Blair wanted to give the new UK constitution some appearance of overall coherence. This meant giving political recognition to the nations of Scotland and Wales, and to the unique position of Northern Ireland [1], in an attempt to take the sting out of the existing national democratic challenges. The extent of the powers to be devolved from Westminster, to each of the three other constituent parts of the UK, reflected the level of support in each area – a type of asymmetrical devolution originally pioneered in post-Franco Spain, which had also been confronted by significant national democratic challenges in Euskadi and Catalunya.

Under New Labour’s ‘Devolution-all-round’ proposals, three separate referenda were organised consecutively in Scotland (September 11th, 1997), Wales (September 18th, 1997) and Northern Ireland (May 22nd, 1998). The order in which they were conducted was a reflection of the different degrees of difficulty likely to be confronted in winning a majority. It was hoped that any positive earlier vote would influence each later referendum result in turn. Under New Labour’s referenda, held between October 1997 and May 1998, 74.3% voted ‘Yes’ in Scotland (with 63.5% voting ‘Yes’ to an additional tax raising option), a very narrow 50.3% voted ‘Yes’ in Wales, and a large 71% voted ‘Yes’ in Northern Ireland (where government propaganda had skillfully made it into a vote for or against ‘Peace’). However, plans to devolve some powers to regional assemblies in England were abandoned due to lack of interest.

 

xii)             The contrasting political nature of the effects of ‘New Unionism’ in Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales

The ‘Peace Process’ and ‘Devolution-all-round’ rounded out the British ruling class ‘New Unionist’ strategy to cover all of these islands.  This strategy has been understood as representing a liberal response to national democratic challenges, but it is not that clear cut. In Northern Ireland, the burning desire for peace, amongst both the Irish and Ulster-British populations, has obscured a significant political feature of the Belfast (Good Friday) Agreement (1998), with its further ‘tweekings’ under the St. Andrews Agreement (2006) and the Hillsborough Agreement (2010).

Under the liberal guise of bringing about peace (for now), these agreements are designed to manage a ‘sectarian’ (in reality, national) divide, rather than to overcome it.  The new constitution for Stormont entrenches the position of Unionists and Nationalists when it comes to crucial votes. These votes require that at least 60% of Members of the Assembly (MAs) agree with the proposal, and that this overall vote must include at least 40% from each of the two groups of constitutionally designated  MAs – Unionist and Nationalist.  Yet Northern Ireland includes people with other politics – e.g. Socialist Republicans (who do not necessarily consider themselves Irish nationalists), Greens and Feminists. There are also sections of the population who do not necessarily completely or partially identify themselves as Ulster-British or Irish.

The British government’s promotion of such divide-and-rule measures represents a long-standing conservative unionist (and wider British imperialist) strategy for maintaining ruling class control. The main difference, between pre-1972 and post-1998 Stormont, is that now the UK state has to exert its influence by brokering between the political representatives of two ‘communities’, rather than depending upon only the Unionists, as in the past. Therefore, it is only liberal in the sense of representing a concession made towards the opposition, rather than an attempt to address the real problem, which is the maintenance of the ethnic/’sectarian’ divide, albeit on a different political basis. And, if necessary, the UK state can still override the reformed Stormont, by resorting to the anti-democratic Crown Powers.

After the Northern Ireland Assembly elections of 1998 and 2003, the UUP formed a loose governing coalition with the SDLP, with the shrinking hope of marginalising the DUP and Sinn Fein respectively. By 2007, the former revolutionary nationalist, but now constitutional nationalist, Sinn Fein was able to form a new Stormont governing coalition with Paisley’s previously famously rejectionist, right populist DUP (which had recently won over much of the remaining rejectionist support of the UUP). The DUP took up office, finally convinced that Sinn Fein was prepared to rein in the aspirations of its own base, and support the Police Service in Northern Ireland (PSNI) (as the RUC was now rebranded) when required. The DUP’s leading members, who now extended well beyond Paisley’s original fundamentalist Protestant base, also wanted to cash in on the ‘fruits of office’. The latest 2010 Hillsborough Agreement showed though that the DUP remains committed to watering down even the original Good Friday Agreement.

The Northern Ireland settlement ensures that all Stormont government partners, whether British unionist – like the DUP, UUP and Alliance, or Irish nationalist – like Sinn Fein and SDLP, work together to run Northern Ireland as part of the UK. Whenever differences arise between Unionists and Nationalists, they turn to the UK government to arbitrate. However, the prospect for any long term ‘Peace Dividend’ has faded, especially in the context of economic crisis and public sector cuts.  These particularly affect the most marginalised communities. This has contributed to the return of the use of physical force both by Loyalists and dissident Republicans.

Indeed, the current furore in Scotland, over Rangers and Celtic FC supporters’ clashes, represents a knock-on effect, ‘over the water’, of the still unresolved clash of British and Irish national claims in the post-Good Friday Agreement Northern Ireland. Successive Scottish governments (Labour/Lib-Dem and SNP) have attempted to portray and address the Rangers/Celtic or ‘Old Firm’ ‘troubles’, and the continued threats to Celtic’s Northern Irish-born Catholic manager, Neil Lennon, as an issue about Scottish Protestant/Catholic ‘tribal’ antipathies. However, the problem has relatively little to do with any remaining Protestant antipathy to ‘papists’, or any still lingering Catholic antipathy to ‘prods’.

Catholics, who have come to accept an Irish-British identity, or now accept a Scottish-British identity within the UK, have been able to make marked economic and social progress in Scotland for some decades now.  Those old Scottish ‘Protestants first’ employers have largely gone with the closure of their traditional industries. State and local government (a major source of employment in Scotland) do not discriminate on ethno-religious grounds when recruiting workers. Of course, anti-Catholic attitudes still remain, both in Scottish establishment circles and in wider society. However, strong religious identification has weakened throughout Scottish society, and mixed marriages and other mixed relationships are common.  Successive Scottish devolved governments have distanced themselves from ‘sectarian’ behaviour, and have officially sponsored an anti-’sectarian’ programme of education and legal reform. The Church of Scotland and Conservative Party have ditched their Orange wings, and made positive overtures to Catholics. The SNP has made real efforts to overcome its earlier perceived Protestant/Presbyterian identity. It has tried to woo Catholic hierarchy support to encourage more of their church members to consider themselves as Catholic Scottish, in preference to Irish-Scottish (or Irish-British – the old Labour legacy).

The Labour Party in Scotland has been the major avenue for Catholic political advance in Scotland, particularly in the West. Such avenues were largely blocked to Catholics in Ulster Unionist-dominated Northern Ireland. The Catholic hierarchy in Scotland has also managed to carve out an influential niche for itself. It has publicly pushed for laws that would impose anti-abortion and anti-gay measures upon non-Catholics (which more secular-minded Catholic Labour supporters have resisted and, which some traditionally anti-Catholic Protestant fundamentalists have supported).

In the process, the Catholic hierarchy has encouraged its co-religionists to become either Irish-British or, more recently, Scottish-British subjects, who accept the legitimacy of the UK state.  The hierarchy has also encouraged Catholics in Scotland to reject any strong political (as opposed to sentimental) identification with Irish nationalism, particularly Republicanism. It is conceivable, in the future, that the Scottish hierarchy could encourage Catholics to become Scottish, just as the Irish hierarchy belatedly accepted the move from an earlier Irish-British to an Irish identity, during the War of Independence, both to maintain its own power and to rein in any more radical politics.

However, in attempting to achieve its reactionary social agenda, and also to maintain its controlling position over separate educational provision, the Catholic hierarchy has also helped the upholders of the UK state to disguise the real nature of the divide between supporters of British unionism and Irish nationalism, particularly in the Central Belt of Scotland. The hierarchy characterises this divide, not as being due to the political mobilisation of ethnic/cultural identities, but as being the result of an ingrained anti-Catholicism endemic to Scotland. In its special pleading it, it is noticeable that the hierarchy has offered no support to Scottish gays (indeed the opposite), who face much more serious discrimination, nor much concern about the oppression of women.

Such a stance is also an obstacle to the secular approach needed to move beyond the continued existence of separate schooling on a religious basis. By maintaining that deep-seated anti-Catholicism in Scotland is irreformable, the hierarchy is able to justify the continued need for separate Catholic provision on defensive grounds. The fact that state ‘non-denominational’ schools remain linked to Protestantism is all grist to the mill, both for the Catholic hierarchy and for Protestant supremacists. Socialists have to fight for genuinely secular schools.

However, the main wider social force, which has contributed to the current conflicts is not essentially based on religion, but has to do with national identity. Scotland’s remaining strong family links with Ireland and Northern Ireland, ensure that, what is portrayed as a clash between Rangers and Celtic football fans, or between Protestants and Catholics, is really a clash between Ulster- (and Scottish-) British Unionists and Loyalists on the one hand; and Irish, Irish-British, and increasingly Irish-Scottish Nationalists and Republicans on the other. This division will not be overcome, on the basis of the distorted analysis and misguided policies put forward by the unionist Labour Party, the constitutional nationalist SNP, or the Catholic hierarchy; nor without ending the constitutionally entrenched ‘sectarian’/national divide in Northern Ireland, which allows such enmities to fester.  As in Northern Ireland, these tensions could yet worsen, in the context of the economic crisis and the massive public sector cuts. These particularly hit the most marginalised communities in Scotland’s Central Belt.

The post-1998 Scottish Devolution settlement is, though, a more genuine liberal unionist measure, than the reformed Stormont, in that it does not constitutionally underwrite ethnic difference – every MSP’s vote in Holyrood is held to be equal; there is no ‘ethnic’ count.

Although Scottish Labour assumed it would remain in full control of Holyrood (and found no real challenge to this from their Lib-Dem Coalition partners in the first two coalition governments), by 2007 they were replaced by an SNP minority government. This greatly upset a Scottish Labour Party used to all the perks of office, and to the extensive patronage it had dispensed at national and local level.

However, the Devolution set-up has also been designed to tame the Nationalist parties, and to get them used to participating in the running of the UK state’s devolved machinery of government. The SNP, like the even more timidly constitutional nationalist, Plaid Cymru in Wales, and now the former revolutionary nationalist, Sinn Fein, has warmed to this role, and become decidedly ‘Independence Lite’ in the process.

It is probably in Wales that Devolution has shown its most liberal face. For, unlike Northern Ireland, where ethnic divisions have become more entrenched through their constitutional recognition, the political trajectory in Wales has been largely away from ethnic/cultural division. The cultural divide, earlier promoted between English speaking and Welsh speaking Wales, could still be seen in the results of the 1997 Welsh referendum, where the strongest support was shown in the Welsh-speaking areas and where opposition was strongest in the English-speaking, middle class areas.

Consecutive Labour/Lib-Dem and Labour administrations initially ran the new Welsh Assembly, which had been narrowly approved in the 1997 referendum. As in Scotland, the main concern of Labour was to assert effective British unionist control over the process of change and to limit its scope. In Wales, Blair took advantage of the sex scandal involving Welsh Labour’s initial strongly pro-devolution First Minister, Ron Davies, to impose a reliable New Labour loyalist, Alan Michael, in 1999. Davies had been an advocate of further devolutionary measures; Michael a supporter of imposing Westminster control.

However, with Labour not enjoying an Assembly majority, the Welsh Assembly opposition was able to remove Michael from the First Minister’s post in 2000. In the consequent election for First Minister, Rhodri Morgan, seen to be, like Davies, a supporter of further devolutionary reform, was elected. After the 2007 Welsh Assembly election, Welsh Labour’s Morgan even entered into a One Wales coalition with Plaid Cymru. It is difficult to imagine such a liberal unionist/constitutional nationalist alliance being formed in Scotland, where conservative constitutional unionism (with its willing subordination to the British Labour leadership), especially under Scottish Labour leader, Ian Gray, has become even more marked.

Welsh Labour and Plaid Cymru cooperated in preparing the ground for a new Welsh Bill, which recommended devolving legislative powers to the Welsh Assembly, in a similar manner to those already existing in Scotland. The March 2011 referendum result was much more convincing than in 1997, and the earlier territorial cultural divisions had largely been overcome.  Even the Welsh Conservatives ‘went native’ and supported the measure, although there was still a combined minority Conservative and Labour conservative unionist opposition organised as True Wales. Plaid Cymru is such a moderate constitutional nationalist party, that to many it appeared to have reached the limit of its constitutional ambitions.  Once the new legislative Assembly had been agreed, Plaid Cymru’s vote fell in the following 2011 Assembly elections, and it dropped to third place behind the Welsh Conservatives. This has permitted Welsh Labour to once more form a single party government. This means its leaders once more have a greater number of offices to hand out to their own careerists.

 

xiii)  The British ruling class is determined to hold the line on ‘Devolution-all-round’ to maintain its imperial position in the world

The overwhelming majority of the British ruling class has rallied around the New Labour initiated ‘New Unionist’ ‘Devolution-all-round’ strategy. This is highlighted by its continuation under the Con-Dem coalition. Any opposition, to limited liberal unionist reform of the UK state, has largely been confined to the Tory Right wing, a few Labour unionist diehards, and to UKIP.  Significantly, they have met with little success. In Northern Ireland, the cerebral conservative unionist Cadogan Group, followed by the more recent, reactionary conservative unionist, Traditional Unionist Voice, have remained committed to continuing Ulster-British majority rule. Yet, they have been unable to halt the advance of further power (in reality office) sharing. This is because some amongst the Right have come to appreciate the words of Enoch Powell, that wily old advocate of a British unionism in a period of imperial decline – “Power devolved is power retained”.

The historical break-up of the UK is not an inevitable process in the short or medium term. To delay this prospect, the British ruling class has come to appreciate that changes are necessary to retain as much of its influence as possible throughout these islands, and that die-hard conservative unionism could prove counter-productive in achieving this end. However, British ruling class preparedness to make concessions depends on the strength of the opposition it faces. Above all, it remains committed to maintaining an imperial role for itself. This is because it still greatly benefits from imperial profits. Today these are extracted, not so much by importing cheap primary products and by exporting higher value manufactured goods, but from finance and commerce; whilst the continuation of off-shore tax havens greatly augments ruling class incomes.

Nevertheless, this ruling class appreciates the fact that it no longer has the independent power to exert its imperial weight around the globe. This is why it has opted for a junior imperial role, subordinate to the USA. The USA was first able to assert it imperial hegemony over the UK as a consequence of the impact of the Second World War (underscored by the terms of the Lend-Lease Scheme made to the struggling British government). However, it was the Suez Crisis of 1956, which finally persuaded a reluctant British ruling class that any attempt to pursue an independent imperial role was now past.

Even the UK’s ‘independent’ nuclear forces need US state permission for their use. The British ruling class efforts to maintain its ‘Special Relationship’ with the US state, at all costs, has meant that the UK now acts as US imperialism’s number one ally in helping to maintain the current global corporate order. Under Blair, the British liberalism of New Labour entered into a symbiotic relationship with the American conservatism of Bush’s Republicans. It provided cover for the Neo-Cons’ gung-ho imperialism. UK military forces have been locked into the very centre of NATO – US imperialism’s armed wing. Baron George Robertson moved from being New Labour’s ‘Defence’ Secretary to head up NATO.

US governments have taken their senior partner role quite seriously. Democrat administrations, in particular, have played a key part in nudging the majority of the British ruling class into acknowledging the necessity for some limited political changes in their Union in regard to Ireland, and for it to address its earlier strained relationship with Irish politicians. President Clinton underwrote the ‘Peace (in reality pacification) Process’ by making Sinn Fein politically acceptable. He personally visited Belfast in 1995. In May 2011, President Obama triumphantly followed up ‘Elizabrit’s more hesitant visit to ‘26 counties’ Ireland, in their joint attempts to ‘normalise’ political relations in these islands, i.e. to gain complete acceptance in Ireland of the US/UK role in maintaining the global corporate order in the north east Atlantic. In return, successive US governments have provided their backing for the British ruling class’s ‘New Unionist’ settlement for Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales. The ‘Peace Process’ and ‘Devolution-all-round’ together provide the best political framework to advance both states’ interests throughout these islands.

Just as US state backing for Israel prevents any meaningful political solution to the Palestinian problem, or indeed to the wider crisis-torn Middle East, so US backing for the British ruling class is a major reason why the underlying historical trend to the break-up of the British Empire and the UK state is still being held back. The combination of US state threats (i.e. the warning to the SNP by Lisa Vickers, the former US Scottish Consul, that Scotland could not just leave NATO without consequences) and the UK’s Crown Powers (which enable the British ruling class to bypass Westminster) provide a formidable obstacle to any attempt to win Scottish political independence.

 

xiv)  Obstacles to any SNP attempt to winning political independence in its proposed referendum

Since the May 5^th election, this year, the SNP has formed a majority government at Holyrood. This has raised the prospect of the promised independence referendum, put on hold under the previous minority SNP government (significantly, with the backing of the SNP’s big business backers).  So, how far will the British ruling class be prepared to move to accommodate the new SNP government’s demands?

With sufficient pressure, the British ruling class could be pushed into accepting further devolutionary measures. The recent successful referendum to achieve legislative powers for the Welsh Assembly showed that the possibilities for further liberal unionist political reform have not yet reached their endpoint. Whether the SNP’s recent Holyrood election success will persuade the British ruling class to beef-up its very limited Calman Commission proposals, for further devolutionary measures in Scotland, remains a moot point. However, if any independence campaign does get off the ground, the British ruling class and the mainstream Unionist parties still have the option of placing their formidable weight behind a ‘Devolution-Max’ option, to ensure that all the most important political and economic powers remain under their central control.

Both the Labour and Conservative Parties have advocates of greater political devolution such as Henry McLeish and Murdo Fraser respectively. However, they will be opposed by such constitutional conservatives as John McTernan (Scottish spin-doctor) and Baron Foulkes in the Labour Party, and by Lord Forsyth and Jackson Carlaw in the Conservative Party. The Liberal Party keeps the option of a ‘federal UK’ in its locker, only to be wheeled out, on behalf of the ruling class, when pressures to break-up of the UK become really serious. However, at present, it is the conservative unionist wing of the Lib-Dems who are in control, highlighted by the obstructive role of the Con-Dem Coalition’s Scottish Secretary, Michael Moore, over the SNP’s proposed independence referendum.

Defence is likely to remain a thorny issue between British Unionists and Scottish Nationalists. With regard to the continuation of nuclear bases and facilities at Faslane and Coulport, there would be significant opposition from a British ruling class, still wedded to having its own ‘independent’ UK nuclear force for purposes of imperial posturing. Yet, with enough mass pressure, it may still be possible to have Scotland moved out of NATO’s nuclear frontline, in line with current SNP policy (although for how long?) With the demise of the USSR, the USA has closed down North Atlantic military bases (e.g. Holy Loch in Scotland and Keflavik in Iceland). However, the USA expects Scotland to remain in NATO’s Orwellian-named ‘Partnership for Peace’. This would allow its military bases to be used as required (e.g. for rendition flights or staging posts for continued imperial airborne sorties), in a similar manner to the Irish government’s permission for the USAF to use Shannon Airport.

Although, American owned (and other) corporations would also be quite happy if Scotland became a low tax haven, the British ruling class would see this as a possible threat to the economic prospects of the other constituent nations and regions of the UK. However, if the Conservatives’ ultra-free market right wing came to dominate any British government, this could encourage an economic ‘race-to-the-bottom’ between the different nations and regions of the UK, with the promotion of competitive tax-cutting to benefit the corporations and the rich.

The major international oil corporations could also quite easily consent to North Sea Oil being transferred from UK to Scottish political control, especially if any new Scottish government was prepared to cut corporation tax even further. Salmond has been avidly courting the oil companies, opposing both the Con-Dems’ proposed one-off windfall tax on their profits and downplaying the effects of Shell’s recent North Sea oil spillage. However, North Sea oil still provides substantial tax revenues for the UK government. Therefore, any British government will strongly oppose such a move. Indeed, so important is this in their economic calculations, that the UK government has already unilaterally redrawn the England/Scotland boundary, as extended into the North Sea, to ensure it still controls much of these major oil and gas reserves.

Furthermore, the British, American and key European (German, French and Spanish) ruling classes are all currently united behind the existing British ruling class ‘New Unionist’ strategy to maintain its power over these islands. The notion of a Scotland, not reined in by the UK state Crown Powers, not participating in NATO, and not committed to a neo-liberal economy is anathema to the British ruling class and its international backers.

Despite any differences of interest mentioned earlier (over US military needs in the North East Atlantic and over the global corporations’ desire for the lowest taxes), the British ruling class is likely to retain wider international ruling class backing for whatever measures they deem fit to prevent the emergence of a politically independent Scotland.

 

xv)  The wannabe Scottish ruling class and the SNP will cooperate with the British ruling class and big business to prevent any radical break-up of the UK

So, how do the Nationalist parties fit into the ongoing decline of British imperialism and the longer-term historical tendency towards the break-up of the UK?  Ironically, those wannabe ruling class members, amongst each of the national middle classes, will cooperate with the British ruling class to ensure that as much as possible remains of i) the UK state machinery – by upholding the Crown Powers; ii) of the City’s economic control – through the maintenance of sterling; and iii) of the state’s military capacity – with, in the SNP’s case, saltire-flagged British regiments and shared military bases. Right wing SNP government minister, Michael Russell, has termed this strategy as seeking ‘Independence within the Union’. Basically this means giving all the institutions of the UK state, located within Scotland, a good lick of tartan paint.

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries of High Imperialism, hybrid identity British liberal unionists in Scotland and Wales, and constitutional nationalists in Ireland, had advocated Home Rule within the UK and British Empire. Today, their equivalent middle class wannabes in Scotland advocate ‘Independence Lite’ under the Crown, the City of London and the British High Command. They fully accept the current global corporate order and are increasingly prepared to work within NATO. Today’s constitutional nationalists are also constantly looking over their shoulders. The absence or the continued decline of British national (including hybrid) identities amongst workers (and others) in the large areas of the ‘Six Counties’, in Scotland, and increasingly in Wales too, has given rise to more radical economic and social visions associated with more advanced national democratic aspirations. These include the break-up of the UK state and notions of social republicanism and even of socialist republicanism. In the current period of working class retreat this can be obscured. However, following from the defeat of the Conservatives’ hated poll tax in 1990, tested out first in Scotland, and the unforeseen Conservative electoral victory of 1992, a Daily Record poll recorded 56% support for a Scottish republic amongst its largely working class readership in 1997.

Nationalist leaderships, of the SNP in Scotland, of Plaid Cymru in Wales, and of the SDLP and (especially post-Good Friday Agreement) Sinn Fein in Northern Ireland, have tried to contain and manage any working class aspirations. Like those liberal unionists (Liberal, Radical and Lib-Lab) and constitutional nationalists (INL and its successors) in the past, they fear workers may raise their own economic and social demands, and push for more advanced political changes, by creating their own independent political organisations. The main concern of today’s Nationalist parties is to negotiate and manage the further break-up of the UK state, in a manner that leaves their wannabe ruling class backers in control within their own national territories, but still leaves them free to profit from the existing global corporate economic order. This order is primarily maintained by the US/British imperial alliance.

Not having their own independent state power at present to ensure their control, or possibly the necessary reserves of coercion in the future, these Nationalist parties have to resort to getting the support of the UK, USA and EU states and their economic and military alliances.  That is one reason why the Nationalists do not challenge the anti-democratic Crown Powers, since they too may need these to handle any future significant working class resistance. The Crown Powers provide those resorting to them with a whole array of anti-democratic weapons beyond any meaningful parliamentary scrutiny.

Therefore, we can see why the incoming SNP majority government has emphasised its commitment to the monarchy. This provides decorative cover for the use of these Crown Powers. The recent banking crisis also witnessed SNP-supporting Sir George Matthewson quickly rushing into the arms of the then British Chancellor, Gordon Brown, to prop up his ailing Royal Bank of Scotland. We can also see why the new SNP government has highlighted its commitment to sterling, i.e. the City and its imposed economic straitjacket. The SNP has long been committed to support for the Scottish regiments of the British army, which have served British imperialism from Culloden to Crossmaglen, and from the Heights of Abraham to Helmand Province. It also supports the retention of British RAF bases in Scotland, such as Lossiemouth and Leuchars. Therefore, it is easy to see why the new SNP government wants to share British military bases and facilities in its ‘independent’ Scotland. And the SNP government has welcomed the Con-Dem government’s promise to post 6,000 British troops, currently stationed in Germany, in Leuchars to compensate for the closure of the air base there. British ‘Troops In Now’ is not a traditional national democratic demand!

 

xvi)  The SNP will play their part in upholding the hegemony of US/UK imperial alliance in the global corporate order

Furthermore, in addition to its attempts to manage the break-up of the UK, in a way that still leaves its major controlling institutions intact, the SNP has also sought allies amongst the major global corporations and the US state. The main attraction the SNP offers is to dangle major tax concessions before the global corporations, making Scotland a low tax haven. The SNP government’s promises to potential big business backers are far more sincere than the electoral ‘promises’ made to win working class support. The current SNP government is so tied to corporate tax concessions that its principal demand upon the Con-Dem Coalition, under their proposed Calman-initiated reform bill, is to get the powers needed to cut corporation tax.

There is strong evidence that the majority within the SNP government considers the realistic outcome of the proposed Scottish independence referendum would be the achievement of ‘Devolution-Max’, particularly the implementation of fiscal autonomy. This would also satisfy the SNP’s recent big Scottish business backers – including Sir George Matthewson, Sir Tom Farmer, and Sir David Murray (their commitment to all the trappings of privilege are shown by their knighthoods).  It would also largely satisfy prominent SNP figures such as Michael Russell and Kenny MacAskill. Furthermore, SNP Finance Minister, John Swinney is known for his support for that ultimate neo-liberal measure – flat rate taxes. So, if the SNP were able to steer the Scottish economy even further down the neo-liberal road, the demands of big business and the ultra-rich for such measures would undoubtedly increase (even to the extent that the SNP’s best-known backer, Sir Sean Connery, might be persuaded to return from tax exile!)

The SNP has a paper policy of opposition to NATO. However, this has been abandoned as an election commitment, in a similar manner to an earlier New Labour promise to renationalise the railways. There is nothing the SNP’s Defence spokesperson, Angus Robertson, likes better than to be photographed in the cockpit of a Tornado plane at Lossiemouth, in his Moray constituency! As yet, the SNP is still opposed to the continuation of nuclear military bases in Scotland, something the USA could easily live with. However, in its concern to appease the junior partner of US imperialism, the UK, there has even been talk in the SNP about the possibility of leasing out such military bases. Scotland would then have its own ‘Guantanamac’ bases. Former SNP firebrand, Jim Sillars, has publicly argued for a bonfire of any remaining radical SNP policies. He naively hopes that if the US and British ruling classes are sufficiently appeased, they will not obstruct any independence campaign.

The SNP does not oppose the current imperial wars in Afghanistan or Libya. Now that Barack Obama is US President, and is prepared to have the UN (which the USA can dominate through the Security Council) front US/NATO military initiatives, the SNP has also dropped its former opposition to the UK’s, and hence Scottish regiments’ participation in imperial wars. It looks like the new American consul would not have too much to get upset about in any SNP ‘Independence Lite’ Scotland.

Although very unlikely to achieve ‘Independence-Lite’, it is possible that the current SNP government could create the pressure to bring about further liberal unionist political concessions – ‘Devolution-Max’. The SNP’s Kenny MacAskill and Labour’s Henry McLeish have jointly written, Where the Saltire Flies. This indicates the possibility of forming a tacit constitutional nationalist/liberal unionist alliance to use any independence referendum to achieve, not the SNP’s first option – ‘Independence Lite’, but a second option – ‘Devolution-Max’. Either scenario would leave the British ruling class and its US allies with extensive powers, but the latter would have the additional attraction to big business and many of the better-off in Scotland that it would put a firmer brake upon the underlying historical tendency towards the break-up of the UK and the continued weakening of British imperialism. It would also avoid any unsettling international consequences for the British ruling class, corporate capital and Scottish business, e.g. Scotland’s relationship with the EU and NATO, and the implications for continued UK membership of the UN Security Council after the curtailment of the UK parliament’s authority over a significant area of its territory.

The UK’s principal imperial ally, the US state, is aware of its need for continued British support, as it too now enters a period of relative economic decline, and possible new imperial contenders, such as China. The ever-increasing readiness of US governments, whether Republican or Democrat, to resort to their state’s overwhelming military power highlights their need to compensate for declining US economic power. The dangers associated with this strategy ensure the need for a more, not less rapid break-up of the UK, to help to undermine this dangerous imperial alliance.

Today, the swingeing cuts being imposed on all parts of the UK, and the impending constitutional crisis, offer Socialists an opportunity to build up our strength once more. Only this time we must not hand over any fruits of victory to Labour or the Nationalists. This means a commitment to a socialist republican ‘internationalism from below’ strategy to break up the UK state and to unite workers in Scotland, England, Wales and Ireland. It also means joining with workers and those other exploited and oppressed peoples of the world in an anti-imperialist alliance against corporate global rule.

Allan Armstrong, 30.9.11

 

[1]             The term ‘Irish’ is used in preference to ‘Catholic’ or ‘nationalist’, since, although the overwhelming majority of those considering themselves to be Irish are Catholic nationalists, their number includes Socialist Republicans and others, who do not necessarily consider themselves to be either of these two things. Amongst these people are those who adopt a more internationalist class perspective.

[2]             Perhaps the New Labour architects of ‘Devolution-all-round’ thought that Northern Ireland would take on more of the characteristics of a ‘nation’, once a collaborative Irish government, as part of the ‘Peace Process’, had won its own referendum to remove the controversial clauses 2 and 3 of the Irish constitution laying claim to Northern Ireland.

ENGLAND’S DEMOCRACY –  ST. PAULS TO ST. MARYS

(The following piece has been written by Steve Freeman of the Bermondsey Republican Socialists for the Occupy Times)

 

“I think the poorest he that is in England has a life to live as the greatest he……and I do think that the poorest man in England is not bound in a strict sense to the government that he has not put himself under.” These words of the republican Leveller, Colonel Thomas Rainsborough, addressing the Army Council on 28 October 1647 at St Mary’s Church in the Putney, still speak to us over three hundred years later.

The struggle for democracy has continued ever since, by revolution and reform, with victories and defeats. Far from ending the struggle for democracy, capitalism has steadily generalised it across the world. As Banks and Corporations exploit their power so people revolt and seek democratic solutions. International finance and people’s democracy stand as mortal foes.

The latest phase, the Arab Spring, began in Tunisia and spread to Egypt, Libya, Yemen, Bahrain and Syria and recently appeared in Moscow and China. This triggered the Occupy movement in September 2011 which hit the headlines when people began to occupy Wall Street. ‘Occupy’ has become an international protest movement against financial capital and social inequality which has spread to over ninety five cities including Madrid, New York, London, Tel Aviv, Tokyo, Sao Paulo, and Paris.

At first sight the Occupy movement seems distinct from the political and democratic struggles in the Middle East. It would be wrong simply to contrast the Arab democratic revolutions with ‘Occupy’s’ economic demands. Whilst the movement’s slogan “We are the 99%” refers to the distribution of income it expresses democratic values. It has been rightly described as a “democratic awakening” – if not yet Spring at least the end of hibernation. The central feature of our movement is participatory democracy in “General Assemblies”.

This takes us back to that historic and revolutionary, if largely forgotten, general assembly of the New Model army in occupation at St Mary’s church Putney. In 1647 the active section of the England’s young people were armed and organised in the New Model Army. Each regiment elected its own ‘shop stewards’ known as the agitators. As the first civil war ended the army became effectively a people’s parliament or republic, inside the defeated Stuart monarchy.

This parliament or general assembly met to debate a new constitution. The republican Levellers proposed an “An Agreement of the People” in opposition to the Army’s ‘Grandees’ – landowning generals – such as Fairfax, Ireton and Cromwell, backed by the wealthy City bankers and merchants. History has shown the Levellers were right but Cromwell and the City had the might. Soon they used it to suppress the Levellers, and the Diggers, who in 1649 began to occupy land at St Georges Hill in Surrey.

England has turned full circle. Today’s young people are not in a revolutionary new model army. But its students and ‘redundant’ youth are rebelling on the streets. Occupy has been led by young people trying to peacefully occupy the City in solidarity with similar protests across the world. The forces of the Crown barred the route to the Stock Exchange and we ended up camped outside St Paul’s. Now, like some Macbethean witches prediction, it is time for St Paul to meet St Mary.

Steve Freeman (Real Democracy Working Group)

 

also see:- http://republicancommunist.org/blog/2011/10/10/2nd-republican-socialist-convention-london-february-13th-2010/

 

 

THE REPUBLICAN MOVEMENT OF THE 1870s

Greenwich in South London has been declared the first Royal Borough in 80 years. In the kowtowing tradition of his party, Chris Roberts, the Labour leader of Greenwich Council, is organizing a celebratory reception. But the area, indeed the whole country, has a vastly different tradition – the struggle against the feudal anachronism of the monarchy and for a secular, democratic and social republic.

A highlight of this struggle was the republican movement of the 1870s. The fall of Napoleon III at the hands of the Prussians, and the proclamation of a French republic, led to a revival of interest in republicanism in Britain. Republicanism had flagged since the demise of Chartism as a national movement. The leading Chartist, George Harney, had called one of his papers the Red Republican. This is where the first English translation of the Communist Manifesto appeared.

Across the country over seventy republican clubs were formed. Mass demonstrations in support of republican France were held in Trafalgar Square and Hyde Park. In September 1870 a new paper The Republican appeared. Its slogan was “Labour-The Source Of All Wealth”

In 1872 an Irish political refugee and member of the First International, John De Morgan, arrived in Middlesbrough.  He became secretary of a committee of Yorkshire Republican Clubs. This committee sent out a circular to all the clubs in the country calling for a National Conference. William Harrison Riley’s International Herald had amongst its aims, universal suffrage, land nationalization and the liquidation of the national debt. (Riley was later editor a Sheffield paper The Socialist and was a political influence on Edward Carpenter.)

G. W. Foote, secretary of the London Club, which had been formed on May 12, 1871, stated that sufficient steps had not been taken to make the conference fully representative. (Foote later became founding editor of The Freethinker and was imprisoned for blasphemy.)

Nevertheless the conference went ahead in 1872, with twenty three clubs represented. James Linton’s blue-white-green republican flag was adopted (Linton had been a contributor to the Red Republican). A National Republican Brotherhood set up with De Morgan as secretary. Riley joined its council.

Charles Bradlaugh, president of the London club and founder of the National Secular Society, attacked the NRB in his weekly paper the National Reformer. He accused De Morgan of absconding with the funds of a Manchester temperance group and said the NRB was a “treasonable conspiracy” The London Club passed a resolution saying the NRB was an illegal association. This was circulated nationally by Foote.

De Morgan in turn accused Bradlaugh, in the International Herald, of being an informer. Bradlaugh threatened libel action and the NRB’s paper changed its name to the Republican Herald.

Riley now declared himself in favour of communism. Physical force would be needed to establish it he said. “The National Republican Brotherhood is striving for a Social Republic”, he wrote.

A leading member of the NRB was Thomas Smith, its treasurer and a Nottingham member of the International. In his pamphlet, Letters On The Commune, he wrote, “The first principle of the political revolution was the emancipation of the conscience, the freedom of the mind, and in the social revolution the first necessity is universal education…” He advocated the abolition of serfdom and the equality of all before the law, the emancipation of women, common ownership of land, the abolition of war and class domination.

De Morgan defined his own republicanism in an article in his De Morgan’s Monthly in September 1876, “I take it that Republicanism can be summed up in a sentence, viz that intellectual ability, ability in conjunction with moral conduct, or moral conduct alone, ought to receive the prizes of life, and no other possessions should be regarded meritorious…In practice, an entire reconstruction of society…the undeserving rich would become poor and the undeserving poor comparatively rich.”

In 1872 De Morgan visited striking Barnsley weavers offering to organize a dramatic event for their benefit.

Early in 1873, the London Republican Club, the London Patriotic Society and the West Central Democratic Society issued a circular calling for a conference to set up a National Republican Association. Forty delegates gathered in Birmingham among them Victor Le Lubez, representing the Greenwich and Deptford Secular Society. The name chosen was National Republican League. Only moral and legal means were to be used. The NRB denounced this as constitutional monarchism.

A third organization, the Universal Republican Association, was set up at a three day conference organized by the Eleusis Club in Chelsea. Among its members was Dan Chatterton, a one man revolt against gin and gospel, monarchy and capitalism. He suggested Queen Victoria be redeployed as a washer woman.

Meanwhile the Prince of Wales became seriously ill with the typhoid that had killed his father Albert. It was suggested Bradlaugh had poisoned him. On the anniversary of his father’s death he miraculously recovered. A thanksgiving service was held in St Paul’s. Pamphlets circulated saying his illness was an invention. Reynold’s News denounced “the mean, toadying spirit of so called loyalty.”

But after this the spirit of republicanism and the national organizations gradually faded out. Bradlaugh eventually became a MP for Northampton and De Morgan emigrated to America where he became a writer of fiction.

In 1874, Hackney secularist and printer, George Stranding, started The Republican Chronicle. He advocated a Metropolitan Republican Club as the forerunner of a new national organization. A conference was held at the Patriotic Club in Clerkenwell (nowadays Marx House) but it bore no fruit.

In the 1880s the cause was taken up again by newly formed Socialist groups in particular the Socialist League of William Morris, Eleanor Marx and Belfort Bax. They nicknamed Victoria the Empress Brown and alleged that after Albert’s death she found solace in the company, and possibly the bed, of her Scottish servant, John Brown.

While Keir Hardie was a republican, the Labour Party he helped to found clings to the monarchy like a manic dog. As we approach Mrs. Windsor’s Diamond Jubilee there is a need for a republican socialist movement, which can learn from the struggles of the past.

 

Terry Liddle

(Some of the information in this article is taken from a pamphlet The Republic Must Come First published by the South London Republican Form and republished by Black Cat Press. Copies can still be had £2 post free, cheques payable to E McArthur, from BCP c/o 83, Sowerby Close, London, SE9 6EZ)

 

 

 

 

INTRODUCTION

 

The rise and initial success of the Scottish Socialist Party (SSP), between 1998-2004, was a significant historical event, not only for the history of the Left in Scotland (with knock-on effects in the UK and Europe), but also in the wider world of Scottish politics. It is therefore vital that we account for this success, despite the SSP’s subsequent fall from grace. This record can not just be left to cynical media and academic figures who have claimed that the SSP project was always doomed from the start, so we should all just accept the current world order and make the best of it.  Nor can we leave the accounting to those Jeremiahs in their ‘revolutionary’ sects, who cover their own inability to grow significantly, by issuing their anathemas and pouring scorn on those who try.

Before the First World War, Rosa Luxemburg said that the choice facing humanity then was ‘Socialism or Barbarism’. Istvan Meszaros has modified this for today’s crisis-ridden world of corporate imperialism, with its austerity drives, mounting environmental degradation, and the continued threat to humanity posed by weapons of mass destruction. He claims that the choice we face now is  – ‘Socialism or barbarism if we are lucky’!

Therefore, to provide new hope, we must account for the factors that contributed to the initial success of the SSP, and see what can still be useful in the future. However, any meaningful accounting also means identifying those weaknesses, which contributed to the SSP’s decline, so that these are not repeated.

Many, from either side of the ‘Tommygate’ divide, still hold fond enough memories of “the good old days” before the split, to hope that something like the SSP can be built again. Recently, some have even been tempted to say, “Let us forgive and forget”. This may sound attractive, in the face of the current unprecedented attacks on our class. However, such a stance would just lead to the repeat of earlier mistakes, perhaps in more desperate situations.

This contribution, which is also based on a strong desire to rebuild that lost unity, argues that to be successful in such an endeavour, we need instead to ‘listen, learn and then move on’. Then we can indeed recreate socialist unity, but on a higher basis. We must take account of those challenges, which the SSP failed to meet, to better prepare ourselves for those that we will certainly meet in the future.

 

1. THE STRENGTHS OF THE SSP

a)          Politics

The drive for greater socialist unity in Scotland originated in the experience of the Anti-Poll Tax Campaign. This drew together socialists and communists from diverse backgrounds in a successful struggle against the Tories and their official Labour Party helpers – one of the very few.  Later campaigns against water privatisation, the Criminal Justice Bill, and in support of the Liverpool Dockers, also brought socialists and communists in Scotland together in common campaigns.

Militant, a section of the Committee for a Workers International (CWI), led by Peter Taffe, had learned, through the bitter experience of the Liverpool Council Fightback and the Anti-Poll Tax Campaign, that conducting a successful major struggle was incompatible with membership of the Labour Party, and that Labour is an anti-working class party that acts as a block to socialism.

The CWI majority (1) formed Scottish Militant Labour (SML) to challenge Labour more effectively. However, SML went beyond this, and drew upon the experience of those earlier working class campaigns. With the help of others, they initiated the wider Scottish Socialist Alliance (SSA), in 1996, to draw in these forces, as well as those members in the Labour Party and the Scottish National Party (SNP) concerned about their parties’ rightwards drift. In the process, the CWI in Scotland changed from being the organisationally independent SML to becoming the International Socialist Movement (ISM), a platform in the new SSA. They called for the unity of socialists in Scotland.

The size of SML/ISM was important. Others had called for socialist unity before the SML had been able to ditch its Labour Party entrist past, and to seriously consider such an initiative.  However, it needed an organisation with a certain critical mass to make any such unity initiative gel.  In Ireland, for example, there have been a number of politically experienced people, who were inspired by the example of the SSA/SSP. They formed the Irish Socialist Network to bring about such socialist unity there. However, they have not had the critical mass to create an Irish Socialist Alliance, then to build this up into an Irish Socialist Party.

The ISM wanted to build a wider organisation, which was not just a front for its own tendency – something that proved a stumbling block with the Socialist Alliance in England. This problem was highlighted there by the competitive sectarianism of the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) and the CWI/Socialist Party (SP) (as Militant later became in England and Wales).

The ISM also wanted the SSA to move quickly beyond being an alliance, which might end up as little more than an electoral non-aggression pact between different participating organisations. Today, in Ireland, this remains a strong danger with the recently formed United Left Alliance (ULA). The ULA is heavily constrained in any attempt to move forwards to a new united party by the desire of its two major components, the CWI/SP-Ireland and People before Profit (an Irish SWP front), to preserve their own control above all else. The SSA, however, was able to move on and become the Scottish Socialist Party (SSP) in 1998.

When it was founded the SSA drew in other political groups, or some of their key activists. Allan Green had pushed from the start to get the Socialist Movement (socialists in the LP) signed up, whilst Bill Bonnar of the Communist Party of Scotland, and George Mackin, former member of the editorial board of Liberation (socialist Republicans in the SNP) joined up.  Members of the Trotskyist United Secretariat for the Fourth International (USFI) in Scotland joined, although they did not constitute themselves as a platform.  The Red Republicans, who emerged from the Anti-Poll Tax Struggle in the Lothians, and the Dundee-based Campaign for a Federal Republic also joined. These two organisations later merged, on a new political basis, to form another SSA platform, the Republican Communist Network (RCN).

The SSA soon threw itself into activity in support of the Glacier workers’ occupation in Glasgow, then in a variety of actions to save schools and other council facilities. By 2002, all the major political groups in Scotland were in one political organisation (2) – the SSP.

The SSP eventually included left Scottish nationalists, e.g. the Scottish Republican Socialist Movement (SRSM), many in the ISM, and some ex-SNP’ers; left British unionists, e.g. the CWI, SWP, Workers Unity (3) and some ex-Labourists; and socialist Republicans, e.g. the RCN and others. Key figures from the Labour and SNP Lefts joined, e.g. John McAllion and Ron Brown (ex-Labour MPs), Hugh Kerr (ex-Labour MEP), Lloyd Quinan (ex-SNP MSP). The SSP included socialist and radical Feminists, and a small number of green Socialists (4).

Tommy Sheridan (former SML) was elected to Holyrood in 1999. He was re-elected, along with Frances Curran and Colin Fox (both former SML), Rosemary Byrne (former president of Irvine Trades Council), Carolyn Leckie (prominent Unison activist and strike leader) and Rosie Kane (environmental activist), in 2003. An impressive 117,709 votes were gained in this election. Keith Baldassara (former SML) and Jim Bollan (former CP member and later Labour leader of Dunbartonshire Council) were also elected as local councillors. This was a considerable achievement, and showed that the SSP had become an important force amongst a significant section of class-conscious workers in Scotland.

SSP MSPs were seen to give public support to workers in struggle, including nursery nurses and working class communities occupying threatened public services. Tommy had been very publicly arrested in 2003, whilst Rosie was jailed for failing to pay a fine in 2005, as a result of the protests they made at the Faslane nuclear base. This highlighted the SSP’s policy of committing its elected representatives to taking direct action when it was deemed appropriate. The SSP policy of having a worker’s representative on a worker’s wage was actually implemented by the SSP MSPs between 1999 and 2007.

The SSP provided inspiration for the Socialist Alliances in England and Wales, and for the Irish Socialist Network. It also formed a part of the new European Anti-Capitalist Left (EACL). The SSP inspired the USFI, including its largest European section, the Revolutionary Communist League (LCR) in France. They later went on to form the wider New Anti-Capitalist Party (NPA) in 2009.

After the split in 2006, the SSP continued to form part of the EACL, standing candidates under its banner in the Euro-elections of 2009, whilst the breakaway Solidarity retreated into the left British chauvinism of the No2EU campaign (5).

The SSP played a prominent part in the build-up of the Anti-War Movement, beginning in October 2001 with its principled and active opposition to the war in Afghanistan, and culminating, on February 15^th 2003, with the massive Anti-Iraq War demonstration in Glasgow, led by the Stop the War Coalition (6). The many marches, held all over the world on that day, formed the largest international demonstration yet witnessed.

The SSP played the leading part in organising the wider European Left opposition to the G8 Summit at Gleneagles in July 2005. Four of its MSPs, Carolyn, Colin, Frances and Rosie organised a protest in Holyrood against its failure to stand up to US/UK security force attempts to severely curtail the right to protest at Gleneagles. The four MSPs were suspended and the party was heavily fined. This led to international solidarity, including support from the acclaimed black poet, Benjamin Zephaniah (7).

The SSA and SSP leaderships recognised that there is a National Question in Scotland and that socialists should consciously address it. Although left Scottish nationalism remained a strong pull on the leaderships of the SSA and later the SSP, republicanism made considerable inroads. The party backed the Calton Hill Declaration, and the successful protest at the royal opening of the new Scottish Parliament building on October 9^th, 2004. This was the last SSP big event to gain favourable wider publicity (8).

The SSP contained a well-organised Feminist element with articulate women prominent in the party. The hotly debated and controversial 50:50 rule, addressing the issue of women’s representation at all levels of the party, was passed at the SSP’s 2002 Conference in Dundee. This contributed to the election of four women out of a total of six SSP MSPs in May 2003 – the highest percentage for any party in Europe.

The SSP was also able to draw support from influential cultural figures, e.g. the Proclaimers, Belle and Sebastian, Peter Mullen and Ken Loach.

At the height of its success between 1999 and 2004, the SSP enabled socialist politics to gain a public visibility. This meant that the ideas put forward by openly declared socialists became the topic of conversation, discussion and debate in workplaces and communities throughout Scotland.

 

b)          Organisation

With the founding of the SSA in 1996, the CWI/SML committed its resources and experienced organisers, at national and local level, to the new organisation. As ISM platform members, they took responsibility for developing the SSA, and later the SSP. However, in many areas, particularly where there was little or no ISM presence, other experienced socialist and communist activists played a key role in developing local branches, and exerting pressure to ensure that democratic practice became more embedded in the SSA and SSP, and to encourage the development of an open, non-sectarian culture.

A majority amongst the ISM, who constituted the SSA and SSP leaderships, appreciated the need to exercise a less tight political control over the SSA and SSP membership than the CWI leadership had desired. The ISM was more prepared to listen to suggestions from people who came from other political backgrounds, and with these comrades’ help, the SSA was able to develop open active branches and democratic structures.

Thus, the ISM majority (9) made a considerable contribution to building a wider more inclusive SSA (later SSP). This provided a striking contrast to the behaviour and unity initiatives undertaken by their original CWI mentors. The CWI/SP walked out of the Socialist Alliance in England, when they could not dominate it  (that role was left to the SWP!). Their Campaign for a New Workers Party has proved abortive, because of its inability to attract or hold on to wider socialist forces, whilst the Trade Union and Socialist (electoral) Coalition is turned on and off according to the needs of the CWI/SP. The CWI (and SWP) treats any unity initiative either as a ‘party’-front or as a recruiting ground. Therefore, the ISM’s support for developing an inclusive multi-platform party did represent a considerable achievement, and a big break from the Left’s past sectarian practice.

Platform rights were allowed and respected to a considerable degree. The SSA and SSP constituted a united front of self-declared revolutionaries and left reformists. Comrades could openly state their support for revolutionary politics. A real culture of debate and comradeliness developed in the SSA and SSP, which for a time was even able to rein in some of the sectarian practices of the CWI and SWP (10).

Despite some undoubted remaining problems, the SSA and SSP were more democratic than all previous left groups in Scotland and the wider UK. SSA and SSP conferences were organised where genuine debates took place in a largely comradely fashion. Attractive ‘Socialism’ events, with outside speakers, were also organised.

SSP branches were soon formed in every part of Scotland, including the Western Isles and Orkney and Shetland. This represented the most extensive support for socialist politics in Scotland that had been achieved so far.

 

 2)      THE WEAKNESSES OF THE SSP

 a)         Politics

The development and handling of ‘Tommygate’ turned out to be the most public failing of the SSP. One effect of this was to disguise some other weaknesses, which would undoubtedly have emerged more clearly after the election of its six MSPs in 2003. The political conditions, which led to these other problems, were created by the international Left’s inability to prevent the Iraq War in 2003, and the decline of working class action in the UK, including Scotland.

The electoral setbacks of the European Left in subsequent (pre-2007 Crash) elections, including those in Italy, France and Ireland, demonstrated this. The Scottish Greens also lost five of their seven MSPs in 2007. If ‘Tommygate’ had not happened then the SSP would still probably have been reduced from six to one MSP in that election – i.e. Tommy. And he thought he was smart in helping to create Solidarity as his own special fan club to further advance his own celebrity politics!

Yet, there had been no prior public questioning in the SSP of the promotion of the Tommy ‘myth’. This failing was to have dire consequences. When ‘Tommygate’ erupted in 2004, the leadership was left floundering over how to deal with a ‘Tommy’ who had been their very own creation. This confused many members and supporters who began to look elsewhere – often either to the SNP, or even back to the Labour Party.

Remarkably, as Tommy had moved further and further into the world of celebrity politics (aided by his new wife, Gail, whom he married in 2000), the SSP leadership allowed him to build up an entirely new public image for himself as the Daniel O’Donnell of the Left. (He later utilised this in court to claim his leisure activities were largely confined to playing Scrabble with Gail!) This involved publicly turning his back on his pre-marriage image as the Errol Flynn of the Left (which he wistfully recalled in his chats with Coolio on Big Brother).

Key SSP leadership figures knew from early on that this new public image was false, but did not challenge Tommy’s hypocrisy. However, even if Tommy had been able to make a ‘Doris Day’ (11) like conversion, socialists should still not have been involved in allowing the public promotion of such a conservative, 1950’s, family man image.

When Solidarity was formed in 2006, it became, in effect, the Continuity Sheridan-SSP. Celebrity politics were enshrined at its founding conference, with the virtual anointment of Tommy by his mother, Alice Sheridan.  With Tommy in prison for the 2011 Holyrood election, Solidarity sought a new celebrity candidate in the form of George Galloway, accountable to nobody but himself.

The resort to celebrity politics was not, however, rejected in principle by the SSP leadership after the split. An attempt was made by the SSP International Committee to highlight this wider problem amongst the Left in Britain (e.g. Derek Hatton, Ken Livingstone, Arthur Scargill and George Galloway), in a leaflet for the 2008 Convention of the Left in Manchester. However, a section of the SSP leadership suppressed this because it might have upset Galloway and his supporters (12).

Celebrity politics, however, are just one aspect of a wider populism, which avoids the open promotion of socialist politics. Promoting populism is a quite different matter to promoting popular politics in order to extend openly socialist ideas beyond their traditional narrow organisational confines. Populist politics, which downplay the centrality of the working class, have often revealed themselves in the SSP. Although the SSP stood as part of the EACL in the 2009 Euro-elections, it ditched the EACL’s own slogan, ‘Make the Bosses Pay for their Crisis’, and retreated to the vacuous, non-class specific, ‘Make Greed History’ (13).

This resort to left populism, though, was not as bad as Solidarity’s support for No2EU’s, ‘No to social dumping’ – a right populist, thinly disguised racist attack on migrant workers, reminiscent of the NF/BNP/Gordon Brown call for ‘British jobs for British workers’.

One reason for resorting to populism is the fact that those coming from the CWI tradition never developed an adequate understanding of what constitutes socialism/communism. Up to the collapse of the Soviet Union, the CWI largely equated socialism with nationalisation. Although the weaknesses in this position have been recognised by those who have moved away from the CWI, there has been no real attempt to develop a new clearly articulated socialism/communism, which could effectively challenge a capitalism very much now in crisis since the 2008 Financial Crash.

Part of the problem lies with the CWI’s long sojourn within the Labour Party, where they began to adapt to the reformist milieu they were working with. Whereas Marx had viewed the state as a machine designed to perpetuate the rule of capital, backed by “a body of armed men”; those from a CWI background tended to see the existing state as being in the hands of the wrong people – the capitalist class – instead of the representatives of the working class. In particular, they had looked forward to a future elected Labour government, pledged to socialist policies, ‘capturing’ this state, passing an Enabling Act and nationalising the top 200 companies. But the capitalist state can not be equated with its ‘representative’ institutions – behind these lie the ruling class’s ‘deep state’ with its military, security, judicial and other bodies, all beyond our effective accountability, ready to bypass parliament, and to take ruthless action against any fundamental challenges from our class.

Therefore, the solutions offered by the leaderships of SSP and Solidarity (where the SWP also avoids offering any socialist strategy), to meet the current crisis of capitalism, tend to be national reformist. They stretch from a call for neo-Keynesian state economic intervention to demands for nationalisation  - i.e. from left Labourism to old style, orthodox Marxist-Leninism. The call for nationalisation is sometimes relabelled ‘public ownership’, or supplemented with an unspecified, ‘under democratic’ or ‘workers’ control’.

There has been little appreciation of the international economic integration of the corporate imperialist capitalist order. This places very real restraints on national ‘solutions’, and makes the development of an internationalist strategy and international organisation vital. The massive anti-(corporate) globalisation, anti-Iraq war, anti-G8 and Occupy protests have shown that millions of people already understand the need for an international response. Yet there has been little indication that the Left can build on this by creating a new International (14).

The EACL is very much constrained by the limitations of the ‘socialist diplomacy’ practised between its two dominant political groupings – the USFI and International Socialist Tendency (SWP). There is clearly a glaring need for concerted international action in the face of the EU leaders’ austerity drive, which has led to unprecedented attacks on Greek, Portuguese and Irish workers. These will have a knock-on effect on the rest of the European (including the UK) working class.

There has been no real debate in the SSA or SSP over socialists’ participation in parliamentary and council elections. Are parliament and local councils vehicles for bringing about socialism through accumulative reforms; or do socialists participate in elections to these bodies to support independent class activity, and to put forward the case for socialism/communism?

Again this confusion arises because a significant section of the Left tends to see the state machine as neutral, and just requiring a different hand at the helm, rather than a capitalist state, shaped to meet the capital’s needs. The existing state machine is therefore worse than useless. Indeed it is a trap for the working class.  What should be recognised is the need for the state’s destruction and its replacement with a commune-like semi-state, intended to wither away as the lower phase of communism (socialism) gives way to its higher phase.

We never got near this kind of debate about a Maximum Programme within the wider SSP.  This was perhaps understandable in the context of the long debt-financed consumer boom, which coincided with the first ten years of the SSP’s existence. Efforts were concentrated instead on developing and implementing elements of an Immediate Programme. Now capitalism is once more in deep crisis. Attempts to buttress each national economy through superficial reforms can only lead to intensified international competition, with a downward pressure on pay and conditions, and an even greater likelihood of wars, possibly extending to the imperial metropoles themselves. Therefore, it has become imperative that socialists/communists outline their alternative.

The SSP became too election focussed, particularly after winning its six MSPs. This sucked prominent regional or trade union activists into the parliamentary centre. The decision to spend so much money on parliamentary support workers for the newly elected MSPs was an indication of this creeping electoralism. A three way split developed between the SSP’s MSPs – 1) Tommy and Rosemary, 2) Caroline, Frances and Rosie and 3) Colin – as to how to relate to Holyrood. There was little effective party control over these MSPs. The parliamentary ‘tail’ sometimes wagged the SSP ‘dog’.

If ‘Tommygate’ had not erupted, a strongly electoralist wing would probably have emerged in the SSP, offering the party’s MSPs as coalition fodder in the event of a hung Holyrood parliament (15). Former Labour MEP, Hugh Kerr, was already suggesting, before the 2003 Holyrood general election, that the SSP stand down in favour of the SNP in first-past-the-post seats, anticipating such coalitions and a more parliamentary focussed politics (16).

Those who learned their initial politics in the British Left have shown little understanding of the UK as an imperialist, unionist and constitutional monarchist state, and the role of the Crown Powers in maintaining British ruling class control. Nor do they appreciate the real nature of the current British and Irish ruling classes’ ‘New Unionist’ strategy of promoting the ‘Peace Process’ and ‘Devolution-all-round’, aided and abetted by trade union leaders locked in ‘social partnerships’ with the bosses and politicians. This is done to ensure that the UK and the Twenty-Six Counties remain safely subordinated to corporate capitalism and US/British imperialism.

In reaction to their earlier left British unionist training, the majority amongst the SSA and SSP (and later the Solidarity) leaderships have shown a strong tendency to be pulled towards Scottish nationalism, and have become sentimental Scottish republicans rather than militant socialist republicans. Although the 2005 Declaration of Calton Hill represented a partial break from this, the SSP leadership has gone on to tailend the proposed constitutional reforms of the SNP in their proposed Scottish Independence Referendum (17).

After the split between the SSP and Solidarity, some members of the now defunct ISM became divided between the Frontline supporters found in the SSP, and the Democratic Green Socialists (DGS), who played a similar role in Solidarity. It was these two organisations’ initially shared break from the CWI, which had led them to move on from much of the old left British unionist politics (although long retaining elements of such politics over the issue of Ireland), only to court left Scottish nationalist politics as an alternative.

As a result, the ISM/Frontline’s and the DGS’s politics, with regard to Scotland, have not been drawn from the major contributors to anti-imperial/anti-UK state politics prior to Poll Tax, e.g. the Workers’ Republican tradition of James Connolly and John Maclean, but to a bowdlerised version of Labourism/Trotskyism inherited, but still not fully questioned, from the CWI. This is sometimes topped up with a little sentimental Scottish history and the use of the saltire in the Scottish Socialist Voice.

Those from a CWI tradition also have a poor understanding of the conflict in Ireland. They have been unwilling to address this issue in case any accusations of ‘sectarianism’ affected their electoral campaigns, particularly in the Central Belt. In the SSA’s preparatory stages, the one group, which CWI members went to considerable lengths to exclude, was the James Connolly Society (JCS). It also took years and years to get one-time CWI/ISM members of the SSP on to the JCS’s annual Connolly march in Edinburgh. The CWI’s left unionism was carried into the ISM. This led to their joint agreement to invite Billy Hutchinson of the Progressive Unionist Party (PUP) as a ‘socialist’ Loyalist, with a background in the UVF, where the British state recruited its death squads (18), to ‘Socialism 2000’ (19).

Despite the 2002 SSP Conference’s 50:50 debate, there was insufficient follow-up debate about the nature of women’s exploitation and oppression, and how women’s emancipation and liberation contribute to wider sexual liberation and to socialism/communism. In the aftermath of the split in the SSP, a marked division remained between those former ISM members in Frontline, who wanted to take on board a more Feminist agenda, and those in the DGS, who retained an opposition to “gender obsessed politics” (many of them had opposed the 50:50 arrangements back in 2000).

In the case of ISM/Frontline members this led to a blurring between socialist and radical Feminist politics. In the case of DGS members this led to a slippage away from any socialist understanding of the role of women’s oppression, and to a schizoid split between holding to libertarian views on sex (e.g. believing prostitution is just another form of wage labour, not recognising the women’s oppression involved), or to a toleration of very conservative sexual relationships (e.g. not questioning the promotion of the ‘perfect celebrity couple’ in the never-ending ‘Tommy and Gail Show’). The political division over the role of Feminism, between the two wings of one-time ISM members, very much added to the acrimony during ‘Tommygate’ (20).

The SSP and Solidarity leaderships, following on the old CWI tradition, have remained wedded to Broad Leftism in the trade unions. This involves a ‘parliamentary’ industrial strategy, which sees sovereignty as lying in the trade union conferences (‘parliament’), when effective control really lies in the union HQs (where the bureaucracy forms the ‘Cabinet’). Broad Leftism concentrates on getting left wing union leaderships elected to replace right wing ones. This is countered to a Rank and File ‘republican’ industrial strategy of democratising and transforming trade unions to make them combative class organisations with sovereignty residing amongst the union members in their workplaces, who are prepared to take independent (‘unofficial’) action when required (21). There has also been no debate on possible new methods of organising workers, e.g. social unions.

There have been illusions around existing Broad Left trade union leaderships, and a failure to extend the principle of a worker’s representative on a worker’s wage in parliament, to campaigning for all trade union officials being on the average wage of the members they represent.  The SSP’s relationship with the RMT was focussed on its General Secretary, Bob Crow, and its Broad Left leadership (22), rather than its rank and file members.

Cultural developments can anticipate wider social and political developments, even during periods when the working class is in retreat. Whilst an effective struggle against exploitation and oppression needs confident economic/industrial and political organisation, attempts to go beyond the alienation we experience under capitalism often takes on a more disparate cultural form, which the ruling classes find harder to discipline and police. Despite the wider vibrant cultural debate found in Scotland, and signs of support from several significant cultural figures, there was no organised attempt to intervene in this debate and to encourage its development in a Scottish internationalist rather than a Scottish nationalist direction.

 

b)          Organisation

From the beginning, despite wishing to create a wider organisation, which brought in others, the CWI/SML still wanted to remain the leadership group. This in itself is not a problem. The issue is how do you go about achieving this aim – by encouraging the maximum democracy or by political manoeuvring?

The CWI/SML sought to bring about wider unity, not primarily on the basis of an agreed Immediate Programme (23), but by courting specific groups and individuals, whilst playing down the revolutionary side of their own politics. This involved a resort to diplomacy, rather than holding an open debate between some of the more advanced positions held by the CWI/SML (and others) and the undisguised left reformism and electoralism of those coming, in particular, from Labour and SNP backgrounds.

Of course, any such open debate, may well have resulted in the SSA adopting openly left reformist positions anyhow, given the historical weight of reformism in Scotland and the wider UK. This is why it was so vital to create and maintain the SSA and SSP as open democratic organisations, where such ideas could be challenged and changed in the light of experience.

The SSA and SSP depended overmuch on the initial political training given to its members from other political organisations before they joined up. There was no comprehensive political education programme put in place for new members. There was an attempt to produce an SSA magazine, Red, but it was short-lived.

When the ISM split into majority and minority CWI/IS factions, the majority ISM kept to the old strategy of trying to remain the leadership by making openings to certain individuals. An ‘Inner Circle’ coalesced within the SSP leadership, which consisted of Tommy Sheridan, Alan McCombes and Alan Green (he represented those from a non-CWI tradition) with a close periphery of Keith Baldassara and Frances Curran (she provided a link with the leading influential Feminists, such as Carolyn Leckie). The ISM used its position as the largest platform to ensure that this emergent ‘Inner Circle’ was given wider support in the SSP (24). As long as the ISM continued to exist, there was still some platform accountability.

The ISM also used its numerical strength to get sympathisers into key positions, whether or not they were up to the job. Paid organisers, who were not transparent or accountable, sometimes built their own fiefdoms either in areas of particular activity or geographical areas.

The ‘Inner Circle’ kept things from the membership (either with tacit ISM acceptance or without their knowledge), e.g. how many real paying members there were, and the fact that the SWP did not pay their subs (although some of their members did join as individuals). Therefore, the activities of the ‘Inner Circle’ were neither transparent nor fully accountable.

Many members of the ISM began to doubt the need for a distinctive platform to advance their specific politics. Instead, they increasingly relied on giving support to those experienced former members of the CWI, and founder members of the ISM, who had steered them through the difficult transition from the CWI/SML to the independent ISM platform in the SSA and SSP.  ISM members began to drop out of their platform, whilst still giving their support as individuals to the ‘Inner Circle’.

In engaging with new political forces, ISM members found themselves questioning some of their previously held beliefs. This is, of course, a good general principle for all socialists. Individual ISM members formed friendships and alliances with other individuals and tendencies, e.g. amongst the left Scottish nationalists and the radical Feminists. This led to a process of adaptation that left individual ISM, or former ISM members, strung out at different points along various lines of thought over a number of key issues. That made it increasingly difficult for the ISM to maintain a unified public position on these political issues.

This was demonstrated most spectacularly over ‘Tommygate’. However, over the issues of 50:50, ‘internationalism from below’ republicanism versus left Scottish nationalism, Ireland (particularly the Connolly march), and secularism versus support for specific identity (especially faith) schools, different ISM members also found themselves on differing sides (25).  As the ISM platform began to fragment, this left the ‘Inner Circle’ as the real SSP leadership, since they were no longer restrained by any remaining ISM discipline.

After 2003, those newly elected MSPs, who had their own trusted personal contacts in the party, also had to be acknowledged by the ‘Inner Circle’. That opened up the prospect of personal, rather than platform differences arising, which could bring about a more dysfunctional leadership, in the absence of either any platform discipline, or of effective wider party accountability.

The ‘Inner Circle’ was unable to successfully address the crisis in the SSP, when ‘Tommygate’ split them, along with their close personal and parliamentary supporters. Both sides put more trust in the bourgeois courts and leaks to the bourgeois media than in the SSP membership. Neither side confined its appeals for support to bona fide working class and socialist organisations. Initially a cover-up ‘deal’ was made between the SSP Executive Committee and Tommy, under which the reasons for his mutually agreed resignation were hidden from the membership. The minutes were not circulated. This sowed further seeds of confusion, adding to those created by the leadership’s shared responsibility in constructing the Tommy ‘legend’ in the first place.

This legacy of personalised politics very much added to the ensuing acrimony, which contributed to the split between the SSP and Solidarity. The two respective leaderships centred on Alan McCombes and Frances Curran on the SSP side, and Tommy Sheridan and his family on the Solidarity side. Supporters were expected to show uncritical loyalty for their leaders’ respective stances in the virtual civil war that developed. Those trying to put forward a more critical viewpoint found themselves subjected, not to real debate, but more often to misrepresentation, and sometimes to vilification.

Prior to the split, the SSP leadership had tolerated the existence of sects, in particular the SWP and the CWI. These were able to take advantage of the SSP’s recognition of platforms (26). The CWI and SWP saw themselves as having all the answers in advance, with nothing to learn from others, when important questions were debated. They were organised as alternative leaderships-in-waiting, ready to take over.

However, instead of establishing firm platform guidelines, diplomatic deals were also made between the SSP leadership and these sects. The SSP leadership did not openly and politically challenge the sectarian practices of these organisations’ leaderships (27). Such an approach could have won over some of their rank and file (albeit not their leaderships, whose sectarianism is hard-wired), attracting them with more open and democratic politics.

 

 3. THE CURRENT SITUATION – FACING UP TO REALITY

There has been no real attempt by either of the two post-split leaderships (SSP and Solidarity) to draw up a balance sheet of the strengths and weaknesses of the original socialist unity project, or to make any honest assessment of where socialists and the wider working class now are in Scotland. The SSP leadership’s main remaining hope, after ‘Tommygate’, seems to be that, “Things can only get better”! And, is Solidarity now on hold until Tommy gets out of jail?!

Solidarity launched itself, in 2006, with the claim that it would soon overtake the number of pre-existing SSP MSPs. However, it failed even to retain its celebrity leader, Tommy, despite his loudly proclaimed court ‘victory’ that year. Solidarity’s leadership took refuge in its ability to garner more votes (31,066 to the SSP’s 12,731) in the 2007 Holyrood election. Yet Ruth Black, its sole elected councillor, soon defected to Labour after an acrimonious internal spat (28).

The SSP leadership believed that there would be an upturn in SSP fortunes, once they were legally vindicated in the Perjury Trial. However, the SSP’s vote fell from the lowly 12,731 gained in 2007, to the abysmal 8,272 in the 2011 Holyrood election, despite the December 2010 court judgement, which upheld the SSP leadership’s version of the ‘Tommygate’ events. This electoral result showed the leadership’s wishful thinking.

Although the Tommy/Solidarity-backed Respect/George Galloway celebrity candidate only received 6972 votes, in the May 2011 Holyrood election (compared with the still unsuccessful Tommy’s 8544 votes in 2007), whilst Solidarity’s own vote plummeted to 2,837, this could hardly provide the SSP leadership with much comfort, considering that both the phantom Socialist Labour Party, and more worryingly, the British National Party, gained far more votes than the SSP.

Indeed, the fact that the BNP’s vote exceeded the combined vote of the SSP and Solidarity was not publicly acknowledged by either leadership, despite the BNP’s and SDL’s ongoing attempts to gain a foothold in Scotland, particularly amongst British Loyalists in the Central Belt. Indeed there had been more concern at leadership levels, to see that the SSP and Solidarity slog it out against each other in certain Glasgow seats, than to ensure that the BNP were opposed everywhere.

What remains of the SSP has become a much looser alliance than the old SSA. Work is left to individuals, the Scottish Socialist Voice has no Editorial Board, the SSP website (29) is Eddie Truman’s sole responsibility, Richie Venton is the SSP’s industrial organiser without any accountability to a committee of SSP trade unionists.

The Scottish Socialist Youth and the SSP International Committee have taken good initiatives, e.g. the Anti-Fascist Alliances (30) and the Republican Socialist Conventions. However, these have not had real united leadership backing (although individual leaders have sometimes given their support, particularly Colin in the latter case).

The SSP leadership does not necessarily follow through conference decisions (e.g. the principled support given to ‘No One Is Illegal’ at the post-split 2007 Conference, which would have meant working closely with the Glasgow Unity Centre). Part of this is due to exhaustion of leading members, but another factor is the continued SSP legacy of having the remnants of this unaccountable ‘Inner Circle’. Whilst no longer necessarily having the vigour to politically oppose initiatives, which they do not fully support at conferences, they can still ensure that any such agreed initiatives receive little effective national leadership promotion or coordination.

The current SSP leadership is divided over the way forward. Some from the old ‘Inner Circle’ are showing signs of abandoning the pretence of that the SSP is still a real party, and of retreating instead towards the formation of a socialist ‘think tank’, somewhat to the left of that recently formed to commemorate Jimmy Reid. This SSP initiative appears to be Glasgow based.

Colin Fox and Richie Venton, however, argue that the existing SSP can be revived if only the correct campaign can be found (e.g. Fighting Fuel Poverty), or if members fully throw themselves into a continuous ‘hamster wheel’ of activity. Both work very hard and lead by example. They can always point towards a model branch out there to show that such activity is the way forward. The current example given is the new Ayrshire branch, built with the help of the party’s latest prominent recruit, Campbell Martin. He is a former SNP and Independent MSP. He remains a strong advocate of a left Scottish nationalist approach to the constitution, coupled with some support for populist politics (including the SNP’s minimum alcohol pricing and their misguided anti-‘sectarian’ bill (31).

Mounting campaigns is indeed an important activity for socialist organisations. However, without a proper assessment of the class forces involved, or of how a particular campaign links up with the organisation’s wider Immediate Programme and the struggle for socialism, then any such campaign will either run out of steam; or, it will be taken under the wing of the larger parties. Then, instead of contributing to the building of independent working class organisation, the campaign merely ends up buttressing these parties’ political position, by providing them with some cover for the cuts, or for the other counter-reforms they are imposing elsewhere. The Free Prescriptions Bill, initiated at Holyrood by the SSP parliamentary group, was only enacted by a subsequent SNP government, after the SSP ceased to have any MSPs.

In contrast to the SSP, Solidarity was formed as an alliance (calling itself a movement) and not a party. John Dennis of the SSP South Region made the original proposal for a breakaway, because he thought that internal relations had become too toxic to be contained in one party. However, Solidarity quickly constituted itself as a ‘marriage of convenience’, between Sheridan and the Sheridanistas of the DGS, CWI and SWP. It now has even less political cohesion than the currently loose SSP alliance.

The DSG website is showing signs of wishing to reunite the Left, but largely on the basis of ‘forgive and forget’ (32). The recently formed International Socialist Group (ISG), a Scottish breakaway from the SWP, also involved in Solidarity, seems to be adopting a similar path. Its co-thinkers in Counterfire, in England and Wales, have already drawn Socialist Resistance (33) into their Coalition of Resistance (CoR) against the cuts. Whilst CoR is all too willing to bow before Broad Left trade union bureaucrats and left-talking politicians, it constitutes the most punchy campaigning organisation fighting the cuts at present (as shown by its contingent on the STUC’s October 1^st demonstration in Glasgow).

CoR and ISG have even attracted some SSP members, despite their strong antipathy to those from an SWP background. However, any such unity is also likely to be on the shaky ground of ‘forgive and forget’, rather than ‘listen, learn and then move on’. Ironically, this would just repeat the ‘diplomatic’ approach the ‘Inner Circle’ adopted taken towards the SWP (the tradition from whence the ISG come), back in 2002.

Both wings of the current SSP leadership remain reticent about becoming involved in other political organisations’ unity initiatives, or even in wider campaigns where they might meet up. An exception is made in the case of the Scottish Independence Convention (SIC), which does bring the SSP into contact with Solidarity and ex-Solidarity members. Furthermore, the various struggles impose their own similar joint work, particularly in trade unions. Just as a shared left Scottish nationalism has led to common work inside the SIC, so a shared Broad Leftism has led to joint electoral slates in some unions (e.g. the Public and Commercial Service [PCS] union).

Some SSP and Solidarity members and former members, who have become disillusioned with these organisations, have called for their virtual dissolution into the various campaigns, e.g. Anti-Cuts. They hope that the experience of working with new forces, or ‘knocking heads together’ (i.e. of mutually suspicious SSP and Solidarity members or ex-members) will eventually provide a new basis for unity in the future. Whilst this path can seem attractive, it means glossing over the real political differences that have arisen, and the challenges neither side addressed. Such a course is also likely to lead to more public ‘diplomatic manoeuvres’ (usually accompanied by personalised put-downs in private), in order to bring about a superficial unity, mainly for electoral purposes. This is never a solid basis upon which to build.

Meanwhile, the CWI and SWP continue to slug it out with their own front organisations – the (now defunct?) Campaign for a New Workers’ Party and the National Shop Stewards Network for the CWI, and the (about to be abandoned?) Right to Work Campaign and Unite the Resistance for the SWP. Neither of these sects is likely to commit itself to building a real united party. They prefer to go no further than forming electoral mutual non-aggression pacts like the United Left Alliance in Ireland (which is likely to flounder, if it fails to develop further, after its initial electoral success this year). The prime political purpose of the CWI and SWP is still to build their own sects.

In 2003, a united SSP showed it had gained a definite foothold of support amongst members of the working class in Scotland. The abysmal 2011 (combined SSP and Solidarity) electoral result is an indication that, not only that most politically conscious workers, but also many socialists in Scotland, have moved on from the SSP and Solidarity.

 

 4) WHAT WE NEED TO DO -

LISTEN, LEARN AND THEN MOVE ON

The inspiring legacy of those successful working class campaigns in the late 1980’s and early 1990’s, along with the recognition of the need for the working class to organise outside the Labour Party, and to address the National Question in Scotland in a serious manner, provided a sufficient political basis for the successful launch of the initial SSA and SSP project. However, the major challenges the SSP has faced since then mean that new lessons have to be learned if any successful socialist unity project is to be developed in the near future.

We need to acknowledge that the current SSP project is over. We can see that the attempt just to hold things together, hoping things will get better, has not worked. There has been little recognition, at the leadership level, of the need to face up to the new challenges, which the working class has faced; or of the necessary self-criticism about the handling of ‘Tommygate’. The SSP leadership had put the addressing of ‘Tommygate’ on hold between 2006-10, ostensibly for legal reasons during the Perjury Trail.  The 2011 Conference in Dunfermline took a retrograde step by overturning those self-critical decisions, which had been made at the first post-split SSP Conference in Glasgow in 2006.

In pursuing this ‘head-in-the-sand’ course, the SSP will end up as little more than another sect. The leadership’s refusal to develop a strategy to win back the more critical elements of Solidarity (using the Perjury Trial as an excuse), which would have involved some self-criticism, was the first step on this dead-end road. When the SSA was being set up, the SML/ISM and understood the futility of trying to build a new organisation solely around an unquestioned and unquestioning CWI leadership. They actively sought wider support, and just as importantly, were prepared to be self-critical and to challenge some of their old shibboleths in the light of recent experiences. Those in the SSP today, who wish to re-establish socialist unity in Scotland, need to recognise that real answers have to be given to those challenges the SSP failed to meet.

Socialist unity, which has the capacity to address the many pressing issues the working class currently faces in a crisis-ridden world, can only be formed on a new and higher political basis. Such socialist unity will also involve those outside the SSP’s ranks. Such unity can not be built on the basis of ‘forgive and forget’ (which will just lead to a reoccurrence of previous bad practices), but must be done on the basis of ‘listen, learn and then move on’.

 

a)           Politics

To meet the new challenges the Left has faced in Scotland, we need to clarify our views over:-

-            What we mean by socialism/communism and how (and if) the immediate struggles we support promote this aim.

-            The promotion of internationalism, through building wider international organisation on the basis of ‘internationalism from below’ and by            participating in international actions.

-            The rejection of populism and the creation of an ‘Immediate Programme’ that both enhances the position of our class, and encourages the development of  independent working class organisation and struggle.

-            An understanding of the reasons why socialists participate in elections to state bodies.

-            An understanding of how socialists participate effectively in trade union (and other working class) struggles.

-            Moving on from a left Nationalist approach to the National Question in Scotland, by adopting a serious commitment to socialist Republicanism.

-            A deeper understanding of Feminism (how to achieve women’s liberation and emancipation), and how this links with the transformation of sexual and social relations between the sexes, which socialist men (who should also have a vision of a realisable better society) have a real interest in achieving.

-            A serious approach to Ecology which takes into account the meeting of the human need for water, food, fuel, shelter and transport, but in an             environmentally sustainable way.

-            An imaginative approach on how we relate to other areas of struggle, e.g, culture.

 

b)          Organisation

To learn from the mistakes of the SSP (and of Solidarity), and become more effective we need to:

-            Emphasise the vital importance of democracy, transparency and accountability in all the organisations of the working class.

-            The role of leadership

-            Reject the lure of ‘celebrity politics’.

-            Acknowledge that neither the bourgeois courts, nor the bourgeois media, are appropriate places for socialists to get rulings on how they conduct themselves.  We must confine our appeals to democratic working class and socialist/communist organisations and media. How can we convince the working class of the case for socialism if we have to run to the ruling class’s courts over how we handle our own affairs?

On November 30^th, two million public sector workers went on strike (including 300,000 in Scotland), thousands joined picket lines, and tens of thousands went on demonstrations throughout the UK.  However, there is no chance of defending our pensions, when the ruling class and its supporting parties are determined to roll back our class’s gains, and we remain divided between unions and a plethora of different pension schemes. Trade union leaders will all too soon be jockeying for sectional concessions. Only a class wide political offensive, which links up all struggles against the ruling class’s current austerity drive (and this must extend across the EU), has any chance of undertaking a successful defence and then moving on to make real gains.

Nor can the working class be left to the ‘tender mercies’ of a future Miliband (34) -led Labour government.  The Con-Dems may demand an immediate ‘arm and a leg’ from every worker in the UK; but New Labour also wants to saw off our ‘limbs’ – only more slowly. The SNP wants a Scotland that is a low tax haven for corporate business and a playground for the ultra-rich.

Socialists and communists must offer something better.  So let us ‘listen, learn and then move on’.

Allan Armstrong, Bob Goupillot, Iain Robertson, 20.12.11

 

 

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Emancipation & Liberation has published a number of articles relating to the current struggle against public sector cuts including:-

http://republicancommunist.org/blog/2011/04/17/international-resistance-to-public-sector-cuts/

Socialists have drawn lessons from the struggles against Thatcher in the 1980’s and 1980’s. Emancipation & Liberation has already looked at the lessons to be drawn from the Anti-Poll Tax Struggle:-

http://republicancommunist.org/blog/2011/05/27/20-years-after-the-poll-tax-lessons-for-the-anti-cuts-movement/

Here we published an article by Mark Hoskisson, currently the Secretary of Liverpool Trades Council, on the  city’s struggle against Thatcher’s Conservative government in the 1980′s. This struggle was led by the Militant Tendency, which was then the dominant political grouping in the Liverpool District Labour Party.

Occasionally we hear this example being quoted by former CWI/Militant members in the SSP. Mark, whilst praising “the city that dared to fight”, argues for a critical assessment of Militant’s role.

Furthermore, Mark notes in passing Militant’s promotion of Derek Hatton at the time. Having been publicly boosted by Militant, Hatton was soon to leave and pursue his own career as a media celebrity. Clearly the promotion of ‘celebrity politics’ has become a deeply engrained feature of CWI politics  which they have been unable to move on from, as we can see in their role of boosting Tommy Sheridan and George Galloway in Scotland. However, as we join today’s struggles against the cuts, it is vital that Socialists do learn from this and help to build open democratic organisations where everybody is fully accountable.

LIVERPOOL – THE CITY THAT DARED TO FIGHT
(First published in Permanent Revolution, issue no. 21)

In early 2011 at a packed Liverpool Trades Union Council public meeting to mobilise for the anti-cuts struggle a voice from the back of the crowd shouted “God bless the 47”. The 47 in question were Labour councillors from the city who, nearly three decades earlier, had dared to challenge Margaret Thatcher’s cuts programme. Under the political leadership of the Militant Tendency, Labour took control of the council in 1983. The 47 were disbarred from office and surcharged £106,000 plus £242,000 in costs by the Law Lords in March 1987. All of the local leaders of the council struggle were subsequently expelled from the Labour Party as well.

The five judges from the House of Lords upheld a decision by an unelected district auditor to dismiss, surcharge and threaten with both bankruptcy and prison 47 democratically elected councillors. Their crime was that they had remained faithful to their electoral pledge that it was “Better to break the law than break the poor”. They refused to set the cuts budget demanded by the national Tory government.

Instead they set about building 5,000 thousand new homes and refurbishing 7,000 older houses. They re-organised schools in the city in favour of the working class. They created thousands of jobs in a city plagued by mass unemployment. They opened more nurseries than any other council in the country and froze rents for five years.

Little wonder then that their memory and legacy lives on in “The city that dared to fight”, as one of the 47 Tony Mulhearn dubbed it. Little wonder also that the stand taken by the 471is a point of reference for today’s battles against Tory-Lib Dem imposed cuts. The decisions taken by the Labour council between 1983 and 1987 are in stark contrast to the council elected in May 2010.

Today’s Labour Council, led by Joe Anderson, has agreed to impose a cuts budget with £91 million of spending being slashed, housing programmes frozen, school building projects axed and of course thousands of jobs being destroyed. Today’s council has chosen to do the Con-Dem coalition’s dirty work rather than call on the people of the city to rise up in resistance.

Only a sectarian would regard the legacy of the 47 as an example of  “Labour betrayal”. The achievements of the council were real. The councillors’ fight was part of a real mass movement of resistance and the attempts to link the council’s struggle to strike action by the city’s workforce were absolutely correct in their intent.

But to defend the record of Liverpool Council between 1983 and 1987 is not to say – as some of Militant’s heirs, like the Socialist Party today claim – that no mistakes at all were made and that the tactics used during the struggle were all perfect and the only model to follow.

Rather, we need a balance sheet that builds on the legacy of the 47 that faces up to the mistakes made and the weaknesses in Militant’s politics that those mistakes revealed.

And given the struggle ended in defeat we need a balance sheet that does not uncritically bless it, not withstanding the call for the divinity to do just that at the mass public meeting of Liverpool Trades Union Council!

The Background

In 1981 Liverpool exploded with the Toxteth riots as black and white youth rose up against a regime of police brutality and harassment and against the city’s staggering devastation at the hands of the Thatcher’s Tory government. Liverpool’s industries were laid waste by the slump politicians at Westminster – down by 65% in 1983. Mass unemployment was like a plague killing the city, whose population fell to a record low of 460,000 in 1983. The social carnage suffered at the hands of the Tories was captured in a 1980s television play, The Boys from The Blackstuff, with its infamous catch phrase “gizza job”.

Thatcher’s cuts to the grant allocation system for local government had, in real terms, taken £34 million from Liverpool between 1979 and 1983. The Liberal council had played along with these cuts – chopping the council workforce by 2,000, freezing council house building and cutting local services to the bone.

The uprising of 1981 though, showed that Liverpool was prepared to fight back. And in May 1983 a Labour council was voted in. A month later Thatcher won her landslide election, but Liverpool bucked the trend. It was a Tory-free city and in Terry Fields, the MP who won Broadgreen, a Militant supporter and well known local class fighter, the city demonstrated that it wanted politicians who would take the fight to Thatcher.

Thatcher was choking off funds to local councils she despised – and Liverpool was top of her list – by capping rates. She aimed to bankrupt councils like Liverpool committed to socially progressive spending programmes. For a period she met resistance from an alliance of left Labour councils. But as the battle lines hardened many Labour councillors caved in to Neil Kinnock’s appeal to avoid a fight. He argued that it was better for Labour councils to give in and act as a “dented shield” than to engage in an all out fight with an enemy he believed could and should only be challenged at the polls.

The Liverpool 47 ignored this call for submission to the enemy. In November 1983 a demonstration of 25,000 was held in the city supporting the council’s stand of setting a budget to meet the needs of the city. In 1984, as the day loomed for setting the illegal deficit budget the scale of support for the 47 was revealed when 50,000 took to the streets to back them. This was soon followed by more victories at the polls, giving Labour seven more seats on the council.

This show of strength terrified the Tories, but it also exposed quite how calculating they could be. After all, at this point the miners had gone on strike and the struggle that was to define a generation began. To avoid the pitfall of fighting on two fronts the Tories “found” an extra £60 million to save the council from having to set a deficit budget.

This was to prove the high point of the mass struggle. Of course further strikes and demonstrations in support of the council followed in 1985 and 1986. But the situation had changed. The council was now under direct attack not only by Tories gleefully waving the scalps of the miners’ union at Liverpool but also by Kinnock who denounced the Liverpool councillors at the 1985 Labour Party conference as the opening shot of his war against the left in the party.

From this point on the Liverpool council – having missed the chance to make common cause with the miners in 1984 with the explicit goal of bringing down Thatcher – now found itself under fire from many sides, and with fewer and fewer allies in a labour movement demoralised by the miners’ defeat. In September 1985 the councilors were suspended by the District Auditor and in November the Liverpool District Labour Party was suspended by Kinnock. From that point on the struggle was on the ebb.

Militant’s political approach

In 1983 the District Labour Party (DLP) in Liverpool was dominated by Militant, with leaders like Tony Mulhearn, the party chairman at the time. The DLP, as Tony Mulhearn explained at the time, was decisive in drafting the 1983 anti-cuts manifesto in the city, one which produced a historically unprecedented swing to Labour. The DLP also exercised control over the council itself. As Tony Mulhearn put it: “The District Labour Party is the policy-making body but also the Labour group implement that policy and the Liverpool District Labour Party elect the leader, the deputy leader and the chairman of the key positions in the Labour group, a position which as far as I know is unparalleled.”2

In the light of this it is clear that the decisions and strategy of the DLP shaped the struggle in Liverpool. We have explained above what we think it got right. But what did it get wrong?

The there are three key elements to Liverpool DLP’s strategy that contributed to the eventual defeat of the struggle. Inevitably they overlap with fundamental aspects of Militant’s overall strategy for socialist struggle at the time:

- Militant’s conception of the role of the party in carrying through the struggle

- Militant’s view of the mechanics of social transformation

- The council’s view of its struggle as a sectoral confrontation with the Thatcher government

In 1983 Militant believed that the only way to build a mass socialist party was through capturing the Labour Party – by entering it and working in it – and winning its leadership to Marxism. Regardless of the rights and wrongs of this schema (a schema the Socialist Party has now broken from), they maintained a view of the “leading role of the revolutionary party” which had its origins in the distortions of revolutionary communism during the rise of the bureaucracy in post-revolutionary Russia in the 1920s.

This view elevates the party to the role of supreme arbiter of the interests of the working class and underestimates the pivotal role of generalised working class democracy and non-party organisations. The party can only be a true leader by virtue of the consent of the masses – party and non-party. It cannot and should never be the sole decision making body on behalf of the masses.

In Liverpool this meant that, once captured and placed in the hands of the “Marxist leadership” i.e. the Militant Tendency, the District Labour Party became the exclusive means through which strategy in the city could be debated and decided. The contribution of other organisations, the democracy of other organisations, and the role of political and social organisations outside of the DLP was limited. They could all have their say, but they were not involved in taking decisions.

A non-Militant member of the council, but one who worked very closely with them, Tony Byrne (the architect of the council’s financial strategy), put it bluntly: “All policies are decided and supported by the Labour Party, not outside organisations. The best way to contribute to policy in the Labour Party is to be in it. In fact I wouldn’t think there is much hope of influencing policy if you are not in.”3

In Liverpool there was, and is to this day, a rich tradition of non-party working class organisation, through the unions, through community organisations, through sizeable non-Labour working class political parties. These organisations represented thousands of workers and their direct involvement, not just their support, in deciding the fate of the struggle was something that needed to be developed, cherished and incorporated into a strategy for change.

The council did not take this road. It substituted the DLP for mass working class participatory democracy. The DLP decided policy and then appealed to the masses for support.

The most well known example of this approach came with the appointment of Sam Bond as the head of the Race Equality Unit. Sam Bond was a Militant supporter from London and his appointment was opposed by representatives of the local black community and the Liverpool Trades Council. The decision to push ahead with the appointment  regardless alienated sections of the black community in Liverpool and the trade unions who felt that Militant was putting its own narrow party interests ahead of building a broad campaign in support of the council.

Whatever the motivations for this approach by Militant and the non-Militant members of the 47, it was a serious mistake. Had the council and the DLP consciously set out to build mass democratic organisations and had they issued a call to such organisations to take control of the running of services, the running of schools and so on, then the Tories would have faced a far more formidable enemy than they did in 1987 when they were able to disbar the 47 from office with relative impunity.

There is less chance now of the left “capturing” the leadership of a local Labour Party, let alone one as strategically important as Liverpool. Nevertheless, we have already seen a recurrence of the far left’s use of the same concept of “the leading role of the party” today – by the SWP in its “Right to Work Campaign”, by the ex-SWP leaders of Counterfire in their “Coalition of Resistance” and of the Socialist Party, which set up a third anti-cuts campaign via its control of the National Shop Stewards Network.

The lesson of the defeat in Liverpool under the leadership of the DLP is that the left needs to set aside its obsession with front organisations whose hallmark is absolute control by a particular faction. They put off thousands of potential fighters even where they manage to hornswoggle a few hundred.

We need to build genuinely independent, mass democratic anti-cuts organisations that embrace those within and without the established parties, that draw in hundreds and thousands of activists who remain suspicious of the bureaucratic legacy of twentieth century left politics. Such campaigning rank and file organisations need to taste their own power and become imbued with a confidence and belief in their own role, the better to fight to the end, and win.

Militant’s view of revolution

Which brings us to Militant’s conception of how to bring about fundamental social change – a view put to the test in Liverpool where it had won leadership of the Labour Party. Our criticism of Militant then was that their years of entryism in the Labour Party had blunted their revolutionary edge.

In order to stay in the party at all costs they evolved a theory of revolutionary change that could be accommodated inside a reformist party. They embraced a top down, parliamentary conception of change. The leadership would “enable” change in either the council chamber or parliament and the masses would be mobilised to support this top down change.

A key leader of Militant, and now of the Socialist Party, was Peter Taaffe. He spelt out Militant’s view of social change quite clearly: “. . . in the pages of Militant, in pamphlets and in speeches we have shown that the struggle to establish a socialist Britain can be carried through in parliament backed up by the colossal power of the labour movement outside.”4 This was no isolated statement. It was at the heart of Militant’s approach. And in Liverpool it was carried into practice once the Council was elected. The councillor did not say to the working class of the city – “over to you”. Instead it said, we have decided this course of action, support us.

Of course the action the council took, especially in 1983, was courageous. It defied the Tory government and demanded the government provide funds to meet the needs budget it had set. So far so good. The council then had a choice – when it was attacked it could have declared all out war on the Tories and called on the masses to engage in an indefinite general strike to force the government to retreat.

This would have meant actively dissolving the antiquated and bureaucratic machinery of local government and establishing the elements of working class rule in the city. Far fetched? Given the DLP had declared it was under Marxist leadership and prepared to fight to the end, clearly not.

However, this was not the course of action taken by the council. It went half way towards it, calling mass demonstrations which numbered tens of thousands, supporting strikes by council workers and others and organising democratic consultations with the working class of the city over changes. All of this was good – but still within the framework of capitalist legality.

But at the same time it sought to maintain the council in power by striking a deal with the government over the budget. The deal enabled the council to carry out important election pledges, but it was a compromise that left the city well short of the money it needed. A Financial Times journalist summarised the deal as: “The fact is that Liverpool’s muscle won, but less than it might have done, and the government lost, but not as much as it might have done . . . For its part Liverpool made substantial concessions too and any claims to the contrary are simply disingenuous.”5

The compromise provided Liverpool with £17 million – still £13 million short of the budget it required to meet its pledges. What followed was a period of creative accounting by Tony Byrne, and later loans from Swiss banks in order to keep the council afloat.

Throughout the negotiations that led to this compromise the council had mobilised the extra parliamentary power of the workers – notably in a massive public sector strike in its support. But this was orchestrated and limited action being used to strengthen the council’s hand in negotiations with the government. It was not independent working class action setting the terms for any deal.

The workers were a supporting cast – and Derek Hatton, the Deputy Leader, was very much the star. Looking back at every piece of footage this is clear. We hear far too much from Hatton and not enough from the workers. The result was that the support amongst the working class drained away. In 1985 workers voted not to strike and both the government and the Labour leadership sensed things could be moving in their direction.

They both moved against the council in a combined legal attack and political witchhunt. They found that the councillors’ failure to capitalise on the mass support they had in 1983/84 by turning it into an all out struggle against Thatcher by the working class of the city had led to things going off the boil. The council was now receiving less support from the very people who had been the “extra parliamentary” army the previous year.

The lesson is that the working class must never be used as “extra support” a stage army marched out to strengthen the negotiators’ hand. Their independent struggle is always and under all circumstances more important than the battles, negotiations and deals struck in either parliament or the council chamber. The independent strength of the working class in struggle will give rise to a new politics in which decisions are made by the democratic organisations of the strikers, the communities and the campaigns not by the parliamentarians either locally or nationally.

National not local battle

Finally we come to the council’s view of its own struggle. It set the limits of its campaign around the borders of the city. It was a battle that pitched militant Liverpool against Thatcher’s London regime. It aroused tremendous civic pride and fierce loyalty to the council by people who were suffering 24% unemployment at the time and enduring  some of the worst housing conditions in Europe.

The council quite rightly mobilised the famous sense of city patriotism felt by the Liverpool working class and directed it towards progressive ends. There was nothing wrong with that except . . . The backcloth to the major budget crisis and struggle in the city in 1984 was the great national Miners’ Strike. Thatcher was at war, quite literally, with the best organised and most militant section of the working class. This battle, as every socialist knew at the time, would shape the entire future of the class struggle in the country. For that reason every socialist worth their salt tried to do one thing – join up every local and sectional struggle into one class front against the Tories and alongside the miners.

Thatcher was well aware of this and staved off the danger by deliberately making concessions to other workers to ensure they did not start striking alongside the miners. Rail workers got one of their best ever pay deals. In the face of two dock strikes, concessions to port workers were made by the Tories. Pay rises were sprinkled across the public sector.

Everywhere a Labour and trade union bureaucracy terrified of the miners’ struggle becoming generalised jumped at the compromises on offer and kept their men and women out of the order of battle. Everywhere the possibilities of opening a second front against the Tories to help the miners were closed off.

In these circumstances Liverpool City Council, which was being offered a compromise by the Tories in order to keep it separated from a generalised struggle alongside the miners, had a duty to reject all offers and declare solidarity with the miners under the banner of “Liverpool’s fight is the miners’ fight – united we can win”. This was not only a duty but offered the only perspective of Liverpool winning. A united struggle could have crippled or defeated Thatcher, reaching a shoddy compromise with her one year, allowed her to defeat the miners and return to the attack the next.

The level of support for the council and for the miners in the city was phenomenal. In the spring of 1984 Everton and Liverpool played each other at Wembley in a League Cup Final. North London was flooded with over 100,000 Scousers wearing their teams’ colours and two stickers: “I support our Council” and “Coal not Dole”. Many miners described the day as one of the best ever collections they had made to raise money for their strike.

A city united had the chance to forge a bond with a union waging a life and death battle for the future of the movement. It did not take that opportunity. It took the money on offer from the government and took the working class of the city out of the line of fire.

A year later, when the workers of the city voted not to strike in September 1985 and ill-thought out tactics were used to try and delay the consequences of the financial crisis that had gripped the city, the miners were back at work, defeated. Thatcher, and the right of the Labour Party, could turn on Liverpool fresh from the victory over the miners. And Liverpool – the city that dared to fight – now found itself alone.

The 47 stood firm and put up a brave fight, Tony Byrne set to work negotiating fresh loans, but terrible damage had been caused by the separation of the city’s fight from the miners’ fight. The end result was that not only did Liverpool find itself fighting alone as the auditors and witchhunters moved in during 1985/86, so too did the councillors. The demonstrations that had once numbered tens of thousands dwindled to hundreds as confusion and demoralisation set in as the scale of the defeat became clearer. Just as the miners had, for a time, believed they could go it alone, so had Liverpool.

For daring to fight it should always be remembered as a heroic struggle. But its defeat carried the all important lesson of the need for class wide unity to triumph over sectoral struggles.

And this, perhaps, is the most important lesson of all for today – the cuts are an attack on all of us, no matter who gets sacked or what gets closed first. We need to be conscious of the need to fight them together and use each sectional struggle that occurs as the starting point for developing a class wide battle to defeat the government’s polices and bring it down.

The city wide strike in Liverpool in 1984 could have – and should have – been a building block for a nationwide general strike alongside the miners. It should not have been only the means of winning a local and sectoral battle.

All of that said the 47 stand head and shoulders above the Labour councillors today who, faced with the Tory demand for cuts, meekly reply “how much”?

1             see http://www.liverpool47.org

2             The Politics of Local Socialism, p 91, John Gyford, London 1985

3             Labour, a tale of two parties, p. 131, Hilary Wainwright, London, 1987

4            Militant International Review, No. 22, p28

5             Financial Times, 17 July 1984

Due to an oversight this report was not placed earlier on the ‘Emancipation & Liberation’ blog

 

The second Republican Socialist Convention was organised by the Socialist Alliance [1] in London on February 13^th.  In its initial conception it was ambitious. With a General Election looming in the UK, the organisers attempted to bring together figures from the Left who might be offering an election challenge this year.  Those invited included Bob Crow, General Secretary of the RMT and someone from the Socialist Party, both involved in the Trade Union and Socialist Coalition [2], Robert Griffiths from the Communist Party of Britain (and formerly of No2EU), Peter Tatchell of the Green Left, and Colin Fox, co-Spokesperson for the Scottish Socialist Party (as well as Tony Benn, now seen as somewhat of a ‘national treasure’ by the British Left). They were all to be asked how they saw the relevance of campaigning on political or democratic issues, especially the demand for a republic. The series of apologies given, some undoubtedly genuine, whilst others more probably sectarian in motivation, highlighted the over-ambitious aims held by the organisers.

The Convention Chair, Steve Freeman, introduced Peter Tatchell as a ‘republican in spirit’. He made a useful contribution to start the debate. Peter outlined his proposed ten points for the republican reform of the British constitution. As with most of the British Left, the ‘Six Counties’ was missing from Peter’s contribution. He did think, though, that a federal Britain could solve the National Question in England, Scotland and Wales.

There was a formalism about the republican principles Peter advocated. This was because Peter had not analysed the real nature of the British unionist and imperialist state we were up against, and the anti-democratic Crown Powers it had its disposal to crush any serious opposition. Nor did Peter outline where the social and political forces existed to bring about his new republic. In particular, he did not really consider the role of republican challenges to the UK state, emanating from Ireland, Scotland and Wales. Unfortunately, Peter had to leave for another meeting, whilst time for further discussion was curtailed, so Colin Fox was then left to put the SSP’s socialist republican case in somewhat of a vacuum.

Colin pointed out how the MP’s expenses scandal has shown how unrepresentative they have become. James Connolly reminded those who aspire to represent working people ‘Rise with your class not out of it’. Some 650 MP’s or ‘representatives’ are elected to Parliament. So why are they so unrepresentative? It has been subverted by the neo-liberal consensus. Being an MP has become a career not a cause. Parliament is full of lawyers, businessmen, bankers, accountants and lecturers and that’s just the Labour side!

In 2005, the Queen opened her new £440m Scottish Parliament building at Holyrood in Edinburgh. The SSP MSP’s decided not just to boycott the event, but to organise an alternative. The SSP gave its support to the Declaration of Calton Hill. Socialist republicanism is at the heart of the SSP’s politics.

The Convention then moved quickly on to the last morning session, introduced by Mehdi Kia (co-editor of the Middle East Bulletin). Medhi provided an overview of the events in Iran over the last 8 months. Initially he addressed some of the myths surrounding the recent presidential election and provided reasons for rejecting them. These included suggestions that the election was not fraudulent, that the protestors are mainly middle class, that this is another “velvet” revolution orchestrated by the US, that it is led by the reformists, and that the Iranian regime is in some way anti-imperialistic.

He went on to point out that the protestors come from a variety of backgrounds, the slogans are continuously changing and becoming more radicalised, the movement is in its very essence democratic and anti-imperialist, and within it is a growing secular republican movement (rejecting the Islamic republic) with increasingly radical slogans. He concluded that under the immense repression of the regime the tactic of street demonstrations has only limited potential and unless the various movements (women, youth, nationalities and workers) co-ordinate more effectively and adopt different tactics the movement will not succeed in its more radical aims.

The afternoon session was meant to introduce the perspective of ‘Internationalism from Below’ – England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales – which had united the contributors to the first Republican Socialist Convention held in Edinburgh on the 29^th November, 2008. The SSP International Committee had to apply some pressure for this issue to be taken seriously by the London organisers. They accepted, given the prevalence of Left British Unionism in England, that a debate was indeed needed between representatives of this tradition and speakers from both Left Nationalist and ‘Internationalism from Below’ viewpoints.  A mixture of the shortness of time, the lack of non-English contacts held by the Left in London, and various apologies limited the scope for this debate on the day.

Instead, Steve Freeman spoke about whether there was a National Question in England, beginning by considering the flags and anthems at the 1966 world cup, the Scotland-England rugby match in 1990 and the Euro football in 1996 when the flag of St George became prominent. The National Question involves issues of political institutions (parliaments etc) and identity. Whilst the National Question was recognised for Ireland, Scotland and Wales, the Left had not examined the related situation in England.

Steve considered that a British nation had been created after 1707 through the wars with France in the 18th century. He saw the UK as one nation and four tribes – the British-English, British-Irish, British-Scots and British-Welsh. Now the political institutions and the identity of the British English were being questioned. There was no British-English National Question in the past but now there were signs of an emerging crisis of politics and identity. From this a new English politics and identity could emerge. How should the Left relate to this?

Allan Armstrong, from the SSP’s International Committee (and a member of the party’s Republican Communist Network platform), then outlined some of the lessons socialist republicans could learn from the decades long republican struggle against the UK state in Ireland. He pointed out that there was now a National Movement in Scotland that is wider than the SNP. Indeed the SNP, like its equivalent parties in Quebec, Catalunya and Euskadi, is increasingly settling for Devolution-Max, and pushing the interests of local business within the existing corporate imperialist order.

Today, the British, American and EU ruling classes are united against any move towards Scottish independence. This is why any movement to win Scottish self-determination must be republican from the start. It must be prepared, in advance, to confront the Crown Powers that will be inevitably utilised against us. Because genuine and democratic Scottish independence represents such a challenge to British imperialism and the UK state, we need allies in England, Ireland and Wales too. We need to be committed to a strategy of ‘internationalism from below’. We are socialist republicans and link our political demands with social and economic campaigns. This was the course advocated by two great socialist republicans born in Scotland – James Connolly and John Maclean.

This session prompted the most debate, which has now continued on the RCN [3] and The Commune [4] websites, and in the pages of the very Left Unionist, Weekly Worker. It was a pity that enough time wasn’t given to air this debate more thoroughly on the day.

The last session was a bit of a damp squib, since the SA had obviously seen it as an opportunity to get the same sort of unity around demands over democratic issues in the forthcoming General Election, that the Left can sometimes achieve (on paper anyhow!) over economic issues. Instead it was left to Colin Fox for the SSP and Joseph Healey, for the Green Left, to outline the nature of their parties’ proposed electoral campaigns. The absence of the other Left forces contesting the election meant the SA’s aims could not be achieved in this respect.

It was good to have a Republican Socialist Convention organised in England. It was traditional Left in its mode of organisation (platform and audience), even when there were only about 20 present, but everybody who contributed did so in a constructive manner  - yes, including those from the ‘Brit Left’! I feel that more could have been gained though if the Convention had concentrated on the debate between Left Unionism, Left Nationalism and ‘Internationalism from Below’.  Maybe the next time!

 Allan Armstrong (member of SSP International Committee)

 

This was issued by the Manchester-based blogger, ‘Infantile and disorderly‘, on May 2.

On May 5, George Galloway will be standing for election to Holyrood. The former Respect MP for Bethnal Green and Bow and Labour MP for Glasgow Kelvin is heading the George Galloway (Respect) – Coalition Against Cuts list. He has the backing of Solidarity, the Socialist Workers Party and the Socialist Party in Scotland. On his election website, Galloway pledges to “oppose every cut to schools, hospitals and public services” and “fight for a parliament with the powers to tax the rich bankers and big business to help pay for jobs and decent public services”. It sounds fine, but there is no way those on the left can extend any level of support for George Galloway.

Galloway is a supporter of the Islamic Republic of Iran. When questioned at a recent public meeting, Galloway denied ever supporting president Ahmadinejad and even offered £1,000 to anyone who could prove his support. However, while interviewing the Iranian president on his Press TV show, The real deal, last August, Galloway stated that he requires “police protection in London from the Iranian opposition because of my support for your election campaign. I mention this so you know where I’m coming from.” In fact, while Iran’s 2009 election is widely accepted to have been rigged, Galloway has stated in his Daily Record blog that the electoral count “was awesome” and the million-plus protesters took to the streets because “too many people were allowed to vote” (his emphasis).

The Iranian regime incarcerates, tortures and executes political opponents, including leftists, trades unionists and leaders of the radical students’ movement. It does the same to those found guilty of “war against god”, a charge levelled at political dissidents.

Confessions are extracted under torture and duress and at times broadcast on state TV channels, including Press TV. Those found guilty of adultery and homosexuality can face the death penalty. Sakineh Mohammadi Ashtiani (called “the so-called stoning case” by Galloway on Press TV) was sentenced to death by stoning in a court speaking a language she didn’t speak herself. George Galloway denies that homosexuality is punishable by death in Iran. On The Wright show, Galloway stated that “the papers seem to imply that you get executed in Iran for being gay. That’s not true.” He then inferred that the boyfriend of gay Iranian asylum seeker Mehdi Kazemi had been executed for “sex crimes” against young boys and not for being gay.

It’s unsurprising that Galloway publicly supports the Islamic Republic. He is an employee of Press TV, the Iranian state propaganda channel. While serving as a MP, Galloway was forced to declare his earnings from Press TV, which ranged from between £5,000 and £20,000 for his various shows.

As pro-democracy protests engulf Syria, it’s worth remembering that Galloway has previously heaped praise upon the Syrian regime and authoritarian ruler, Bashar al-Assad. Addressing Damascus University in late 2005, Galloway said: “For me he is the last Arab ruler, and Syria is the last Arab country. It is the fortress of the remaining dignity of the Arabs.” Galloway has expressed approval for other dictators too, once describing Pakistan’s general Musharraf as an “upright sort”. Far from a consistent democrat, after the 1999 coup brought Musharraf to power Galloway told The Mail on Sunday that “Only the armed forces can really be counted on to hold such a country together … Democracy is a means, not an end in itself and it has a bad name on the streets of Karachi and Lahore.”

Galloway’s Christian beliefs have influenced his views on abortion and stem cell research. He doesn’t believe in evolution. In The Independent on Sunday in 2004 Galloway said: “I’m strongly against abortion. I believe life begins at conception, and therefore unborn babies have rights. I think abortion is immoral.” He was absent from all votes on the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill (which included attempts to reduce the abortion time limit in the UK). His notable absenteeism extends to many LGBT issues and euthanasia. Then again, Galloway always had fairly lamentable levels of parliamentary participation. As a Respect MP, Galloway only participated in 98 out of 1,288 votes. In 2006, he claimed more expenses than any other backbench MP in parliament.

Galloway’s egoism has always been astounding. While most socialists consider it standard for workers’ representatives to be elected on a workers’ wage (not an impoverishing amount, but the salary of a skilled worker), Galloway has declared he couldn’t possibly live on “three workers’ wages”. And what else other than pure vanity can have driven an appearance on Big brother, which discredited whole sections of the left?

Finally, it’s worth remembering that Respect’s own councillors in Tower Hamlets have voted through cuts to public services.

We call on socialists to offer no support for Galloway’s election campaign.

Moshé Machover (Israeli socialist)
Torab Saleth (Workers Left Unity Iran)
Mehdi Kia (co-editor Middle East Left Forum)
Charlie Pottins (Unite and Hands Off the People of Iran steering committee)
Rosie Kane (Scottish Socialist Party)
Nima Kisomi (Iranian socialist)
Sahar G (Iranian socialist)
Suran Badfar (Iranian Socialist)
Vicky Thompson (Hopi)
Tami Peterson (National Union of Students LGBT committee)
David Broder (The Commune)
Steve Ryan (The Commune)
Barry Biddulph (The Commune)
Sinead Rylance (Communist Students)
Ustun Yazar (Communist Students)
Reyhaneh Sadegzadeh (Communist Students)
Alex Allan (Communist Students)
James O’Leary (Communist Students)
Sebastian Osthoff (Communist Students)
Komsan Duke (Anarchist Federation)
William J Martin (Batley and Spen CLP)
Elsie Wraight (Manchester Labour Students)
Rachael Howe (Love Levenshulme Hate Cuts campaign)
Karen Broady (Unison)
Ste Monaghan (GMB)
Edd Mustill (NUJ)
Dan Read (NUJ)
Pete Cookson (NUT)
Joe Broady (Bectu)
Raphie De Santos (‘The left banker’)
Andrew Coates (socialist blogger)
Michael Leversha (student activist)
Beth Marshall (student activist)
Nima Barazandeh (student activist)
Democratic Socialist Alliance (organisation).

Allan Armstrong, Nick Clarke, and Bob Goupillot, editors of Emancipation & Liberation would like to add their names to this Open Letter, but with the following reservation regarding phrase the He doesn’t believe in evolution.

Galloway does support evolution as scientific fact – see article below from ‘Daily Record‘.

http://blogs.dailyrecord.co.uk/georgegalloway/2009/02/student-critic-creates-a-fuss.html

The one thing that does not appear in the letter of protest is Galloway’s public incitement to violence against those who failed to support Sheridan in court in his attempt to use his political position for purely personal gain. We are pleased to see that Rosie Kane, who has been the subject of particularly foul abuse and attention from this quarter, has signed this letter.

The challenge to the UK state and British Empire from 1879-95

Contents of forthcoming book

1. Introduction
2. The growing conflict between liberal and conservative unionism in the period of New Imperialism
3. Michael Davitt and the launching of the Irish Revolution in 1879
4. Davitt adopts an ‘internationalism from below’ strategy to spread the revolution
5. The struggle against coercion and for land triggers off a new movement in England and Scotland
6. Parnell’s ‘counter-revolution within the revolution’
7. Shifting the main focus of the ‘internationalism from below’ alliance to Scotland
8. The ending of the liberal consensus in the face of the rise of the New Imperialism
9. Davitt widens his ‘internationalism from below’ alliance, and brings in Wales
10. ‘Internationalism from below’ and the weaknesses of Irish nationalism and British Left radicalism
11. From land and labour struggles to the beginning of independent labour political organisation in Scotland
12. From land nationalisation to the eight hour day
13. Broadening the ‘internationalism from below’ alliance around the political demand for Home Rule
14. 1889-92 – the new industrial and political offensive
15. The rise and wider effects of New Unionism in Ireland
16. The limits of Davitt’s politics reached as the Irish Home Rule Movement splits
17. The thwarted hopes of New Unionism and the Home Rule Movement after the 1892 General Election
18. The employers’ offensive and the retreat of New Unionism
19. The final break-up of the ‘internationalism from below’ alliance
20. 1895 – High Imperialism triumphant and the emergence of Connolly’s Irish Socialist Republican Party

1. Introduction

Why should we spend time examining a period of history from over a hundred years ago? Perhaps the best reason is that, between 1879 and 1895, there are striking parallels to the situation we find ourselves in today. This was also a period of increasing inter-imperialist competition, as the previously dominant world power began to lose its leading position. In the late nineteenth century it was the UK that found itself in this new position in the world; today it is the USA, with the UK continuing to fall well down the global pecking order.

Furthermore, when we compare the situation in the UK, over the two periods, we can see the continuing significance of national democratic challenges to the unionist state. The Irish Revolution(1), which began in 1879, led to a questioning of the very existence of the UK, and to profound divisions amongst the British ruling class over how best to maintain its rule over these islands and their wider empire. The demands for national self-determination in Ireland, Scotland and Wales were linked to major social and economic struggles. Clearly, there are significant echoes of this situation today.

From 1875, under the impact of the New Imperialism(2), Disraeli’s Conservative government had begun to pursue increasingly aggressive colonial policies. These reflected the concerns of a British ruling class, now facing global competition from a larger number of European states. From 1879, however, a challenge developed to this recharged British imperialism. The new opposition drew its politics largely from the social republican tradition found in Ireland, and the radical tradition found in England, Scotland and Wales. It formed largely as result of the failure of traditional Gladstonian Liberals to uphold their earlier support for civil rights and opposition to colonial expansion.

Michael Davitt, migrant, former textile worker, Fenian and Irish Land League organiser, was the central figure involved. He attempted to unite land and labour struggles, across the four nations constituting the United Kingdom, and beyond into the British colonies and the USA. Davitt developed an ‘internationalism from below’ alliance to win wider support for the Irish National Land League (INLL), one of the biggest ‘lower orders’ movements in the nineteenth century UK. However, he deepened this alliance in England, Scotland and Wales, by contributing to the development of independent land and labour organisations in each of these nations.

The leader of the INLL, Charles Parnell, though, had other ideas. In 1882, he closed down the INLL in order to form a purely constitutional nationalist party, the National League, with the aim of winning Irish Home Rule. However, the first Irish Home Rule Bill, adopted by Gladstone’s Liberal government, was defeated in 1886, and a new government, led by the Conservative Lord Salisbury, took office.

Davitt now had to confront the thoroughly jingoist, racist and sectarian Unionist alliance. It would countenance no concession over Irish Home Rule, and revelled enthusiastically over every latest imperial exploit. This was the conservative unionist approach to maintaining British ruling class domination at home and abroad. It vehemently opposed the liberal unionist approach(3) with its support for home rule (devolution) for the constituent nations of the UK.

As New Imperialism increased its stranglehold on British politics, the Liberal Party, including many on its Radical wing, were drawn into its slipstream. A section of advanced Radicals, however, reacted against this and made the first tentative steps towards Socialism. Robert Cunningham-Graham and Keir Hardie were just two examples. However, many former Radicals (and Liberal Party members), who became Socialists, retained much of their earlier politics.

Furthermore, the Conservative Party, hitherto seen as a major impediment to any democratic advance, began to develop a Tory Democrat wing. Its supporters made appeals to the newly enfranchised workers. They were offered limited economic reforms in return for giving their support to British ruling class attempts to expand the Empire. Disraeli was one of the first to see the possibilities of harnessing the link between reform and Empire; but it was Randolph Churchill, who attempted to develop this further, by appealing directly to the working class. He also strongly linked expansion of the British Empire with the defence of the existing British Union. He looked to the local dignitary-led, Orange Order in Ulster, for inspiration in forming his pro-imperial, cross class alliance.

Many workers were drawn into Conservative Unionist and further Right populist organisations. They did hope to gain economically from the Empire, or to draw some psychological comfort by celebrating their racial or religious ‘superiority’. The growing number of wars directed against the peoples of the colonies took only a small number of British lives. The real cost was to come later, when the inevitable consequence of growing inter-imperialist competition led to the mass slaughter of the First World War. The leaders of the Conservative Unionists though, were then able to look with smug satisfaction as their Liberal, Irish constitutional nationalist, and some Labour and Socialist ‘opponents’, threw themselves into the promotion of the carnage.

However, back in the 1880’s, a few Tory Democrats, such as Henry Hyndman and Henry Champion, broke with the Conservative Party and became leading figures in the new Socialist movement. Like the former Radical Liberals, these individuals also retained aspects of their old politics, especially their lingering support for English/Anglo-Saxon/British supremacy and racism. Some of the clashes, which took place in the early Socialist movement, reflected this earlier division between Radical Liberals and Tory Democrats.

The infant Social Democratic Federation (SDF), formed in 1885, showed many of the characteristics which have plagued later attempts at Socialist agitation – whether to concentrate on direct action and socialist propaganda or to seek political office; and whether to seek constitutional change or economic reform. Failure to develop a coherent programme and an integrated strategy contributed to many of the setbacks and consequent splits amongst Socialists at the time, just as they continue to do today.

One of these breakaway organisations was the small but quite influential Socialist League (SL). It soon became divided between those who wanted to make propaganda for Socialism, and those, mainly in its affiliated Scottish Land and Labour League (SLLL), who wanted to orientate upon trade union, crofter and cottar struggles.

However, it was the launching of the Irish Land War, in 1879, and the formation of the INLL, which had largely inspired the formation of the SDF, as former advanced Radicals turned to Socialism. They joined the wider struggle against those forces, both Conservative and Liberal, either aggressively advancing the Empire and defending the Union, or meekly bowing before this new onslaught.

The social struggle was closely linked to the political battle for greater Irish self-determination. Furthermore, as new Land Leagues were formed in Scotland and Wales, the demand for Home Rule was taken up in these nations too. The majority of the independent Crofter candidates of 1885, and the new Scottish Labour Party, formed in 1888, supported both Irish and Scottish Home Rule.

Many key individuals, from the land and labour struggles of the 1880’s, contributed to the massive wave of ‘New (Trade) Unionism’, which burst out in 1889. They faced a similar situation to that faced by socialists and trade unionists today. Only then, socialists were up against the politics of Lib-Labism. Trade union leaders were still tied to an earlier Radical Liberal vision of a Free Trade Empire and a ‘fair day’s wage for a fair day’s work.

Today we are up against the politics of New Labour, with trade union leaders locked into ‘Social Partnership’. Sometimes these misleaders may still hanker back to the disappearing vision of the post-war, Welfare State Empire, when workers in the UK were looked after ‘from the cradle to the grave’.

Furthermore, prior to 1889, the vast majority of unskilled and casual workers lay outside the Old Unions. Today, union membership has shrunk back to a minority, mostly concentrated in the public sector. This has left vast numbers of private sector workers, particularly women, migrant and part-time workers unorganised.

Today, the majority of the British Left is tied to a Broad Left strategy of recapturing the ‘old’ unions by replacing their existing leaders with new Left leaders (many of whom are earlier Broad Left leaders!) In contrast, any contemporary ‘New Unionism’ would aim to thoroughly democratise existing unions and bring them under rank and file workers’ control; or, where necessary, build completely new unions to organise those workers now completely unorganised.

Nor is the Left nationalist notion of breakaway unions much use against the global corporations, which workers confront today. Yes, national (and sectoral) union sections need more autonomy, but unions should be as extensive as possible. The key issue is not the existence of union HQ flying a national flag (e.g. the tricolour or saltire), but the necessity for union sovereignty to reside with workers at the workplace level, not in the union HQs. The independent Scottish teachers’ union, the EIS, is one of the most fervent upholders of the embrace of government and employers, not so much in social partnership, more a morganatic marriage(4).

Today, some may take comfort from the fact that the majority of the British ruling class has opted for the liberal, and not the conservative unionist option, in order to maintain its rule over the UK, and its continued, albeit now indirect, influence over Ireland. New Labour promotes ‘Devolution-all-round’ (i.e. for Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales) and the ‘Peace Process’ in Ireland, backed by the social partnerships of compliant trade union and demanding governments and employers.

Yet, the aims of today’s liberal unionists are the same as those of the conservative unionists of the nineteenth, twentieth and twenty-first centuries. They both want to create the best political environment for their principal class backers. Today this means allowing corporate capitalists to lower wages, attack working conditions and undermine pensions, through deregulation and privatisation. It means fawning before the requirements of finance capital.

The British ruling class may indeed have learned some political lessons from their one-time support for intransigent conservative unionism. When Conservative and Liberal Unionists tried to face down the rising demand for Irish Home Rule, in the 1880’s, ‘90s and first two decades of the twentieth century, this eventually proved to be a disastrous strategy for them. By 1922, direct rule over ‘the Twenty Six Counties’ had been ended, and the UK state had begun to break-up.

However, the post-1922 UK-Irish ‘settlement’, imposed after the threat of a renewed war on the Irish people, seemed so permanent, that this lesson appeared to be forgotten by the late 1960’s. This was when new national democratic movements confronted the British ruling class. Initially this ruling class did flirt with both liberal centralist(5) and devolution(6) measures to deal with these challenges, which coincided with major working class struggles. However, once the ruling class had reasserted its control, under the two post-1974 Labour governments, it returned to the old failed conservative unionist strategy of defence of the constitutional status quo, backed by threats and coercion. Meanwhile, anti-trade union laws soon tamed most union leaderships. The TUC and the Labour Party leaders left the miners isolated, when they defied these new laws. The NUM faced the full panoply of state power between 1984-5. The Labour/TUC’s acceptance of ‘New Realism’ was but the beginnings of the road back to the Lib-Lab ‘Old Unionism’ of the nineteenth century, and its complete acceptance of capitalist rule.

Thatcher’s British Unionist ‘No, No, No’ intransigence first began under Labour, in the late 70’s in Northern Ireland. The attempt by Labour Irish Secretary, Roy Mason, to criminalise any effective opposition had its parallels in Forster, Gladstone’s Liberal Irish Secretary, and his introduction of coercion to Ireland in 1881, long before Lord Salisbury’s Conservative Irish Secretary, ‘Bloody Balfour’ was given free rein in 1887.

The failure of the UK state to meet the constitutional and economic reform demands raised by the Civil Rights Movement in ‘the Six Counties’, produced another period of constitutional instability, lasting over a quarter of a century. An overt and determined republican challenge emerged within the UK’s frontiers. Thatcher’s later attempt to deny any political self-determination, for either Scotland or Wales, made the ‘National Question’ an even wider and more volatile political issue.

This is one reason why the majority of the British ruling class unceremoniously dumped Thatcher in 1990 and, under John Major’s government adopted The Downing Street Agreement. The Conservatives were now committed to a liberal unionist strategy to defend the Union. When this proved too limited to contain the wider challenge, the ruling class turned instead to New Labour’s policy of ‘Devolution-all-round’. This is, in effect, a return to the old nineteenth century Liberal Home Rule strategy.

However, as with the nineteenth century division between Conservatives and Liberals, there is little difference today in the real aims of the Tories and New Labour. Both are committed to maintaining a British imperial presence in the wider world. Both accept that the British ruling class can now only achieve this as a junior partner to US imperialism. This leads to continuous wars, attacks on civil rights, austerity welfare provision, and the scape-goating of migrant workers. There is now a tension between New Labour and the Tories’ liberal unionism and their increasingly conservative militaristic imperialism. And, under today’s prevailing political conditions it is the liberal unionism which is more likely to give.

New Labour soon falls back on the nastier traits, usually associated with conservative unionism and imperialism. Indeed, as international competition becomes more pronounced, in the wake of the current Credit Crunch and the deepening worldwide recession, New Labour is preparing the ground for even more jingoistic, racist and sectarian forces.

The Immigration Minister, Philip Woolas, has shown that it is not only conservatives, who will stoop to the gutter, when it comes to racist attacks to divert attention from the real causes of the economic crisis. Meanwhile, the rise of the BNP, and the continued presence of malevolent loyalist forces in ‘the Six Counties’, show that even more sinister forces are lurking not far below the surface in the UK. Events in Berlusconi’s Italy demonstrate that it is but a short step to government encouraged racist assaults and murders of migrants and ethnic minorities.

As we try to build a new socialist movement, an appreciation of the Left’s politics, between 1879 and 1895, provides us with useful insights. The Radicals were then the dominant force on the Left, from whom the infant socialist and labour movements inherited much of their politics. The Radicals wanted to return to the mid-century ‘glory days’ of free trade and international peace.

Today’s Left includes those ‘Marxist’ Radicals – the entrants and outriders of the British Labour Party – who hope to re-establish the welfare state and to prolong the long period since 1945 without a world war. This is often tied to their Broad Left strategy for reclaiming the trade unions for ‘real Labour’. However, just as the rise New Imperialism, at the end of the nineteenth century, spelled the end of the old international ‘free trade’ capitalist order, so the development of corporate capitalist imperialism today means that the post-1945 social democratic world has changed irrevocably. New answers and approaches are required.

‘Marxist’ Radicals in the SWP and Socialist Party(7), often defend the formation and continued existence of the UK as a ‘progressive’ achievement. They claim this historical gain needs to be defended against the attacks of the nationalists in Scotland and Wales, completely failing to see the wider democratic issues at stake. They take some consolation in the ‘Peace Process’ in ‘the Six Counties’, which appears, for the time being, to have reopened the road for ‘bread and butter’ issues, i.e. traditional labourist politics.

When ‘Marxist’ Radicals are forced to address the major democratic and constitutional issues, they tend to follow their nineteenth century Radical predecessors. They either see the ‘National Question’ as a diversion form the ‘real struggle’, or give support to liberal unionist options to defend the UK.

Some ‘Marxist’ Radicals go further, but still only end up tailing the more thoughtful sections of the British ruling class, when they call for more powers for the existing devolved assemblies. A few would go so far as to advocate a new federal arrangement between the constituent parts of the UK. This last ditch liberal option has a long pedigree, whenever the British union state is under threat from national democratic movements. Others, however, hide behind the formulation of support for the ‘right of national self-determination’. The political effect of this is to leave it to the various nationalist parties to take the lead formulating the politics of the national democratic movements.

By examining past history, we can see that the politics of those advocating various ‘British roads to socialism’ are but continuations of an older British Radical tradition, which dominated the Left in the UK, in the late nineteenth century. Radicals tended to leave the political initiative to the Liberal Party and their Irish nationalist allies. Today’s ‘Marxist’ Radicals also take their political lead over the UK constitution from the liberal wing of the British ruling class, or sometimes, if unwittingly, from the nationalist parties – Sinn Fein, SNP and Plaid Cymru.

Yet, between 1888 and 1894, an alternative tradition developed, which recognised some of the weaknesses of the ‘Marxist’ Radicals. The Scottish Socialist Federation (SSF) was formed, which brought together SDF and SL/SLLL members, as well as other socialists, to try and go beyond the politics of Radicalism and the subservience of Lib-Labism. In some respects the SSF anticipated the Scottish Socialist Alliance, (SSA) formed in 1996, in the aftermath of the Anti-Poll Tax Struggle, along with the continued failure of the Labour Party to meet workers’ needs.

In the end, just as Davitt’s social republicanism collapsed into populist nationalism in Ireland, so the SSF, along with the Scottish Labour Party, it had backed, collapsed into the hybrid Radical/Tory Democrat tradition of ‘the British road to socialism’ found in the Independent Labour Party or the SDF. Today, after a major internal crisis, the SSA’s successor organisation, the Scottish Socialist Party, faces powerful pulls, in the form of Left nationalism and Left unionism.

By 1895, the limitations of Davitt’s politics had become quite apparent, as the British ruling class regained the political initiative and derailed the Home Rule challenge. Furthermore, Socialists, at the time, were unable to take the vigorous post-1889 New (Trade) Unionism challenge forward. It also went into retreat, taking on some of the characteristics of ‘Old Unionism’ once more. A new politics was needed to unite the political and economic wings of a wider working class movement.

However, it was within the SSF milieu that a real alternative began to emerge, in the figure of James Connolly. Like Davitt, he was a member of an Irish migrant family. Connolly’s family had settled in Edinburgh. He received his initial political training within the Scottish Socialist Federation and the Scottish Labour Party. He was to make a quantum leap in his political approach, though, when he moved to Dublin and founded the Irish Socialist Republican Party in 1896.

Connolly developed the socialist republican politics needed to take Davitt’s social republican and radical ‘internationalism from below’ alliance on to a higher level, during the heyday of High Imperialism from 1895. Connolly’s consistent anti-unionism and anti-imperialism offered a clear strategy, which opposed both the Irish constitutional nationalism and the ‘British road to socialism’, which was supported by most of the British Left of his day. Instead, Connolly promoted a ‘break-up of the UK and British Empire road to socialism’.

In today’s world, imperialism still calls the shots. The continued existence of the UK provides the British ruling class with a powerful bastion of support. This unionist and monarchist state is fundamentally undemocratic. It gives the British ruling class a whole host of draconian Crown Powers to maintain its rule. Even the formally independent Irish Republic has to bow to British ruling class needs. This was highlighted by Irish leaders’ recent reluctant acceptance of the liabilities of UK-owned banks in Ireland. Nor did the Irish government get many thanks for their pioneering bank rescue plan to save domestic capitalism, much of which Brown and Darling so quickly copied and took credit for.

However, the current financial crisis has also highlighted the close links between leading Scottish nationalists and the British banks. In panic, they have quietly rushed into the arms of the UK government to develop a common approach to address shared capitalist concerns. Meanwhile, in public, the SNP and New Labour continue their political squabbles, jockeying for position to gain relative advantages for their particular capitalist backers.

British politicians, whether they are Labour, Conservative or Liberal Democrat, continue to argue with SNP politicians over the extent of power to be awarded to the devolved Scottish Parliament at Holyrood. However, they all agree that the monarchy and the ruling class’s Crown Powers have to remain in place, that the Bank of England will control the economy through the continued use of sterling, and that suitable arrangements have to be made to accommodate NATO and to protect US imperial interests. All these parties are wedded to neo-liberalism and are in hock to corporate capital.

The nationalist parties represented in the various devolved assemblies, in Holyrood, Cardiff Bay or Stormont, make no attempt to mount a joint challenge to continued British rule, or to the all pervading corporate capitalist power over these islands. Whilst Plaid Cymru leaders may be envious of the powers already devolved to the Scottish Parliament, it is pretty clear that, if parity were to be achieved, this would merely signal their intention to compete more effectively for inward corporate investment. When Donald Trump threatened to abandon his golfing complex project in Aberdeenshire, in stepped the then DUP Minister, Ian Paisley Junior, to offer an alternative site on the Antrim Coast of Northern Ireland.

Just as Davitt and Connolly realised, in their day, that they faced the combined forces of British imperialism (whether it be Conservative or Liberal) and Irish nationalism (whether it be Parnell or his successors), so socialists face a similar combined opposition of Labour, Conservative and Lib-Dem unionists and nationalists today. By studying our class’s history, we gain the advantages of hindsight. This is why we need to look once more to rebuild an ‘internationalism from below’ alliance of republican socialists in Scotland, England, Ireland and Wales.

Footnotes

• (1) ‘The Irish Revolution’ is the term given by Theodore Moody to describe the major period of social and political upheaval between 1879-82, initiated by the Irish National Land League and the ‘Land War’.
• (2) New Imperialism developed in Europe, the USA (and later Japan) in the 1870’s. This followed the defeats of the Paris Commune in 1871, and the overthrow of the Radical Reconstruction (the concerted state-backed attempt to bring about black emancipation in the USA, after the Civil War) by 1877.
• (3) Here, liberal unionism refers to one of the two overall approaches taken by the British ruling class to defend the Union. It is not to be confused with the Liberal Unionists, who were adherents of a conservative unionist strategy.
• (4) A morganatic marriage was an arrangement by which a king had a queen who was entitled to none of his property and whose children had no inheritance rights. In other words she only had the right to be screwed!
• (5) It was one of the ironies of history that Northern Ireland, ended up, in 1922, with the sole devolved parliament in the UK, in the form of Stormont, despite the Ulster Unionists’ earlier vehement opposition to Home Rule. This ‘Protestant Parliament for a Protestant People’, far from being liberal in inspiration, more resembled the old reactionary, pre-1801, Irish Parliament, in its attempt to exclude Catholics (or Irish nationalists) from any share of power. Thus, the Conservatives’ closure of Stormont in 1972 and resort to Direct Rule was initially a very weak liberal centralising political measure. However, responsibility for much of this ‘direct rule’ was undertaken by the British armed and security forces, negating any liberal intentions.
• (6) The proposals for Scottish and Welsh devolution enjoyed wider support, both from liberal unionists and constitutional nationalists. However, political support for a liberalised and reformed Stormont was much more narrowly based, and found primarily amongst constitutionalist nationalists.
• (7) Whilst the tradition of the Tory Democrats has virtually no remaining political purchase upon Socialists today in the UK today, it still perhaps enjoys a kind of afterlife in the Labour Unionism still found in the Socialist Party in ‘the Six Counties’. Here the SP has been known to flirt with plebian loyalism, particularly the Progressive Unionist Party, which is linked to the paramilitary Ulster Volunteer Force.

The Scottish Socialist Party site is carrying a report on the conference here.

As well as an overview of events there are some comments and feedback from attendees. These are reproduced below, visit the report on the conference for more details.

Brian Garvey, Fourthwrite, Independent Workers Union:

The space given to democratic discussion, the planning and facilitation of the event was impressive and I’m fairly confident that it was because people felt valued theat the exchanges were so constructive.

The honesty and will to learn from recent experience and experiences of others is a great example to us. So to is the acknowledgement that it requires our working alongside many other individuals and organisations to create a new society and on the bus home we talked of the inegrity and earnest of our Scottish friends and look forward to welcoming you to Ireland as we get things moving.

go raibh maith agat

Dan Finn, Irish Socialist Network:

Last Saturday’s conference in Edinburgh was an excellent day, well done to the SSP for organising it.

I learned a lot from the discussions as I’m sure everyone there did.

It was very encouraging to see left activists from Scotland, Ireland, Wales and England who are all working towards similar goals and facing similar challenges come together to see where our work over-laps, what we can learn from eachother and how we can support each other’s efforts.

I hope this is just the beginning.

Ed Walsh, (Irish Socialist Network) gives his personal views on the recent split in Respect

Originally printed at http://www.irishsocialist.net

The British Left has now experienced two acrimonious splits in the space of eighteen months. After the grim transformation of the Scottish Socialist Party into two bitterly-divided camps (The SSP split has been covered in back issues of E&L including an article by the Irish Solidarity Network entitled Crisis in the SSP, Emancipation & Liberation No. 14, Spring 2007), their comrades south of the border now have their own feud to manage.

Whatever else happens, it seems clear that the two factions emerging from within the Respect coalition will not be working together in the same organisation for a long, long time.

57 varieties – still unfit for human consumption

If you listen to the Socialist Workers Party, it would appear that the vitriolic parting of the ways between themselves and virtually every other prominent figure in Respect is the result of a left/right divide. The SWP are the left wing, while George Galloway and his allies represent a rightwards-moving, communalist, electoralist tendency that had to instigate a witch-hunt against Britain’s largest Trotskyist grouping in order to smooth the path for their own march towards the centre ground.

Unfortunately for the SWP, very few people outside their own ranks give this theory the least bit of credence. It’s quite true that there are notable political differences between George Galloway and the SWP, and you’d expect that any group chiefly shaped by the thinking of Galloway would be quite distinct from one in which the ideas of the SWP played a dominant role. But that doesn’t seem to have been what provoked the falling-out.

Rather, the immediate cause of the split was organisational. Questions of organisation are themselves deeply political, of course, but not always in the sense that one faction is more radical, less given to compromise in the pursuit of left-wing goals than the other. In this case, former allies of the SWP in Respect have levelled accusations of authoritarian control-freakery against the organisation – they claim that the SWP would have preferred to destroy Respect rather than give up total control over its structures. Previous experience with the Socialist Alliance in the UK counts against the furious denials of the SWP leadership (as does the track record of numerous campaigns in Ireland).

This article is not going to waste much time on SWP-bashing (you can find plenty of it in the community of leftist bloggers if that’s what you’re looking for). It’s more useful to ask what political conclusions might be drawn from a trail of broken alliances and wrecked campaigning fronts. It doesn’t seem very plausible to assume that the SWP (or any other far-left group with a similar record) does this sort of thing for the craic, because they really enjoy sabotaging political initiatives.

The root cause appears to be the lack of democracy in the ranks of so many Trotskyist organisations. All too often, we find radical groups to be dominated by a permanent leadership faction which marginalises or co-opts dissenting figures within the ranks. Without a healthy culture of debate and disagreement inside the party, it’s going to be very hard to establish a good working relationship with non-members – chances are, the leadership is going to import the same high-handed, autocratic methods and try to establish its own hegemony through manipulation. This sort of behaviour is made all the easier when the average member is unable to challenge the approach of the leadership without exposing themselves to the threat of expulsion.

Theoretical arrogance

Along with this democratic deficit, you would have to include as a factor an odd kind of theoretical arrogance – the belief that one group (be it the SWP or anyone else) represents the vanguard-in-waiting, already armed with the correct ideas to lead the working class to victory. It can’t be said often enough – nobody active on the Left today has worked out the perfect strategy, otherwise they would have settled accounts with capitalism long ago. We all have an awful lot to learn, the best we can manage is to set out with a fairly solid set of guide-lines based on the experience of the past and keep our eyes and ears open for new trends as they emerge.

Anyone who believes they know all the answers already and can trace the path to be followed in advance is going to be sorely tempted to take authoritarian short-cuts – if we know what conclusions people should end up drawing, why not save the time and trouble and do the job for them? The best safeguard against this tendency is the firm conviction that all the bother of thrashing out political differences and contending with views you consider mistaken is not a tiresome distraction from the real business of socialist politics – on the contrary, it is a vital and indispensable part of the socialist project, which requires that millions of people learn to think for themselves and shed the passivity nurtured by the power structures of capitalism. Any project of radical change which is steered to victory by a handful of infallible leaders will simply replace one system of elite rule with another.

Wrong direction

If you’re familiar with socialist history, and appreciate how closely the modern day Trotskyist groupings model themselves on the Bolshevik party of Lenin and Trotsky, you’ll find it very hard not to think of the critical points made against Bolshevism by Rosa Luxemburg and other socialists of her day so many years ago. The evidence that far-left authoritarianism can be traced back to its roots in the Leninist tradition appears very strong. This is not to say that every group which comes out of that tradition is bound to be authoritarian – the French LCR, for example, practices genuine pluralism, and many sincere opponents of undemocratic chicanery in Respect and the Socialist Alliance come from a similar background. But more often than not, the influence of Bolshevik theory and practice has pushed radical socialists in the wrong direction.

Some readers may be starting to groan at the prospect of yet another discussion of 1917 and all that, so don’t worry, this is not the time. It’s frustrating that we still have to spend time debating issues that appear very remote from contemporary politics – there’s so much in the modern world that demands hard thinking from socialists, and it seems more useful to spend our time discussing recent events in France, Bolivia or Palestine than rehearsing old arguments about Red October and its aftermath. Leninism still casts a powerful shadow over the organised radical left, though, and can’t just be ignored.

New directions

It’s far too early to say what will emerge from the fracturing of Respect. The SWP has pledged to carry on with its own version of Respect, despite having lost all its significant allies – how long they will persist is anyone’s guess, but it doesn’t seem as if the modus operandi of the party will change. Its top-down, ultra centralised style of organisation will continue to frustrate its own potential and antagonise its would be allies. Ken Loach’s remark that the SWP leadership want subjects, not comrades cut right to the heart of the matter.

Unpredictable

The Respect Renewal current, which gathers together the likes of Galloway, Loach, Salma Yaqoob and the Socialist Resistance group, is more unpredictable. A lot will depend on George Galloway himself. Galloway does not have a good track record when it comes to matters of democracy and accountability. He has been saying the right things on this score since the faction fight exploded over the summer, but it’s not at all clear if he means it, or if he’s just saying what he thinks people want to hear. As the best-known public face of Respect, he can do a lot of good or a lot of harm.

To be very cynical, the socialists in Respect who have lined up with the Scotsman had a simple choice. They could trade off the very real possibility of being shafted by Galloway at some point in the future, against the certainty of being shafted by the SWP right now. The choice they made was understandable, and they can reasonably argue that Respect minus the SWP is not just a Galloway vehicle – it includes other figures like Yaqoob and Loach with a high public profile, and might now be able to reach out to left activists unwilling to work with the SWP.

One common denominator between the left-wing crises in Scotland and the rest of Britain was the involvement of a leader who became a media personality and ended up making a complete arse of themselves in the public eye. While Tommy Sheridan appears well-set for a career of undignified but lucrative clowning-around (reports of his stand-up show left people gasping in disbelief), Galloway has gone some way towards repairing the damage inflicted by his turn on Celebrity Big Brother. It’s not clear though if he’s really acknowledged what a disaster it was.

Tabloid fodder

The experience of Sheridan and Galloway shows the dangers for the Left inherent in a heavily mediatised society. Not only do we have to worry about the hostile propaganda of right-wing newspapers, we also have to reckon with the possibility that prominent left-wingers will end up becoming tabloid fodder if they don’t watch themselves. The record of Joe Higgins as a TD suggested one way to avoid this peril – he earned plenty of column inches by coming out with great quotes in the Dáil, while projecting a rather austere, puritanical image that seemed to protect him from being lampooned. The lack of a permanent tan did Higgins no harm either.

While clearly not as radical as Sheridan, Galloway or Higgins, Ken Livingstone is another left-winger who has learned to handle the media in his own way, after finding himself one of the tabloid hate-figures of the 1980s. Ironically for someone who earned himself the undying hatred of New Labour, Livingstone’s media image has endured better in the long run than the spin-obsessed Tony Blair. The Left needs to spend time studying examples like this, and figure out the best (or the least worst) way to use the mainstream media as a platform without allowing it to suffocate our movements in a haze of glib, personality-driven nonsense.

As long as Galloway remains the best-known figure in the re-organised party, we can expect to hear plenty more talk about his notorious visit to Baghdad. It’s only fair to point out that much of this criticism has come from hypocritical pro-war commentators – their own champion Tony Blair has a much grosser record of cosying up to tyrants, from Suharto of Indonesia to Karimov of Uzbekistan, yet that doesn’t appear to bother them.

Nor is Galloway the only progressive figure who has demeaned himself in such a manner. The Sandinistas supported the Polish military dictatorship of Jaruzelksi, while Nelson Mandela offered a fawning tribute to General Suharto during a visit to Jakarta while the murderous occupation of East Timor was still in progress. More recently, Hugo Chavez and Evo Morales have done their reputations no favours by exchanging compliments with unsavoury figures like Mahmoud Ahmedinejad.

But there’s only so far you can go with qualifications and caveats of that sort before acknowledging that Galloway’s Iraqi performance will always be a black mark against his name. The key point, surely, is that his current position and reputation owes so much to his role in the anti-war movement. Arthur Scargill supported the invasion of Czechoslovakia, which was shameful, but it wasn’t directly relevant to his leadership of the miners’ union during its titanic battle with Thatcher. Galloway has opposed the Iraq war all along and put himself on the line to do so – it’s bloody tragic that he has tainted that creditable record of activism by a compromising appearance in pre-war Iraq.

The best hope for Respect Renewal seems to be that Galloway will take a step back and allow other figures to take a leading role. His behaviour in the past encourages scepticism – but Galloway does have strengths as well as weaknesses, so it’s not beyond the bounds of possibility that his better side will win out. Only time will tell.

Islamophobia and the Left

One of the most striking things about Respect’s development to date has been its ability to win support from a significant layer of British Muslims – both in terms of its voting base and its activist cadre. This has also been the source of much criticism. In the more ludicrously over-charged rantings of some journalists, Respect has been presented as an alliance between Islamo-fascists and the far left, akin to the BNP. More restrained critics have spoken of communalism, or accused Respect of watering down left-wing principles and forming dubious alliances.

There is more than a grain of truth in such criticism (at least in the more balanced stuff, not the hysterical diatribes). Socialists who have always opposed imperialism and the war on terror, and who recognise the need to combat Islamophobia, have been critical of the approach taken by Respect in its efforts to win Muslim support – Gilbert Achcar and Tariq Ali being two notable examples.

But critical comments need to be qualified by recognition that left-wingers can make even more damaging mistakes in the opposite direction. The French radical left has totally failed to mobilise support from Muslims in France who are at the sharp end of racist discrimination, harassed by the state and demonised by the far right. It sat on the fence while the Chirac government introduced its hijab ban with hypocritical calls for Muslims to “integrate” into a society that largely treats them as second-class citizens. The LCR section in Saint-Denis even turned down an application for membership from a young Muslim woman, because she wore the hijab and that would have been bad for the party’s image…

So while it’s important not to compromise with conservative and reactionary tendencies that undoubtedly exist in Muslim communities, it’s equally vital that the Left doesn’t adopt its own version of mainstream prejudice and see all practising Muslims as fundamentalist bigots. Christianity has more than its fair share of bigotry, but that hasn’t stopped leftists from embracing Christians in all kinds of progressive struggles. The same principle should apply to Muslims.

The achievements of Respect deserve to be stressed as well as its errors. British society is saturated with anti-Muslim racism. The recent controversy involving Martin Amis, one of Britain’s best-known novelists, showed how bad things have got. Amis made a number of explicitly racist comments directed against Muslims, advocating their persecution by the British state. He treated his audience to smug lectures on the superiority of western civilisation of the sort that should have died with Rudyard Kipling. When left-wing academic Terry Eagleton tackled Amis for his racism, he was booed and hissed by a large section of Britain’s literary intelligentsia, who were quite happy to let the novelist off the hook after he slithered his way out of responsibility for his comments and responded to Eagleton with vulgar abuse.

From the high-falutin’ literati to the dregs of the tabloid press, it’s become acceptable to say things about Muslims that would never be tolerated if Jews, black people or homosexuals were in the verbal firing line. A study commissioned by Ken Livingstone recently established that over 90% of references to Islam in the UK media were negative. Muslims in Britain and other European countries form one of the most impoverished and down-trodden sections of the working class, and the Left badly needs to connect with their experience. Nor should it be a question of enlightened socialists bringing their ideas to the benighted Muslims – we have at least as much to learn as we have to teach.

There is a http://www.scottishsocialistparty.co.uk/republicansocialist Section on the SSP website on the Republican Socialist Convention.

The agenda is still to be confirmed so watch that page for details. The page also contains links to the motion which led to the convention taking place and an article on it.

Link is now dead and does not appear to be archived