Emancipation & Liberation

Allan Armstrong gives his personal reflections on The Provisional IRA – From Insurrection to Partition, (by Tommy McKearney, with an Introduction by Paul Stewart)

I first met Tommy McKearney in the preparations for the initial Republican Socialist Convention, which was held in Scotland. He was due to pick me up from the Dublin Monaghan bus. I described myself over the phone – “Late fifties, with short grey hair.” Tommy laughed and said, “A lot like me then.”

When I opened the front cover of his new book, there was photo of Tommy in 1975 with long hair and a droopy moustache. His appearance then was not too different to mine at the time. Tommy, like myself, had also been drawn into political activity – part of that worldwide post-‘68 generation. Unlike many, we have both remained committed to socialist politics.

However, during my own political activity as a trade union militant and political activist, over more than 40 years in Scotland, I have never faced anything worse than minor inconvenience and mild harassment – often from union officials and the Left! In contrast, Tommy, who became an active IRA member, was arrested, ill treated, then convicted in a Diplock court on the uncorroborated word of an RUC officer, and imprisoned for 16 years of a 20 year long sentence in Long Kesh. During this time he spent a period of 53 days on a hunger strike that brought him within hours of death.

Tommy’s book explains better than any other I have read, why the situation in Northern Ireland – or ‘the Six Counties’ – has been and remains so different from those other parts of the United Kingdom, including Scotland. In the process, the book also helps us to understand why the course of activists’ lives, on either side of the Irish Sea, has usually been so different; and why those from ‘the Six Counties’ have experienced degrees of repression unknown to most of us living on this side of the water.

So, whilst Tommy’s book is written from that shared international experience of being a socialist (red), it explains very clearly the political impact of the national differences between living in Northern Ireland (orange) and the rest of the UK, which in my case means Scotland (blue).

Back in 1970, as a young student and socialist, these differences were not that clear to me. I was mesmerised when Bernadette Devlin (McAliskey today) spoke to a large audience at Aberdeen University, giving her account of the Battle of the Bogside and the setting up of ‘Free Derry’. She easily demolished the arguments of those (including a Young Ulster Unionist invited for balance!), who were opposed to the actions taken by the Peoples Democracy wing of the Civil Rights Movement, of which she was then a member.

As young ‘68ers, many of us students had already taken the radical wing of the American Civil Rights Movement to heart. We loved the new wave of Black music. One or two even went for Afro haircuts!  However, the young protestors from Northern Ireland seemed even more familiar. They dressed the same way, listened to an even wider range of shared music (including traditional music, which, in Scotland, often took its lead from the resurgence in Ireland), and held the same disdain for the British Establishment.  Yet, not only those young people in Britain and Northern Ireland, but also those protesting in Chicago, Detroit, Mexico City, Paris, Prague and beyond, all seemed to be part of one common struggle.  Any still remaining national differences seemed insignificant as international revolution beckoned.

In January 1972, we got the first real inkling that things were different in Northern Ireland, at least compared to the rest of the UK. Fourteen people were shot dead by the Parachute Regiment during a civil rights march held on a Sunday afternoon in Derry.  It would still be a number of years before Kevin Gately (1974) and Blair Peach (1979) were to be bludgeoned to death by the police on demonstrations in London – but even these events were seen as exceptional. Meanwhile, in contrast, killings by the British army, UDR and Loyalist death squads had become almost routine in ‘the Six Counties’.

We were certainly outraged over Bloody Sunday. We cheered Bernadette when she mauled Reginald Maudling, the Tory Home Minister, as he lied in Westminster about the role of the British troops in Derry. However, after one last major march in Newry, on the following weekend (which attracted many from the South for the first time), the Civil Rights Movement just seemed to peter out.

How could protestors deal with the sheer brutality of the British state, its continued support for the Ulster Unionist leaders of the Stormont regime and, before long, its clandestine backing for Loyalist death squads too?  Even in the American South, as Tommy points out, “The US federal government made some serious attempts to redress {the} underlying grievances” (p. 50), which had held black people there in subjection for so long.

After Bloody Sunday, new images appeared on our TV screens. We tried to take in the appearance of those people wearing forms of dress unfamiliar to us – men in military attire with balaclavas or black berets. These people didn’t just throw stones and petrol bombs. They had guns and real bombs. They were the IRA. Republicans didn’t even call the place ‘Northern Ireland’. It was the ‘Six Counties’ – a name which revealed another struggle, much older than that shared by the world’s youthful ‘68ers. But was an armed response the only possible reply to UK state repression and Stormont intransigence?

As regular visitor to Ireland, including the North, I never knowingly met IRA members. However, I did come across RUC police stations built like small fortresses. I was stopped at British army-manned checkpoints (many later remotely-controlled from helicopter-supplied hilltop bases). I was forced to turn my car back when I found Border roads that had been rendered unusable by British army-made craters. I soon understood that Northern Ireland certainly was not “as British as Finchley” as Thatcher was later to claim – before she found that Brighton was nearly as Irish as Belfast!

Watching Brian Friel’s play, The Freedom of the City (1973), helped me understand that necessary moment of transition from the Civil Rights Movement to the Republican Movement. Michael, the earnest young civil rights protestor, believes the British army is making a big mistake, as they point their rifles at him, before shooting him dead; unlike Skinner, the young ne’er-do-well, who had up to this point survived on a mixture of quick wits and cynicism, but who now understands what is about to happen to him, and appreciates that an altogether more serious response is needed in the face of what they are up against; whilst the older Lily, drawing on her longer experience of the existing order, realises that they have transgressed and upset the ‘natural order of things’ and, as a result, are going to pay the ultimate price.

This play is not about just any British city council, calling upon the ‘boys in blue’ to get them out ‘a spot of bother’ with the locals. It is about Londonderry City Council, that beachhead of the local Unionist and Orange order, located on the furthest land frontier of the UK state. These locals are not even fully recognised by the authorities as belonging to the same country. This explains the presence not only of the hated RUC and B Specials, but also of the British army, ready to kill to uphold the existing order.

Therefore, as Tommy shows, specific national histories have to be taken into account. “Unlike other parts of the United Kingdom, Northern Ireland had a quasi-colonial tradition where one section of the community {Unionist} participated enthusiastically in policing the other {Nationalist} (p. 49).  In the ‘Deep South’ of the USA some Dixie Democrats might well have been members of, or enjoyed close relations with the racist Ku Klux Klan. In Northern Ireland, however, the relationship between Unionist politicians and the sectarian Orange Order was even closer.

Both the southern states and Stormont could also draw upon armed police and militias. However, unlike those US federal forces, which had come to put a check on the segregationist South, the British army, when it arrived in 1969, came to bolster the local Orange state. Any covering rhetoric was just that, as Callaghan, Labour Home Secretary, revealed his tactics – “talk Green, act Orange” (p. 61).

Tommy highlights the mindset of the British ruling class, still wedded to the maintenance of an imperial order. This led to their “very calculated determination to protect its western flank by maintaining a physical military presence in Ireland… They were then, in the midst of an ongoing cold war with the Soviet Union” (p. 59-60).

However, as well as these undoubted strategic worries, the British ruling class faced mounting political opposition closer to home. They were confronted by rising national movements in the UK – not only in Northern Ireland, but also in Scotland and Wales. Douglas Hurd, then Tory MP, later Northern Ireland Secretary (1984-5), wrote Scotch on the Rocks, in 1971. This novel showed his concerns about the spread of new national challenges to the UK – in this case, Scotland. Perhaps, in contrast to the more determined efforts of the US ruling class in the southern states, the British ruling class’s unwillingness to seriously reform its troubled ‘Ulster’ political slum, reflected a growing uncertainty and an element of paranoia. The sun was setting upon the British Empire. Worrying shadows were being cast over the UK itself.

This aspect of British ruling class thinking would not be so apparent to others at the time, particularly anyone in ‘the Six Counties’. For the ruling class’s strategy in Northern Ireland diverged [1] from that in Scotland and Wales, because they faced different problems there. However, once the perceived threat from the USSR had evaporated after 1989, the underlying national threats to the UK state emerged as the central concern of the British ruling class.

They began to devise a common strategy to bolster the US/British imperial alliance, and to create the conditions to maximise corporate profitability throughout these islands – England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales.  This strategy, perfected under New Labour, involved the ‘Peace (or pacification) Process’ and ‘Devolution-all-round’. Furthermore, the TUC, ICTU, STUC and WTUC leaderships, drawn by ‘social partnerships’ into cooperation with the state and the employers, gave this strategy a breadth of political support not enjoyed by any previous ruling class attempts to maintain the Union or Partition.

Tommy provides a very clear rebuttal to those pro-British historical revisionists and a reminder that, back in 1968, there was no predetermined Republican plan to become involved in an armed insurgency – the memory of the IRA’s failed Borders Campaign (1956-62) was still too bitter. The struggle that emerged in Northern Ireland was originally for civil rights within the UK. However, the total intransigence of the Ulster Unionists, and the willingness of the British state to give its militarily backing to the Stormont regime, explains the turn to guns and bombs.

After the Loyalists launched their pogroms in the summer of 1969  (involving the B Specials), citizen defence groups emerged in the Nationalist areas of Belfast and Derry. They looked for whatever arms they could get, which meant they were illegally acquired, to defend themselves against the hugely better-armed Orange state and Loyalist gangs often using legally held guns. “One of the first groups to organise for the defence of Catholic Belfast was the Catholic Ex-Service Men’s Association, which was composed of former members of Britain’s armed forces” (p. 68). The Provisional IRA only emerged in December 1969. “When the British Army began shooting petrol bombers, the Provisional IRA began to shoot British soldiers. When the RUC or the British army raided Catholic houses, the IRA bombed British or Unionist-owned businesses’ (p. 112).

Initially the organisation of the insurgency fell upon the IRA’s Belfast Brigade. But “gradually, the British began to impose their strength on IRA districts… foot patrols soon learned the pattern of streets and roadways. More damaging still… was the accumulation of information and knowledge that was being gathered by the British Army and RUC… It became an unpleasant shock to both the IRA in Belfast and to the leadership of the movement overall, when they realised that its largest and most hard-hitting brigade was vulnerable” (p. 115).

Thus, the armed struggle became more focussed on the rural areas where, after “the IRA units gradually acquired the ability to destroy British Army road vehicles… the British used … the UDR (as the B Specials became), supported by the RUC reserve to gather intelligence and to act as a lightly armed counter-insurgent militia” (p. 117).

The UDR often had contacts and overlapping membership with the fascist Loyalist [2] death squads to whom they could pass on information, and offer a degree of protection for their illicit operations. It is not uncommon for reactionary regimes to resort to fascists when required; but usually their services are dispensed with once the particular ‘emergency’ has subsided. The B Specials had been a permanent feature of the Northern Ireland set-up.

Tommy describes vividly the insidious way that the Orange state was able to use these forces to penetrate rural working class communities. “Operating in their own areas… this force performed a function that was vital in every counter-insurgency strategy across the world. That is its members provided a constant on-the-ground presence of men familiar with their native districts who monitored events, responded quickly to incidents, and manned checkpoints at key locations” (p. 111). “They had dual military and civilian roles… Employed as school bus-drivers, postmen, refuse collectors and every other position in the workforce {which Unionist sectarian employment practice very much contributed to} they had a perfect ‘cover’ for travelling covertly through Republican districts” (p. 117-8). “The B Specials were often trusted to store personal weapons in their homes so that they could mobilise at short notice” (p. 50). “Unsurprisingly, therefore, the Provisional IRA responded by proactively targeting UDR members and RUC reservists, whether in or out of uniform” (p.118).

Yet, when it came to those local forces of Unionist law and order, as Tommy points out, “Strenuous efforts have been made over the years to portray {them} as well-meaning part-timers doing their best to protect society insinuating that any attack on their members was motivated purely by sectarianism” (p. 117).

One of the most unpleasant aspects of British counter-insurgency strategy was the attempt to portray this conflict – whether between Loyalist and Republican, Unionist and Nationalist, or Protestant and Catholic – as one between “two warring tribes”. This was used to justify the deployment of British troops “to keep the peace”. Yet, at the same time, British security agencies were clandestinely arming and directing one ‘tribe’, in the form of the Loyalist death squads, in order to intimidate the Nationalists (potential Republican supporters) and to break the real opposition they faced.

This opposition extended way beyond the IRA to the very real ‘communities of resistance’ found amongst the Nationalist working class.  These had originated in the ‘No Go’ areas established at the time Internment was first introduced in 1971. Photographs of working class women banging dustbin lids, to warn of British army patrols, became their iconic image. Although ‘Operation Motorman’ put an end to the ‘No Go’ areas, in July 1972, ‘communities of resistance’ persisted.

The fact that Bernadette Devlin McAliskey, and others in Peoples Democracy, made that transition from the politics of Civil Rights to Republicanism was reassuring for many socialists over here. Furthermore, Bernadette, over both phases of her political activity, retained a strong socialist commitment, which meant that she remained a critical voice. We were reminded of the high cost of such commitment when, in 1981, Bernadette was shot by the UDA seven times at her Coalisland home, with British soldiers waiting not far away.

One of the major strengths of Tommy’s book is how he shows that the war of attrition, which sometimes became derailed into murderous dead-end actions, could have developed in other ways. In the early stage, “for approximately three years… {the IRA} offered training in the use of arms to the local defence committees (p. 75). By late 1972… the Provisional IRA leadership decided to cease providing training for defence to non-members… In the short term this had some merit. In the long term, though, it deprived the organisation (and the Catholic population) of the means and the concept of a broad ground-level defence against Loyalist attack. To a large extent, deciding to tighten control over the armed insurrection illustrated a fundamental dilemma… the Provisional IRA… needed popular support yet felt uneasy about placing unregulated trust in the masses. This was and remains an unfortunate feature of insurrectionary Irish Republicanism” (p. 78).

This weakness became even more apparent in the context of the 1981 Hunger Strikes. “The Anti H-Block campaign drew a broad cross-section of left wing and working class people behind its cause. Very few radical elements of Irish society remained outside the movement and for a period a real opportunity existed to forge a new and dynamic anti-establishment mass movement. Fear of losing control, and a limited understanding of the nature and power of a mass mobilisation of people, led the IRA leadership to impose its authority on the movement with unfortunate consequences” (p. 153). “The Republican leadership recognised the power of mass popular actions but instead of creating a broad revolutionary movement from what they had helped to create, opted instead for a parliamentary path… The strategy was successful from a Provisional IRA point of view, leading eventually to the basis for the nascent New Sinn Fein” (p. 152)  – where ‘New’ has a similar connotation to the prefix placed before Blair’s Labour Party.

And it was in this context that Tommy became involved, with others in Long Kesh, with the Communist Republican Prisoners, and later the League of Communist Republicans. “Unlike those pushing for acceptance of a purely parliamentary strategy, this group of prisoners were firmly to the left of the movement and Marxist for the most part. They argued that it was imperative that the IRA put in place a strategy that would allow it to win significant support in the South and that its politics and strategy would also allow it to make a significant impact on a strategically important section of the British working-class and radical population” (p. 166).

Yet, perhaps this very notion of a ‘British working class’ also needs to be questioned. ‘Britishness’ is an imperially created identity, which has so often helped to imbue workers in these islands with ruling class ideas. Nowhere is this more obvious than in ‘the Six Counties’ itself, where the notion of being ‘Ulster-British’ was such a powerful pull on Protestant workers. The notion of being both Scottish and British exerted a strong pull on Loyalists over here too. And, of course, this British identity came along with support for the Crown, the Union, the Empire and the British armed forces.

However, when the Communist Republicans were first writing in Long Kesh, it is understandable why they could not see beyond this notion of a “British working class”. It was the Tories’ attempt to introduce the poll tax in Scotland that led to a significant increase in the hostility to the idea of a British identity amongst Scots. The successful Anti-Poll Tax campaign, initiated in Scotland, showed the potential for joint campaigns, organised on the basis of ‘internationalism from below’, bringing in, not British, but Scottish, Welsh and English workers. The Tories were smart enough not to extend this tax to ‘Northern Ireland’. However, once the British and Irish ruling classes had developed their shared ‘Peace Process’ and ‘Devolution-all-round’ strategy by 1997, to maintain their control over these islands, it became much clearer that any republican socialist ‘internationalism from below’ response should bring in Ireland too.

Later, Tommy draws readers’ attention to Bernadette McAliskey’s astute observation about the outcome of the ‘Peace Process’.  “She said that it was reminiscent of the Tudor policy of ‘surrender and regrant, in sixteenth century Ireland, when English power was being imposed across the entire island. The Provisional IRA leadership had achieved a certain status by surrendering its old programme and being allocated a place within the British system in Ireland. The era of New Sinn Fein had arrived” (pp.181-2).

Thus, Tommy’s outlining of the Communist Republicans’ viewpoint in the chapter, The Road Less Travelled – The Left Alternative (pp.164-71), provides a very necessary corrective to both those revisionist historians’ accounts and the ‘establishment Republican’/‘New Sinn Fein’ view of events. Tommy highlights the political consequences of  ‘the road not taken’. “Sinn Fein now holds 14 seats in the Dail but has not managed to fundamentally challenge the status quo. North of the border, they are partners with the DUP in the administration of Northern Ireland, having accepted Partition and the implications involved in this, including adapting to the neo-liberal consensus that reigns in Stormont” (pp. 170-1).

However, when appraising the course eventually taken by the Republican struggle, after it was eventually brought securely under the wing of ‘New Sinn Fein’, it is perhaps worth remembering the words which Victor Serge applied to Bolshevism.  “To judge the living man by the death germs which the autopsy reveals in the corpse – and which he may have carried in him since his birth – is that very sensible?”

Another strength of Tommy’s analysis is that, although very critical of the direction taken by the Provisional IRA, and now ‘New Sinn Fein’, he does not fall back on dissident Republican “mantras about ‘betrayal’ and the ‘right of the Irish people’” (p. 213). Neither does he turn his back on his the long years involved in the Republican struggle. “It broke the foundations of Orange state sectarianism – anti-Catholic discrimination in housing, welfare, the economy and politics. This was a transformative war” (p.202).

But Tommy’s excellent analysis of the nature of this transformation is very revealing. “Something that has not changed, though, is the sectarian division of the Northern Irish working class… The Orange state may have been brought to an end, but in its place is a {new} sectarian entity. This outcome has benefited a significant section of a Catholic middle class born out of the ashes of the Orange state” (p. 189). The new Stormont constitutionally entrenches the position of two ‘communities’ by ensuring that the votes of  “representatives of parties who decline to register as either ‘Unionist’ or ‘nationalist’… do not count when it comes to deciding if cross-community consent has been obtained” (p. 190). Furthermore, “the Northern Ireland assembly has about the same relationship with the House of Commons in London as the management in Tesco in Belfast has with the head office in the UK” (p. 193).

Thus, “if ever the Marxist dialectic of one contradiction giving way to a fresh contradiction was evident in any situation, it is surely visible in the Good Friday Agreement” (p. 190). Whereas the British ruling class once depended upon Ulster Unionists and their Orange state to directly defend its imperial interests, today they have positioned the UK state as ‘honest broker’ between the Unionists and the Nationalists, providing each, in the new Stormont, with a forum to raise their concerns, and to mediate between their claims. The British still call the shots and – if it proves necessary again – they will also still fire the shots. And, whereas in the past, there was always some American questioning of the British role in Ireland, the current strategy of the UK state enjoys the full support of US imperialism.

Tommy finishes his book with a call to launch, A New Republic and a Relevant Republicanism (pp. 207-14). There is a great deal of thought provoking material in this chapter. One doesn’t have to agree with all Tommy’s analysis or proposals, which by their nature are still tentative. What is clear though is that Tommy locates Republicanism within a clear class perspective, with a life beyond its main organisations.  Tommy shows that, depending on the available obstacles or opportunities, Republicanism’s largely working class base has usually taken a fairly pragmatic attitude towards support for a physical force or a political road.

This particular divide, though, has always led to splits within Republican organisations – whether during the Irish Civil War in 1922; as a result of Fianna Fail’s acceptance of the Irish Dail in 1926; the Provisional/Official split in 1969; or between what Tommy calls ‘establishment Republicanism’ (‘New Sinn Fen) and ‘anti-establishment physical force Republicanism’ (1986 onwards).  Attempts to prioritise the working class’s own economic and social issues, whilst keeping firmly to a socialist republican path, have been less successful. However, “as the Provisional IRA military machine has passed into history and the political party that it generated {‘New Sinn Fein’} has drifted into centrism” Tommy sees a real opportunity to create a viable new socialist republicanism, which takes forward the issues the Communist Republican prisoners first raised in Long Kesh.

What I found most satisfying reading this book, as somebody who has been interested in events in Ireland since 1969, is that Tommy has come through his experiences still very much committed to the working class and to socialist republicanism.  This is demonstrated in his current work for the Independent Workers Union, which challenges the ICTU member unions’ backing for ‘social partnership’; and by his commitment to wider political debate, whether in, for example, Fourthwrite and Red Banner, or by attending discussion and debating forums throughout these islands.

Tommy addressed the first Republican Socialist Convention in Edinburgh (November 29^th 2008), organised by the SSP’s International Committee on an ‘internationalism from below’ basis. He also spoke to the third Global Commune Event (January 29^th, 2011), organised by the Republican Communist Network, where he addressed the question – ‘Trade Unions – Are They Fit for Purpose?’

This latter event also involved Paul Stewart, who wrote the Introduction to Tommy’s book. Paul is from a Northern Irish Protestant background and is a politically engaged academic living in Scotland, researching workers’ struggles.  He has given his professional help to the Independent Workers Union, and has helped it in its embrace of social (trade) unionism – which may well turn out to be for the beginning of the twenty first century, what industrial (trade) unionism was for the beginning of the twentieth.

I also had the privilege of seeing Tommy speak to another meeting, this time in Derry. This was organised to celebrate the centenary of James Connolly’s return to Ireland from the USA in June 1910. Bernadette McAliskey, the person who first inspired my interest in the struggle in Ireland, also addressed this meeting. Connolly was born in my home city of Edinburgh. The British army shot him in Dublin for his role in the Easter Rising of 1916. Connolly was the first socialist to challenge ‘the British road to socialism’. He advocated an ‘internationalism from below’ break-up of the UK and British Empire strategy. In this regard, he also inspired that other great Scottish socialist republican and communist – John Maclean from Glasgow, who extended Connolly’s notion of the break of the UK to cover Scotland, after his visit to Dublin in 1919, shortly after the Limerick Soviet.

When people like Bernadette and Tommy remain committed to socialist republicanism, despite all the trials and tribulations they have faced over more than 40 years, we can be a lot more confident about the future.  Tommy’s book addresses the issues faced by socialist republicans in a serious and engaging way. Get a copy, read it, get others to buy it (or, if they can’t afford one, pass yours round) and discuss it.

17 December 2011

[1] see Allan Armstrong:- http://republicancommunist.org/blog/2012/01/11/why-we-need-a-socialist-republican-internationalism-from-below-strategy-to-address-the-crisis-of-the-uk-state/ (sections v-viii)

[2] see Chris Ford:- http://republicancommunist.org/blog/2002/08/05/british-nationalism-and-the-rise-of-fascism/

Tommy McKearney’s book, published by Pluto Press, is available from Word Power Books. The Edinburgh book launch was held on August 20th, 2011.

see:-  http://republicancommunist.org/blog/2011/08/26/tommy-mckearneys-new-book-the-ira-from-insurrection-to-parliament/

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

Celtic Soul Brothers

Tara O’Sullivan (from Red Banner, issue no. 45)

A review of From Davitt to Connolly: ‘Internationalism from below’ and the challenge to the UK state and British Empire 1879-95, by Allan Armstrong

Earlier in the year we witnessed much discussion of relationships between Ireland and Britain. Some was of interest, but the worst of it was that the debate was occasioned by the visit of a certain over-privileged woman with a big house in London, and accompanied by moronic assertion that acquiescing in such a parasitic presence was some sign of maturity. But the histories and destinies of these two islands are linked in plenty of ways infinitely more relevant than the backslapping banqueting of the rich and their retinues.

Allan Armstrong’s book examines such a part of our history, a history of combined efforts to break such power and privilege and end the injustices that working people laboured under. The official take on the period covered here focuses on the Westminster cattle trading between Parnell and Gladstone, the vagaries of the Liberal/Home Rule alliance up to the point where it notoriously ended in tears. Here, however, we see what could have been the makings of a very different kind of alliance, aiming for real political democracy and radical change in social and economic relations.

The book opens as the land war does, a sustained militant movement to overthrow landlordism in Ireland, which inevitably fused with the attempt to win greater national independence. As outlined here, Michael Davitt personally had higher ambitions than others in leading positions: he wanted the land nationalised, not just taken from the landlords, and an Irish republic rather than home rule within the British empire. But this point of view was only one minority strand within the movement, and one which was continually subordinated to more moderate aspirations. The author puts his finger on “Davitt’s main political weakness—his overriding concern to maintain public unity” (p 58). Again and again we read of Davitt agreeing to hush up his more radical demands, so as to prevent a common front to the enemy. The unity of the land war was firmly based on this low common denominator. In view of this, the following characterisation of Parnell’s position seems to miss the point (p 42):

“A different strategy was already forming in his mind—a slower transition to peasant proprietorship and to Irish Home Rule. He was planning his own ‘counter-revolution within the revolution’—the ‘revolution’ being “The Fall of Feudalism”, or the breaking of landlord power; the ‘counter-revolution’ being the cementing of bourgeois political, economic and social power in Ireland, with the backing of the larger tenant farmers.”

The Land League’s stated aim was to win ownership of the land for tenant farmers instead of landlords, while the Home Rule party had the explicit object of an Irish parliament subordinate to Westminster. Parnell’s strategy was nothing new, only a continuation of the agreed strategy: sticking to the original aims of the revolution (in so far as it can be called such), not a counter-revolution. It was the strategy of Davitt and his allies that would have broken new ground, extended the revolution further—and it was their failure to organise openly and independently for that which deserves blame for it not happening, not Parnell doing what came naturally to himself and the class he represented.

A particular quality of the period is well highlighted, drawing a lesson that needs reiterating today, on both sides of the Irish Sea (p 24):

“Migrant labour played a key role. The constant changes in the class composition of the ‘lower orders’, leading to the fall or rise of certain categories of labour, initially made working class organisation more difficult, as employers deliberately promoted ethnic or sectarian divisions amongst their workforces. However, migrant labour also brought its ready-made traditions of struggle, imported by workers from other nations and regions. These traditions were drawn upon and modified in the course of struggle. They contributed to the political awareness and fighting capability of a new ethnically mixed working class.”

The existence of such a contribution has been noted before, of course. Anyone who ever read a history of trade unions in England knows that if you removed all the Celtic names you would have precious little left. Armstrong doesn’t present this as just a pleasant multicultural curiosity, however, but recognises it as a powerful dynamic in the making and renewal of the working class, a dynamic which should be evident in struggles of our own day.

But is it the case that “From the early 1880s an ‘internationalism from below’ alliance, of Irish social republicans and Scottish, Welsh and English Radicals, was created” (p 25)? Though a deal of evidence is presented here, it doesn’t back up such a sweeping claim. We read repeatedly of links made from time to time between struggles of working people in those four countries, but nothing that constitutes anything as strong or as lasting as an alliance.

In fact, a strange construction has sometimes to be placed on the material to make it fit this interpretation. In 1886 Davitt addressed Welsh miners and condemned the exploitation they faced. This is portrayed as “further strengthening the link between land and labour” across national boundaries (p 82). But he was electioneering on behalf of a Liberal Party candidate, in the hope that a Liberal government might grant a more generous measure of home rule to Ireland—hardly a radical alliance forged in the heat of class struggle.

This leads to wondering why—apart from the intrinsic interest of the events themselves—the period 1879-95 is chosen. Sympathies and common action between radicals in Ireland and Britain, encompassing Irish independence and social justice, were evident in earlier periods, after all. Left-wing Chartists and left-wing Young Irelanders stood together in 1848. In the 1860s and 70s radical Fenians and the International Working Men’s Association made common cause. So why 1879-95 specifically?

Armstrong explicitly argues here and elsewhere (see ‘The need for internationalism from below’, Red Banner 33, for instance) for a mutual internationalist alliance of socialists in Ireland, Scotland, Wales and England, in answer to the concerted efforts of those who rule these countries. While myself and Allan have had a friendly disagreement around whether Britain and Ireland should form an especial framework of activity for socialists (see our letters in Red Banner 34 and 36), it is a noble aim which socialists here in the western reaches of Europe can only welcome.

There is something problematic, however, about reading this perspective back into history. The concept of an “internationalism from below” alliance is entirely the author’s own, not one that ever emerged in the actual struggles of the time. Solidarity with Irish struggles was widespread, but more often on an all-British basis than consciously Scottish,Welsh or English. The emergence of these national questions was more prominent in 1879-95 than before—which presumably explains the book’s focus on the period—but Britain, even the United Kingdom, still formed the dominant terms of reference.

This is evident among Marxist thinkers of the time too, who Armstrong either criticises or claims as supporters—but the proof for their support is weak. He presents Friedrich Engels in 1891 being “in support of a federal republic for England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales… He now advocated a federal republic for the four nations” (p 131-2). In reality Engels had written (in a well-known critique of a German socialist programme) that such a republic “would be a step forward” compared to the UK, while still advocating a decentralised unitary republic for Britain and elsewhere. Similarly, “Connolly pursued a ‘break-up of the UK and British Empire road to socialism’” (p 21). But while of course insisting on Irish independence, Connolly’s assault on the UK never envisaged an independent Scotland or Wales, or separate socialist organisations in Britain’s three countries (despite th option of establishing a Scottish Socialist Labour Party being wide open to him around 1903).

Again, the argument is more concerned with the early 21st century than the late nineteenth. The author makes no bones about this, as in his characterisation of many British Marxist responses to the issues (p 17):

“They either see the ‘National Question’ as a diversion from the ‘real struggle’, or begin by giving their support to liberal unionist options to defend the UK. When the ‘National Question’ refuses to go away, some ‘Marxist Radicals’ end up tailing the more liberal sections of the British ruling class, when they call for more powers for the existing devolved assemblies. A few go so far as to advocate a new federal arrangement between the constituent parts of the UK.… They hide behind the formulation of support for the ‘right of national self-determination’… take their political lead over the UK constitution from the liberal wing of the British ruling class, or sometimes from the Nationalist parties…”

There is much here that we can regrettably recognise, left-wingers who would prefer if questions of political democracy would conveniently go away and leave them to the bread and butter they know best. Not alone do such issues refuse to go away, however: we shouldn’t want them to. Demands for political democracy are an integral part of our work, often powerful elements in undermining the system we oppose and developing the desire for an alternative.

But is their demand for less than full Scottish and Welsh independence the problem? Take the case of Wales. The only trouble with demanding an independent Welsh republic is that few of the people living there want one. At the moment, most of Wales wants a certain level of self-government—more than it has at present—without breaking away from England completely. This can change, of course, and any decent socialist will fight for Wales’s right to separate as soon as it wants to. But until such a time, our job is to support the Welsh people’s right to vary, weaken, or sever that link as they see fit, to determine their own national future. Socialists support the right to divorce absolutely, but leave it up to people themselves whether they want to break up or not.

This doesn’t amount to defending the UK or a reformed version of it. The grave of the United Kingdom is one every socialist should want to dance on. This forced union, presided over by acres of feudal mummery, belongs in the museum, with its Union Jack torn up for dishrags. But does it have to be replaced by discrete Scottish, Welsh and English workers’ republics, or could a socialist Britain with full autonomy and the right to separate not do the job? The oppression of Ireland has always been greater, and its partition inherently sectarian and anti-democratic, but there are a host of reasons—geographic, economic, cultural and others—why the nations which inhabit Britain might want to share a workers’ republic which accommodated their diverse needs.

If we look to mainland Europe and further afield, it is hard to find many state boundaries that don’t perpetuate some kind of injustice. The map is dotted with nations, nationalities, ethnic and cultural groups whose existence is denied and marginalised by undemocratic capitalist states. Socialism—both as a future society and as a movement aiming for it—will have to come up with various ways to respect their rights, and independent statehood is only one solution among many. Proposing it as the only or primary solution fails to do so, especially in cases where it isn’t wanted by the peoples involved themselves. For instance, a socialist England or Britain should go out of its way to facilitate as autonomous a relationship as Cornwall wants and to support the use of the Cornish language—but proclaiming an independent Cornish republic that hardly any Cornish people want would only be dodging the difficulties involved.

From Davitt to Connolly goes to the heart of such debates, spurning a bad tradition on the left of ignoring tough dilemmas which defy banal answers. It throws light on a crucial period of history for Ireland and its neighbours, one which contains lessons for us today. It is clearly written, not by someone bestowing his private enlightenment upon lesser mortals, but a socialist concerned above all to build a movement of equals that can take capitalism on in these islands and beyond. It deserves to be met in the same spirit.

Looking For A Political Soul Sister

Allan Armstrong replies to Tara O’Sullivan’s Celtic Soul Brothers in Red Banner, no. 45

Once again, Tara O’Sullivan is to be congratulated for her contribution to the continuing debate on the relationship between Socialists in the different nations and states comprising these islands 1. Tara raises some interesting and challenging questions in her critical review of my book, From Davitt to Connolly – ‘Internationalism for Below’ and the challenge to the UK state and British Empire from 1879-95.

Tara wonders why I have chosen this particular period and points to earlier examples of  “sympathy and common action between radicals in Ireland and Britain.” My book is an elaboration of a single chapter from a much larger four volume work I have been writing, entitled Internationalism from Below 2. In this work ‘internationalism from below’ is considered first in relation to the development of nation-states and nationalism; then in relation to other oppositional strategies adopted as mercantile and industrial capitalism developed along with their particular forms of imperialism.

These strategies have included – ‘universalism from above’ and ‘below’ and ‘cosmopolitanism’; support for ‘historic nations’ against ‘non-historic peoples’; and social imperialism against the ideas of Kautsky, Lenin, Luxemburg and the Austro-Marxists. Tara will be pleased to note that, in volume 2, I do take up all the other examples she gives, whilst, in volume 1, I also deal with the first ‘internationalism from below’ alliance of the United Irishmen, United Scotsmen, the London Corresponding Society and their other international allies.

The Introduction in From Davitt to Connolly highlights one of the main reasons I have chosen this particular period. It was written in the context of challenging British Left unionist and Scottish Left nationalist currents, particularly in the Scottish Socialist Party. However chapter 1 is almost like a second introduction and points to the impact of the break-up of the UK, beginning in 1922, on Socialist and Labour historians’ reading of events in relation to class struggle in these islands. Therefore, I hope that, even if people still have doubts about my full-blown ‘internationalism from below’ interpretation, they will appreciate this aspect of the book. I particularly welcome Tara’s words of encouragement in this regard.

Tara’s first criticism of my book is that “the concept of an ‘internationalism from below’ alliance is entirely my own.” In reply, I would argue that my own particular contribution only amounts to the use of the label ‘internationalism from below’ to describe the strategy utilised by the alliance of social republicans, Radicals and Socialists that developed in the period I wrote about.

By way of an analogy, the term ‘capitalism’ was not used at the time to describe the system which tenant farmers, artisans, the new working class and others were up against when they first fought against capitalist encroachment. Thomas Hodgskin was the first to use this term in 1825 in his Labour Defended against the Claims of Capital. However, Marxists and others have also been quite happy to apply the term ‘capitalism’ to describe its mercantile and early industrial forms long before this word was actually in use. Similarly, I think the phrase ‘internationalism from below’ helps us to understand what was at stake in the struggles I describe, particularly when set against the ‘internationalism from above’ alliance of the Gladstone’s Liberals and Parnell’s Irish National League (INL).

Tara also suggests the word ‘alliance’ is too strong a word to describe the international cooperation she recognises did exist. Whilst there certainly was no signed and sealed formal agreement between the various participants I do think the book demonstrates that many of those struggling in the various Land Leagues, in the Scottish Land and Labour League (SLLL) (as the Socialist League was called in Scotland), the Scottish Labour Party (SLP) and Scottish Socialist Federation (SSF), were aware of the imperial nature of the UK state and the potential for an alliance of national democratic challenges from below. People will just have to read it to see for themselves!

Tara criticises my own characterisation of Parnell’s suppression of the Irish Land League after the Kilmainham Treaty as a ‘counter-revolution within the revolution’. She states that, “Parnell’s strategy was nothing new, only a continuation of the agreed strategy: sticking to the original aims of the revolution (in so far as it can be called such), and not a counter-revolution. It was the strategy of Davitt and his allies that would have broken new ground… Parnell {did} what came naturally to himself and the class he represented.”

Tara is quite correct in stating that Parnell’s class objectives did not change. However, what she misses out is the impact of the struggle itself. Davitt, and other leaders in the Land War, more closely involved on the ground than Parnell, saw the much greater potential that the mass Land League struggle opened up. This led them to raise new demands, to extend the fight beyond Ireland, and to advocate  continued mass action. This meant prioritising the Land League’s mass campaign over the earlier Home Rule League parliamentary and the Fenian Brotherhood military strategies. The mass action aspect of the Land League’s campaign was subordinated, both in the minds of Parnell and the Fenians, to their own preferred strategies – parliamentarianism and physical force respectively. This resulted in the emergence of the INL and the Invincibles, which both contributed to the undermining of the mass action.

However, Parnell’s success in diverting this struggle into purely constitutional channels was far from uncontested, and was not that easy for him to achieve. Precisely because of the mass struggle, initiated by the Land League, Parnell was unable to move seamlessly from his initial public support for mass action (whilst distancing himself from what he saw as it excesses) to the purely constitutional politics, which he probably always really wanted. Parnell’s attitude to growing women’s involvement in the action, demonstrated by his determination to shut down the Ladies Land League (much to the consternation of his sister, Anna), is just one example of the problems he faced in getting his way as a result of the huge impact of the struggle itself . Thus, it can be argued that the launch of the Land War opened up a period of revolutionary change in the social relations found in Irish agriculture; but that Parnell, and his bourgeois and large tenant farmer backers, severely reined in the wider potential, bringing about, in effect, a ‘counter-revolution within the revolution’.

Tara agrees with the criticisms I make of  “Davitt’s main political weakness – his overriding concern to maintain public unity” with Parnell. However, she thinks I place a “strange construction… on the material to make it fit {an ‘internationalism from below’} interpretation”. In particular, she cites my reference to “Davitt address{ing} the Welsh miners and condemning the exploitation they faced.”  Tara protests, reminding readers of the context. Davitt “was electioneering on behalf of a Liberal Party candidate, in the hope that a Liberal government might grant a more generous measure of home rule to Ireland — hardly a radical alliance forged in the heat of class struggle.”

I think though, that my book highlights the growing contradiction between many of those involved in the unfolding class struggles, which demanded a higher form of politics, socialist republicanism, and the inherited politics held by these people. The two dominant ways of thinking on the Left in Davitt’s day were Radicalism (mainly in Britain) and social republicanism (mainly in Ireland). Davitt was very much influenced by both of these ways of thinking, given his Irish birth and his upbringing in industrial Lancashire.

In retrospect, it is relatively easy for us today to see the need back then for a new specifically socialist republican politics, and to understand the political shortcomings of those who were unable to make that transition. The book shows how Davitt, along with others, was very much on the cusp of such a transition, but they were often dragged back by their adherence to now outdated politics.  Yet, they still made significant contributions to the struggle.

Perhaps, we can get a better appreciation of what was happening, if we consider today, how hard it is to get self-declared Socialists to break from the old social democratic shibboleths, outdated strategies (e.g. neo-Keynesianism) and misplaced party loyalties, even when throwing themselves into ongoing struggles, for example, against austerity and cuts.

We have the example of John McDonnell, possibly the last socialist Labour MP in the UK. He is still involved in the official machinery of the British Labour Party and the UK state. Yet, he is often prepared to offer his support for real class struggles on the ground. Davitt, whilst using his 1886 tour of Britain to garner support for the Liberal-INL Home Rule electoral alliance, also used the opportunity to try to bring the miners into struggle, on the basis of opposing mining royalties. I think this provides another example of such contradictory behaviour.  Engels appears to have appreciated Davitt’s contribution, even as late as the period of ‘New (Trade) Unionism’, as I show in the book.

Of course, there will always be some tension between those to whom the political limitations of others (such as Davitt in the past) and the needs of the current movement at the time are stark; and those who still remember the earlier contributions made by such people, but who now hold things back. Despite the growing evidence of Davitt’s political failings, particularly during and after the Kitty O’Shea Scandal, I still find Davitt a sympathetic character, especially when you examine his life of struggle and the changing problems he confronted.

My book ends just before James Connolly left Edinburgh in 1896 for Dublin. Keir Hardie provided Connolly with some money, thinking he was going to set up a branch of the Independent Labour Party in Ireland. Instead he chose to set up the Irish Socialist Republican Party.  In this he was very much influenced by John Leslie’s (fellow SSF and later SDF member in Edinburgh) interpretation of Michael Davitt and the Land League legacy. This led to Connolly rejecting the all-UK strategy of British Socialists at the time. He took Davitt’s social republican and Radical-Liberal alliance on to higher plane by arguing for a new Irish Socialist Republican and British Social Democratic/Socialist alliance, effectively on the basis of ‘internationalism from below’.

Tara points out that “Connolly’s assault on the UK never envisaged an independent Scotland or Wales.” In this she is quite correct.  However, the book shows how the challenge of the promising SLLL, SSF and SLP (all of which Connolly joined after he moved back to Scotland), had been contained by the British ruling class by 1895. This contributed to the tacit adoption of a ‘British road to socialism’ by the Social Democratic Federation and the Independent Labour Party.  So although, as Tara points out, it was mainly Scottish members of the SDF who broke away to form the de-Leonite Socialist Labour Party, they did not form a specifically Scottish party in 1903.

It was not until 1919, that the Scottish SDF member, John Maclean, switched from its ‘British road to socialism’ course and adopted Connolly’s strategy of the ‘break-up of the UK and British Empire’. Maclean specifically added Scotland to the fault line in the UK state set-up, which he could clearly see in Ireland after his visit to Dublin that year, shortly after the Limerick Soviet. I have dealt with these developments elsewhere 3, but I also intend to write a follow up book, From Connolly to Maclean – ‘Internationalism from Below’ and the Challenge to the UK state and British Empire from 1896-1923, to develop these ideas.

Tara argues that it is not necessary for Socialists to advocate the break-up of particular states, provided that they champion “the right to separate”. There are considerable problems with the ‘right of self-determination’ both as used by Kautsky and Lenin. I have also addressed these problems elsewhere ⁴  and would need a lot more space to do so here. Indeed one of the purposes in writing my longer Internationalism from Below is to show the profound ambiguities in this formulation and how, along with Luxemburg’s and the Austro-Marxist alternatives, they undermined the full potential of the 1916-21 International Revolutionary Wave.

Tara, who lives in a state that has already broken away from the UK (if not from its wider economic stranglehold, as the banking crisis demonstrated), appears to take this (partly thwarted) revolutionary action as having been almost inevitable. This seems to follow from her quite valid comment that “the oppression of Ireland has always been greater”. However, Tara rather underestimates the initially pretty isolated position of that great revolutionary, James Connolly, when he first advocated the break-up of the UK, and his considerable contribution to bringing about revolutionary change.

The vast majority of the Irish working class at the time gave its support to Home Rule parties, which did not advocate the break-up of the UK or British Empire. This was highlighted by their role in recruiting Irish workers and small farmers in the First World War. Even the early Sinn Fein looked to an Austro-Hungarian-style ‘dual monarchy’ solution (Britain and Ireland) to the National Question. It was only in the context of the horrors of the First World War that the majority of Irish workers began to move towards the break-up of the UK strategy, which Connolly and a few others had long being arguing, but from a minority position.

There is probably greater support for specifically socialist republican politics in Scotland today (albeit still far too small) than in Ireland in the days of Connolly’s ISRP.  There is even greater support in Scotland for Home Rule (now termed Devolution) than in the days of the Irish Home Rulers. Scotland’s own ‘dual monarchy’ party, the SNP, also enjoys much wider support than the early Sinn Fein. Mercifully, the ultra-Unionist, including Loyalist forces, whilst real enough, are also smaller.

What this shows is that not only is the National Question very relevant in the UK today but, as in the period before the First World War in Ireland, is dominated by bourgeois and petty bourgeois forces. Connolly didn’t start from an opinion poll showing the extent of support for Irish independence, but from an analysis of the role of British imperialism and the contradictions it led to, and the possibilities this opened up for Socialists.  This is the approach I advocate today, when the US/UK imperial alliance, fronting corporate capital, is the dominant imperial force in the world.

The future for the working class, and indeed for wider humanity, is pretty bleak as the current capitalist crisis envelops us all. We need to find an effective strategy to challenge this. Only we cannot afford to wait for a new inter-imperialist war to win majority support!  The National Question, which Tara recognises as constituting a vital issue of “political democracy”, still acts as a fault line through UK and Irish politics. This should not be left to the Nationalist parties, which are all prepared to make their own accommodation with corporate capital and imperialism.

Connolly’s proposed alliance of Irish Socialist Republicans and British Social Democrats turned out to be problematic, especially when it came to getting British support for the 1916 Rising. The British Left remains a problem today. I have argued that, in some respects, their hard-wired sectarianism mirrors their adaptation to the UK state.  This is why we have to take Connolly’s version of ‘internationalism from below’ on to a new higher plane through a specifically socialist republican alliance of organisations in England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales.

Indeed, some of the lessons to be learned from the negative experience of the ‘British Left’ – the SWP and IS (CWI), both London centred - in helping to sabotage the promising Scottish Socialist Party are probably of considerable relevance in Ireland. Here these organisations’ ‘colonial offshoots’ look set to repeat their divisive roles in relation to the promising United Left Alliance. Although the CWI and SWP constitute their own sectarian ‘internationalism from above’ alliances, they have no strategy to deal with the British and Irish ruling classes’ own ‘internationalism from above’ alliance promoted through the ‘Peace Process’ and ‘Devolution-all-round’, nor their promotion of ‘social partnerships’.

I particularly welcome Tara’s conclusion, which acknowledges that “From Davitt to Connolly goes to the heart of such debates, spurning a bad tradition on the left of ignoring tough dilemmas which defy banal answers. It throws light on a crucial period of history for Ireland and its neighbours, one which contains lessons for us today.”

1. See our previous debates on ‘Internationalism from Below’ in Red Banner, issues no. 33, 34 and 36.

2. All these volumes will be published, as they become available for free, on an internet site. In the meantime volumes 1 and 2 are completed and can be obtained in pdf format on request by e-mailing:- intfrobel@hotmail.co.uk

3/4 These can also be obtained by e-mailing intfrobel@hotmail.co.uk

Also see:-

A Review of From Davitt to Connolly by Chris Gray, and Book Launch: From Davitt to Connolly: ‘Internationalism from Below’ by Angela Gorrie, in the current Emancipation & Liberation, issue no. 20 and internationalism from below book launch//a>

Reclaiming the unions –  Bluster about bureaucracy, but no alternative programme – Socialist Democracy (Ireland)

The “Reclaiming our Trade Unions” conference in Dublin on 1st October (better seen as a convention because of the limited political discussion) had its theme set by Kieran Allen, the President of SIPTU’s education branch.

Kieran denounced the corruption of the trade union leadership. The years of social partnership and the collaboration with austerity meant that their role was to pacify and smother workers protests. The decay of the trade unions was so deeply entrenched that even at shop steward level the movement was corrupt.

He went on to assert that a new period in trade union struggle had opened at last November’s mass rally in Dublin, when workers had booed and protested against ICTU secretary David Begg and SIPTU leader Jack O’Connor. If activists began to organise now they could use this new mood of opposition to reclaim the unions.

Kieran Allen was followed by UNITE organiser Tommy Fitzgerald. He recalled his own history of all-out battles against the employers and of the automatic solidarity offered by other trade unionists. He wanted to see the return of fighting unions, of trade unions that practiced solidarity.

A common thread running through the rest of the convention was this anger at bureaucratic sell-out and desire to build fighting union structures. This was expressed forcefully by Helen Metcalf of IMPACT and by Terry Kelleher of the CPSU executives in their speeches.

However Kieran Allen’s notion of a turning of the tide within the trade union membership was not discussed, nor did the structure of the convention really allow for an open political discussion.

That is unfortunate, as the lack of political discussion led to the rally ending in confusion without any concrete decisions on policy. The only outcome was that a very large steering committee was formed.

If Kieran Allen was correct and there was a new spirit of revolt in the unions then activists could postpone discussion of a programme. That clearly was the view of platform speakers. Helen Metcalf denounced the IMPACT bureaucracy but saw the answer in workplace activism and social networking on the internet. Terry Kelleher drew on his experience in the CPSU to stress the capture of executive positions in the union.

In fact there are reasons to doubt Kieran Allen’s analysis. Workers’ hostility to the bureaucracy did not begin in November. A key point in the bin tax campaign was a large number of council workers tearing up their union cards in disgust at the betrayals of Jack O’Connor. The majority of the socialist movement have kept their distance from these protests and have opposed calls to challenge the trade union leadership. This was the case during the bin tax and it was the case at the November demonstration. Finally, insofar as there is widespread disillusion with the unions, it is impotent in the absence of an alternative policy and is leading workers to flee union structures rather than rushing to join them. In any case if, as Kieran argues, the unions are corrupt at shop steward level, limiting the workers to these structures is a recipe for defeat and would exclude the many workers unemployed in the current economic collapse.

From this point of view the strategy outlined at the meeting – that socialists should be active at the shop floor in order to recruit people to attend branch structures seems self-defeating. Workers would need to be part of an independent movement, already committed to a programme of resistance, to be in a position to reconquer the unions.

The explanation for the emphasis on union structures is that the socialist movement has a long history of seeking places within trade union structures and of seeking unity with the bureaucracy or with sections of it. In addition, it does not advance its own programme of debt repudiation but works within the framework of a Croke Park agreement that ties them to the bureaucracy even as they struggle against them. An example of left policy was seen in the fate of the decision of the much larger June meeting to demonstrate at the ICTU congress.  The demonstration never happened, dismissed as a sideshow by the steering committee.

This became clear in the presentation of the speaker from the British National Shop Steward’s Network. No mention was made of its close ties with the Socialist Party. It was clear that it was the gentlest and most loyal of oppositions, seeking unity with the left bureaucracy and lobbying the TUC leadership for greater action rather mapping out a new direction. The 250 000 TUC march in London was seen as a triumph, even though the workers were presented with Labour cuts by a Labour government as the alternative to Tory cuts.

Again there was much to discuss, both around socialist strategy in Britain and its applicability to Ireland, but the session ended without discussion.

A low point of the convention came when it split into workshops. There was protest from some activists about having the workshops in the absence of political direction and a report back from private sector workers noting the need for a political programme, but overall the workshops promoted activism at a low political level. The meeting ended with a call to conquer official positions in the trade union movement and to build the movement by individual recruitment. The failure of political agreement was so great that even the modest demands on jobs, wages and privatization presented in the document calling the convention were not discussed or adopted. The much larger meeting in June had had impassioned discussion about building an all-Ireland movement and organising unemployed workers, but these were not revisited.

It is impossible to ignore the failure of the convention. It did not reach a political agreement and this fits the pattern of other meetings organised by the component parts of the United Left Alliance. There is no united party or programme and only limited co-operation. Because the issue here is the self-organisation of the working class the issue is more serious.

It is to be welcomed that the socialist groups are willing to denounce the union leaderships, but there is a long road from there to a rank and file movement. Denunciation of the bureaucracy has been a standard aspect of the Socialist Party position for a long time. It has never translated into a political struggle against the bureaucracy inside the unions or a wider opposition outside.

The starting point for any political discussion has to be the working class itself and its struggles. Yet the nature of the austerity programme, the role of the European Central Bank and IMF in  overseeing the programme of government and in setting austerity targets for the trade union leadership – all this was totally absent from the discussion. As a result discussion in the workshops reflected an unconscious reformism. Many clearly believed that a big mobilization would force a government retreat. Suggestions that workers might act independently and use methods such as seizure and occupation of workplaces were seen as ultraleftist, even though they were among the methods used in relatively recent struggles such as Waterford Glass and Visteon.

The rallies of newly qualified teachers in the Irish National Teachers Organisation [INTO] were seen as examples of successful struggle. This displays a breathtaking ignorance. As a result of the Croke Park deal the INTO leadership must oversee an austerity plan that leaves all new teachers without jobs. It then becomes impossible for them to teach anywhere as a year in school is part of the qualification process. The INTO leadership are constructing a deal where the young teachers work for a year with a peppercorn payment extracted from money normally available for substitute cover.

All this is possible because the union leaderships are allowed to arrange details of austerity in their own sectors as long as they meet overall targets. The fact that young teachers are lobbying for unpaid work shows the level of desperation involved. Individual socialists supporting this process simply shows what a trap union structures can be in the absence of a programme and a broader movement.

The most recent major struggle was that of Aer Lingus cabin crew, organised by IMPACT. Almost half the cabin crew were suspended and facing the loss of their jobs before IMPACT agreed to compulsory arbitration.

And that lays bare the situation. In individual struggles the workers are quite willing to confront the bosses. The struggles collapse because they are not willing to confront bosses, government and unions united against them. The socialists, a loyal opposition within separate unions, are largely silent and invisible.

The path forward follows as night follows day. Workers need an alternative. They need a programme that repudiates the debt, a method of struggle that puts workers action above protest and lobbying, an organisation that cuts across union structures and, above all, a worker’s party to put forward a programme for the entire class and unite struggles in one fight.

The majority of Irish socialists are not advancing along this path. The falling attendance at the trade union forums indicates that the socialist movement cannot continue to tread water. They risk being dismissed by workers looking for an alternative.

7 October 2011

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)

A REPUBLICAN RE-ALIGNMENT

John McAnulty (Socialist Democracy – Ireland)

Shortly before Elizabeth Windsor’s visit to Dublin, the death of police officer Ronan Kerr led to a moral panic across Ireland, with demonstrations in support of the status quo and with the great and the good claiming all Irish society was under threat. In the Assembly elections which followed a new republican layer, opposed to Sinn Fein, marked up an unexpected vote. In the aftermath of the elections there has been a ramping up of state action, with statements of support for republican militarists seen as criminal acts in themselves, leading to a series of arrests.

Yet the background of the republican resistance has been one of
weakness. The republican groups have been slow to split from the
Provos, as they have split in successive waves they have fragmented,
riddled with informers and suspicious of each other. The aim has been
to resume the failed military struggle of the Provos on a smaller
scale, their explanation of the Provo collapse limited to calls of
treachery and British agents within the movement. Much of their
activity has been aimed at Sinn Fein supporters, calling on them to
return to the military struggle.

The standard claim is that these groups lack any support, yet they
have steadily grown. Old leaders have moved on, young people have been
recruited, the level of state intelligence has declined, the number of
bombs and hoaxes steadily risen. A steady pool of recruits has come
from ex-prisoners unable to adapt to the system of patronage run by
the Provos and from ghetto youth who found the bigotry and
discrimination of the new Northern Ireland little different from the
old. Control of areas in Belfast, Derry and Lurgan slipped from the
hands of the Provos. It was the emergence of this youth layer that led
to last year’s savage confrontations around Orange parades. A semi-secret dance is taking place. The republicans see increasing state repression as drawing in the mass of working class nationalists.

The state, aware of this danger, depend on the Provos, the church and Irish capital to isolate the republicans and allow focused
intelligence. So far this strategy has been successful, but the price
is a growing alienation of sections of nationalist youth, an
alienation strengthened by the asymmetric response by the state to
violence. The fact that the UVF have not disarmed, their role in
sectarian violence and the willingness of unionist politicians to
justify the sectarians all pass with only a muted response.

A more general problem is that the “peace dividend” – the economic
boom that was supposed to follow in the wake of the peace process,
never materialized. A property and credit bubble has come and gone,
unemployment is steadily rising and the Assembly is about to unleash
savage cuts in public services endorsed by Sinn Fein and the DUP. To
add insult to injury both parties endorse an enormous subsidy to
private businesses from the public purse to fund a reduction in
corporation tax. The economic vice is closing especially on young
people and a growing alienation is to be expected.

What has reduced the impact of the republicans has been the apolitical
and militarist nature of their campaign. No-one wants to return to a
blood bath, and that is all they seem to offer. What they count as
success – the killing of police and British troops – is used by their
opponents to strengthen the northern state, with Sinn Fein, the media
and all the forces of capitalist society, hammering home the message
that the only alternative to the sectarian and colonial settlement now
in place is a return to war.

All the evidence indicates that the May assembly elections were fought
and won in the furore around Constable Kerr’s killing. Sinn Fein were
able to further clarify their support for the state. The trade union
leaderships and sections of the left, by joining in the hysteria,
dismissed the possibility of a socialist alternative. Nationalist
organizations vied with each other in calling for new recruits for the
police. The republican groups largely remained silent. Eirigi issued a
statement indicating that they did not advocate a military campaign
and were attacked by Sinn Fein supporters for not going on to advocate
the use of informers and state repression of the republican
militarists.

When the elections came they were largely an afterthought and Sinn
Fein and the DUP romped home with large majorities. In the aftermath
of the elections the state has stepped up levels of repression.
Veteran republican Marian Price, a prisoner released as part of the
Good Friday agreement, has had her license revoked and been returned
to prison because she held a written speech transcript at a militarist
demonstration. A student was jailed for being in a van used by a
republican colour party.

However there was one exception. A substantial and unexpected vote was
recorded for the republican group Eirigi in the west Belfast council
elections – a political shift that was partly reflected in a large
vote for the People before Profit candidate in the Assembly elections
held alongside. The West Belfast result was accompanied by substantial
votes in Fermanagh, mid-ulster and Newry with a number of councillors
supporting the Eirigi program being elected.

Eirigi differs from the other republican groups in that it was formed
in a political split with class issues behind them, being formed in
inner city Dublin in opposition to a policy of coalition in a right-
wing Fianna Fail government. It fought the council elections by
explicitly ruling out a military campaign, by opposing the local
Stormont assembly and calling for opposition to the Sinn Fein/DUP
program of cuts.

There is obviously room for a republican movement to expand further,
but it must be borne in mind that any political movement will have to
withstand the assaults that will constantly try to link them to
military adventures, the tendencies within republicanism that tend
towards militarism and that the modest electoral gains in the North
have to be set against the enormous triumph registered by British and
Irish capitalism in the Assembly elections.

It should also be added that the current program of the republicans is
not far removed from that of left members of the Provos in the past. That program is obviously insufficient. The Sinn Fein and the DUP cuts
will lead to mass discontent that will seek an alternative, but a new
movement will have to face the class struggle around the bankruptcy of
the 26 county state and will have to seek common ground with the
socialist movement and confront the unionism and acceptance of
partition that defines sections of that movement. In the north the
frantic support of the revamped colony shown by the Catholic middle
classes gives the lie to any idea that revolutionary nationalism will
prove a mechanism for dealing with the vicious class struggle involved
in any struggle against partition.

Two telling local reports give a flavour of the current struggle. One
indicated that a majority of Catholics would vote for the continuation
of the British presence. The other indicated that the Belfast West
constituency, after 30 years of Provo electoral advance, remained one
of the most deprived areas in the north.

The potential for revolt is there. The appearance of a political
resistance from within republicanism creates a pressure for a
political representation of marginalised working class nationalists
and a discussion of class politics. A new republican movement will
force the socialist movement to acknowledge that Ireland remains a
country dominated by imperialism and it is in this context that a
working class program must be advanced.

22 June 2011 -

This article was originally written for ‘Permanent Revolution’ and was reprinted in the online version of ‘Fourthwrite’

At the South Carolina State Penitentiary on the 16^th, June, 1944, 14 year old, George Junius Stinney, was strapped to the electric chair. Securing him to the frame holding the electrodes proved difficult as the child was so slightly built and merely 5’1”, a reason to suspect it wasn’t he who had wielded the huge railroad spike, the weapon used in the killing of two white girls. In a locked room with only white officers bearing witness, Stinney confessed within an hour of his arrest. The court appointed lawyer, did not call any witnesses and as the Stinney family were moneyless, an appeal could not be raised. Another harrowing and messy murder took place towards the end of WW2, when 24 year old, Eddie Slovik was strapped to a post and shot by firing squad, eleven bullets entering his body, but not immediately killing him. The appointed executioners were reloading their weapons when Slovik finally died: “They’re not shooting me for deserting the United States Army, thousands of guys have done that. They just need to make an example out of somebody and I’m it because I’m an ex-con. I used to steal things when I was a kid, and that’s what they are shooting me for, they’re shooting me for the bread and chewing gum I stole when I was 12 years old”, Slovik had told them. Stinney was black and Slovik white. They had in common their poverty and thus their utter powerlessness, as simultaneously, the allies allegedly fought for freedom.

We no longer believe the WW2 myth that America fights other nations for liberty’s sake, but how can we believe that US citizens are free, when with 5% of the world’s population they have almost a quarter of the world’s prisoners. With the “3 strikes law”, people have been sentenced to 25 years porridge for shoplifting. US citizens are the most incarcerated in the world, their prisons stretched to bursting with a population of 2.3 million. China with 4 times the population has 1.6 million prisoners. Little wonder the People’s Republic of China likes to confront the US with its annual, ‘Human Rights Record of the United State’s’ as a retort to the US practice of issuing its own, ‘Country Reports on Human Rights Practices’, never addressing their own egregious methods.

“Capital Punishment is the most premeditated of murders” said Albert Camus and Troy Davis had many premeditating accomplices take a hand in his death, from Obama, who it seems has taken the 5^th amendment, to the police who intimidated “witnesses”; from the medics of the sinisterly named companies, Correct Health and Rainbow Medical Associates, who for money injected a healthy, man with the lethal cocktail which ceased his heart and respiration; from the careless court-appointed lawyers, to Nathan Deal, Georgia’s Republican Governor, responsible for the 70% cut in the federal funding of the Georgia Resource Centre (Georgia’s legal aid) and from the section of the public who whoop and applaud the statistics on prisoners put to death in the state of Texas, State governor’s, Rick Perry and previously George W Bush, literally killing for votes.

Troy also had against him the endemic racism of his Southern state home of Georgia, where as in other southern states, black people joke bitterly of being arrested for DWB, (Driving While Black). Blacks, representing 10% of the American population as a whole are 40% of the population on death row. Though victims of murder are roughly 50% white and 50% black, those murdered  by the state, have in 80% of cases, (since the DP’s reinstatement in 1976) been where the victim was white. In Mobile, Alabama, 1981, Michael Donald was the last known person lynched by the Ku Klux Klan. The police initially lied that he was the victim of a drug deal gone wrong, though Donald had never taken drugs. It took the efforts of Jesse Jackson to get a rightful conviction. In 1997 Henry Hayes was executed for the crime by electric chair. Prior to that gruesome death, the last time somebody was executed for a white on black crime in the state of Alabama was in 1913. Now they use legalised murder in place of lynching.

Sharon, the commune

Part One – the Meaning of the May 5th Elections

A good kicking for the Lib-Dems disguises the wider impact of the National Question on May 5th

On May 5th, the Lib-Dem-initiated referendum proposal to introduce AV to Westminster elections was massively rejected in every nation and region of the UK, including Northern Ireland. In the English Local Council, the Welsh and Northern Ireland Assembly and the Scottish Parliament elections, all held on the same day, former Lib-Dem voters used the opportunity either to punish Clegg and his allies for entering into a coalition with the Tories, or to vote for the real thing. This took precedence over any vote ‘Yes’ recommendations on AV by the other parties. In the absence of meaningful resistance, voters turned to revenge instead.

In the English Local Council elections, Labour routed the Lib-Dems in the north, whilst the Tories routed them in the south. Elsewhere in the UK, though, the impact of the National Question pushed the Lib-Dems’ decline to being a secondary issue.

In the Welsh Assembly election, the Lib-Dems also lost out to both Labour and the Tories. However, the main loser was Plaid Cymru, recently in coalition with Labour. Plaid’s recent efforts, throwing all of its weight behind the  Coalition’s successful referendum campaign to devolve law-making powers to the Welsh Assembly, seemed to represent the culmination of its political ambitions.  Yet, all the mainstream unionist parties supported this liberal unionist measure too.  With Plaid less relevant, and the Tories very unpopular in working class South Wales, Welsh Labour advanced and has formed its own single-party government, thus making more posts available for its own careerists.

In the Northern Ireland, the Lib-Dems officially support the moderate unionist Alliance Party. However, the lack of any wider appreciation of this fact, along with Alliance’s different name, meant that, despite its Lib-Dem type politics, it was able to make limited gains in the Northern Ireland Assembly elections, as the old UUP continues to sheds its more moderate voters (remembering that ‘moderate’ is a relative term in Unionist politics in Northern Ireland!)

But this too was a side issue when the DUP and Sinn Fein made small gains, despite their joint implementation of public sector cuts. They were able to take their first Stormont Coalition into a second term. Voters threw their weight behind competitive sectarian pleading for Westminster resources, in a Stormont that has a constitutionally recognised divide between Unionists and Nationalists. Voters rejected any return to possible armed conflict, or to a class based opposition to the Con-Dem cuts to the Northern Ireland budget.

On the Unionist side, the tentative move to the centre, marked by the growth of the Alliance Party, was matched by a move on the Right towards the rejectionist, Traditional Unionist Voice. However, the possibility of voting for either of these constitutional Unionist options was underpinned by the continued desire for stability. This was highlighted by the electoral demise of the Progressive Unionist Party, linked to the redundant (for the moment) Loyalist UVF death squads.

However, the most sensational result on May 5^th occurred in the Scottish Parliament election. Here the previous minority SNP government was able to increase its number of MSPs from 46 to 69, an absolute majority forecast by no one. Furthermore, the SNP’s votes came at the expense, not only of the Lib-Dems, but of the Tories, Labour and the small Socialist vote too. Only the Greens managed to hold on to their vote and their 2 MSPs. They made a calculated Left appeal, now that their moderate leader, Robin Harper, has retired. They hoped to woo former disillusioned Socialist voters. Labour only managed to increase its vote in two constituencies, Dumfries and Eastwood. Here they were the main challengers to the Tories, who by their own admission remain “toxic” in Scotland.  Very few people in Scotland held street parties to celebrate Will’s and Kate’s royal wedding on the 29^th April – many are saving these for Thatcher’s funeral!

How socialists fared throughout the UK

In the English Local Elections, three Socialist councillors, now standing under the CWI-initiated, Trade Union & Socialist Coalition (TUSC) banner, lost their previous seats (including both SWP councillors), despite these and a few other candidates still getting a credible vote. Elsewhere though, the TUSC vote was small. It will be interesting to see whether TUSC can survive as a wider Socialist unity project, or whether it will just follow that other CWI initiative, the National Shop Stewards Network and become a complete CWI-front.

In Wales, Socialists only stood on the List vote in the Assembly elections, under the banner of Scargill’s SLP, the Communist Party of Britain, or TUSC. They made little headway. Indeed it is an indication of the decline of the Left, that it was the moribund SLP that attracted most Socialist votes as a purely passive electoral gesture.

In Northern Ireland, those Socialists who contested the Stormont election, either under the banner of People Before Profit (SWP front), the Socialist Party (CWI), the Workers Party or Socialist Democracy (USFI), sometimes competed against each other. They were marginal outside Derry/Foyle, where the SWP’s well-known Eamonn McCann made a credible showing. Republican socialists and traditional pro-armed struggle republicans did not stand in the Stormont elections, but confined their activities to the Local Council elections held in Northern Ireland on the same day (unlike Wales or Scotland). A couple of breakaway former Sinn Fein councillors held their seats, whilst Patricia Campbell of the Independent Workers Union and the republican socialist, eirigi and the IRSP all made a credible showing, despite some mutual competition between these last two in West Belfast. The traditionalist republican, pro-armed struggle, 32 Counties Sovereignty Movement also made headway in Derry, a reflection of the lack of any meaningful ‘peace dividend’ in the most deprived Nationalist communities.

In Scotland, Socialists, who as recently as 2007, held 6 seats at Holyrood, were fatally crippled in the aftermath of the Sheridan affair. As in Wales, they only stood for the List seats and were split between Scargill’s SLP, the SSP and Solidarity. And, as in Wales, Scargill’s phantom SLP gained the most Socialist votes in the Left’s equivalent of ‘bald men fighting over a comb’. In the absence of Solidarity’s leader, the Left nationalist, Tommy Sheridan, they also decided to back another celebrity socialist, the left Unionist, George Galloway. He had parachuted into Glasgow as the George Galloway/Respect candidate after being rejected by electors in East London last year. Glasgow voters recognised an opportunist carpetbagger when they saw one, so knowing he was going to lose, he just picked up his bags and left before the count. The SSP vote continued to fall from its poor 2007 result, whilst Solidarity’s declining vote went into tailspin. This raises the question in both organisations about the prospects of future meaningful Socialist unity.

The meaning of the SNP electoral victory

So, what does the SNP victory in the Holyrood elections represent? Ever since the banking crash, which saw the SNP and its charismatic leader, Alex Salmond, too closely associated with the failed Royal Bank of Scotland, the party had been unable to win any Westminster or many council by-elections. During the 2010 Westminster general election, the Labour Party, amazingly and also unpredictably, increased its vote in Scotland, retaking a seat previously lost to the SNP in a pre-crash by-election. Labour’s electoral appeal was almost entirely based upon playing up to the fear of the Tories.

As recently as the beginning of the year, polls were anticipating the return of a Labour-led government to Holyrood, in the face of the SNP’s betrayal, after the economic crisis, of its 2007 electoral promises. Labour thought that they could just repeat their ‘No back to the 1980s’, anti-Tory appeal in the run-up to the May 5^th. However, that card had been played out in 2010.  Despite voting Labour, Scotland now faced the hated Tories once more, supported by the increasingly despised Lib-Dems. Yet Miliband’s Labour Party, consigned to ‘opposition’, was making absolutely no difference.

Salmond was able to repeat Gordon Brown’s 2010 pre-election trick, and postpone major Holyrood cuts until after the election. Although he lowered the electorate’s sights, abandoning many earlier SNP promises, those still remaining aimed higher than any made by Labour. The relentlessly negative Scottish Labour leader, Ian Gray, believed that Scottish voters would automatically return to their ‘natural’ fold, and that the Holyrood gravy train would once more be at Labour’s disposal. He slept-walked towards May 5^th. When Labour’s poll support started to ebb away, his response was once more to raise the separatist bogey (it had failed in 2007 with its effect neutralised by the SNP’s promised referendum on independence), and then, in panic, he adopted virtually every other SNP policy.

Meanwhile, Salmond had been assiduously building-up the backing of Scottish businessmen, including Brian Souter, the homophobic owner of Stagecoach, Sir Thomas Farmer, the Con-Dem cuts-approving owner of KwikFit, and Sir David Murray, the Unionist owner of Murray International Metals and recently of Rangers FC.  Donald Trump, the controversial American tycoon, given the go-ahead to build a luxury golf-course and gated housing project in Aberdeenshire, also enjoys the support of the SNP government. Both Murdoch’s Sun and Tommy Sheridan (http://tommysheridan.wordpress.com/ April 22^nd) backed the Scottish populist nationalist, SNP. The SNP obviously gained far more by way of support from the former, given the evidence of the latter’s failure to persuade many Glasgow voters to back his other recommended choice – the Left British unionist, George Galloway.

SNP success in inverse proportion to working class confidence and Socialist success

Underlying the large electoral drift to the SNP is the current lack of working class self-confidence. This reflects the lack of fightback against the Con-Dems’ austerity drive, following on workers’ earlier disillusioned acceptance of Brown’s and Darling’s proposed Westminster imposed cuts. The STUC is every bit as wedded to social partnership deals with the employers and the state as the TUC.  The effect of these has been to turn trade unions into a free personnel management service for the bosses. Added to this is the sorry demise of the Left in Scotland in the aftermath of the Sheridan fiasco. The attraction of Socialist unity in the face of massive cutbacks was demonstrated earlier this year in the Irish elections when the United Left Alliance was able to pick up 5 Dail seats.

However, much of the SNP’s electoral support is superficial – a clutching at straws. As long as workers remain acquiescent, the SNP government will openly pursue its real aim – making Scotland a haven for Scottish businesses and global corporations. Earlier this year, to show where the SNP’s loyalties lie, John Swinney, Finance Minister, allowed the lapse of Holyrood’s income tax raising powers, voted for in the 1997 Devolution Referendum. The SNP have extended their council tax freeze for another five years to force Local Councils into privatising services. The Lib-Dem/SNP coalition running Edinburgh Council has brought in consultants to prepare for such measures. This follows their attack on cleansing workers’ pay, preparatory to possible privatisation. The SNP government has even attacked the Con-Dem’s recent proposed levy on North Sea Oil. It’s not to be ‘Scotland’s Oil’, but will remain the petroleum corporations’ oil!

The SNP has entered negotiations with Cameron over Westminster’s proposed Scotland Bill. This is based on the miserable additional devolutionary powers recommended by the Calman Commission to dish the SNP, in advance of any possible Independence Referendum. The SNP’s over-riding concern is to get the political power to cut corporation tax. Up until 2008, the SNP’s very mild reforms were dependent on building up Scotland’s ‘buoyant’ finance sector – a trickle-down ‘social democracy’ courtesy of the Royal Bank of Scotland! Now, any such reforms are meant to be financed by a very limited tax on corporate profits – if their boards agree to play ball!

Constitutional crisis or a SNP negotiated ‘Devolution-Max’ cop out?

The media has made much of a possible constitutional crisis due to the SNP’s commitment to holding a referendum on Scottish independence in the last years of its office. The novelty of a Nationalist victory in one of the UK’s devolved assemblies should not prevent people looking to other comparable examples in Spain and Quebec. Here Catalan Convergence and Union (CiU), the Basque Nationalist Party (PNV) and Parti Quebecois (PQ) have also formed majority administrations in devolved assemblies. Both the CiU and PNV have settled for greater measures of devolution within the Spanish state, whilst the PQ initiated referendum on Quebec independence was narrowly defeated and has not been attempted again.

Meanwhile, ‘over the water’, the former revolutionary nationalist Sinn Fein has settled very quickly into helping to run the UK’s devolved administration in Northern Ireland.  All the indications are that the very constitutional nationalist SNP is quite willing to settle for ‘Devolution-Max’. Salmond doesn’t have the excuse that he had in his last government of being in a minority, and hence being unable to put forward the SNP’s promised Independence Referendum Bill. In reality, however, significant forces in the SNP, including rightist Education Minister, Michael Russell, and former leftist, Justice Minister, Kenny MacAskill, never wanted a referendum, and nor do many of the SNP’s current business backers.

Salmond is publicly ditching more and more attributes of meaningful political independence. The SNP recognise the continued role of the monarchy (which fronts the British ruling class’s draconian anti-democratic Crown Powers), the City (which sets financial policy), and the UK’s armed forces (which would be able to use Scottish military facilities). The SNP supports UN-backed (i.e. US-dominated Security Council approved) imperial wars, and has campaigned vigorously to maintain Scottish regiments, and British and NATO bases in Scotland.  There may still be some commitment to abolishing the unpopular Trident bases and hence for Scotland to step down into NATO’s second tier, non-nuclear ‘Partnership for Peace’. However, there are also signs that the SNP would be prepared just to lease out military facilities here, creating, in effect,  ‘Guantanamac’ bases.

‘Independence-Lite’ represents the height of SNP leadership ambitions, although a considerable section would settle for ‘Devolution-Max’.  Most of the existing institutions of the British unionist and imperial state would remain in place but be given a lick of tartan paint in Scotland. The SNP is no more able to deliver meaningful political independence, than Labour was able to deliver political devolution in 1979. A considerable majority of the British ruling class was against Scottish devolution then, but the overwhelming majority of the British ruling class is against Scottish independence now.

The British ruling class opposes Scottish independence and backs ‘Devolution-all-round’

The British ruling class is currently prepared to go no further than a few more limited devolutionary concessions, based on Blair’s 1997 ‘Devolution-all-round’ and Peace (in reality, pacification) Process settlement. This settlement is designed both to buttress wider British imperial control over these islands (emphasised by the recent royal visit to Ireland) and to create the best political conditions for corporate profitability.

Furthermore, despite the SNP’s overtures to Americans of Scottish descent (many of whom are on the US Right), it is the UK government, which enjoys official US state backing. Indeed the UK is such a reliable junior partner (with military forces that can be deployed more widely than Israel’s) that successive US governments have granted the UK state the imperial franchise in the North East Atlantic. The UK also acts as a useful spoiler to contain any independent French-German Euro-imperial ambitions. The USA is unlikely to switch its backing to the SNP. Furthermore, EU leaders will not step on UK governments’ toes over this issue.

Realising the SNP is isolated in the UK and wider international arena, Salmond is likely to offer a second ‘Devolution-Max’ option in the SNP Government’s proposed Independence Referendum. This would satisfy his most ardent business supporters, as well as important sectors of his own party.  Those rank and file Scottish independence supporting SNP members could be left to get on with campaigning for a ‘Yes’ vote for what is, in effect, ‘Independence-Lite’ under the Crown, the City, the British armed forces and NATO.

However, the SNP leadership would itself be riding two horses, with different members providing their personal support for whichever option they really backed (in a similar manner to Labour in the 1979 Devolution referendum). SNP ‘Devolution-Max’ supporters might hope to get influential backing from those amongst Labour (e.g. Henry MacLeish), the Lib-Dems (e.g. Charles Kennedy) and even the Conservatives (e.g. Murdo Fraser), who are committed to further liberal unionist measures.  The SNP’s worried rank and file independence supporters would be fobbed off with the promise that ‘Devolution-Max’ was but another stage on the road to independence – an argument that could have some purchase, given that some SNP supporters also see ‘Independence-Lite’ as but a stage towards ultimate Scottish political sovereignty.

Those actually campaigning for a ‘Yes’ vote for Scottish ‘independence’ (i.e. ‘Independence-Lite’) will soon be subjected to all the dirty tricks available to the British ruling class and its political representatives under the UK Crown Powers, since they are currently implacably opposed to such a course of action. The membership of the impeccably constitutionalist SNP is no more prepared for these, than it was in 1979, when the British ruling class was at least split, not united as it is today, over how best to maintain the Union. Meanwhile, the SNP government will be forced to impose the cuts demanded by Westminster and its business backers. This will highlight just whose class interests the SNP’s advocacy of ‘independence’ are meant to serve.

Salmond has just had his own 2011 equivalent of New Labour’s ‘things can only get better’ 1997 election. This is likely to lead to a similar let down in the future. Socialists today appear to be in as much of a mess as they were after Thatcher defeated the miners and Liverpool Council in the mid-80’s. By 1987, the triumphant Tories had decided to introduce the poll tax and face down the growing ‘National Question’ in the UK. However, Thatcher was defeated by mass independent class action and continued Irish republican opposition. Independent class action and a socialist republican strategy based on the promotion of ‘internationalism from below’ is the precondition for our advance today.

Allan Armstrong. 7.6.11

Part  Two – the  SNP follows Labour 

Social democracy SNP-style and the lessons it has learned from Labour

The long-term decline of the Labour Party in Scotland has enabled the SNP to pose in social democratic colours, particularly in the Central Belt. The SNP’s social democratic commitments are not that great, and like New Labour compete inside the party with another distinctly neo-liberal economic agenda. However, the SNP has skilfully positioned itself, so that it appears to promise more reforms than New Labour  – not a very difficult task! However, as with New Labour, any social democratic reforms are only made as election promises when they are compatible with the interests of the major financial institutions, well represented in Edinburgh, and of other global corporations and Scottish businesses engaged in constant lobbying at Holyrood or Bute House.

The last SNP government (2007-11) soon abandoned its election promises of improved teacher/student ratios in schools, the cancellation of student debt, and the abolition of the regressive council tax, in order to prioritise meeting the costs of the bankers’ bailout. This highlights the limitations of the SNP’s social democratic reforms. The SNP pushes much more consistently for reduced corporate taxation and other pro-business measures, highlighted by its courting of prominent Scottish businessmen, e.g. Brian Souter, Sir George Matthewson and Sir Tom Farmer, as well as international tycoons, e.g. Donald Trump and Rupert Murdoch.

Furthermore, the essence of any social democratic reforms today, whether under Labour or SNP, is that they only represent ‘sweeties’, selected and handed down by those liberal capitalist parties representing the ruling and middle classes, in order to win votes from what they hope will remain an otherwise passive working class. The conservative capitalist parties (the Conservative and UKIP) oppose state financed, social democratic reforms, and only accept their continued existence as a price to be paid to prevent greater social upheaval. Since the post-1975 ruling class offensive, any new reforms have rarely come about as a result of independent working class campaigning or action. This is why they have proved to be so ephemeral under the current conditions of capitalist crisis.

The notion of what constitutes social democracy has been successively diluted since the late nineteenth century. Then it meant the politics of those who organised the working class to fight for an alternative socialist society. Later it meant the politics of those who represented the economic and social interests of the working class within capitalism and who sought a welfare state  – termed Labourism in the UK. Nowadays it means the politics of those who argue for a vague commitment to some state regulation and social reforms, something that also appeal to sections of the middle class, especially those employed in the management of the public sector. However, today’s social democrats everywhere subordinate their proposed social democratic reforms to first meeting the ‘needs of the market’, i.e. global corporate capital.

The SNP has become, in effect, a ‘tartan’ social democrat party, in the current political sense of the term. This chimes in very well with the dominant cultural values found in Scotland. However, when workers take their own independent action you can see the real class face of the SNP. The SNP control West Dunbartonshire Council and have imposed cuts here upon some of the most deprived working class communities. They suspended Scottish Socialist Party (SSP) councillor, Jim Bollan for six months following his consistent backing for workers and service users resisting these cuts. In the City of Edinburgh Council, the SNP are in coalition with the Lib-Dems. Here they have spent more money on hiring private refuse collectors to break the industrial action of the council’s in-house refuse workers resisting a major pay cut, than it would have cost to settle the dispute. This is because the council is preparing for privatisation of services, as a way of making public sector cuts, and of winning business support.

The SNP remains, in effect, a federally organised party, advocating different policies in different regions to appeal to different classes and sections of the Scottish population. It has a somewhat different face in the Western Isles, the north-east and the Central Belt. However, for a long time, a dominant Labour Party was able to limit the SNP’s growth in the major cities and the Central Belt, with its characterisation of the SNP as ‘Tartan Tories’. This was never an entirely accurate label, although the SNP undoubtedly has a right populist wing, where most remaining ‘fundamentalists’ are still to be found.

However, under Jim Sillars and later, Alex Salmond (significantly both from the former Leftist 79 Group), the SNP has made huge efforts to win over the Labour Party’s working class electoral base. They have been mightily helped in this by New Labour’s drift to the Right, and by the current demise, after the Sheridan debacle, of the once promising Socialist alternative, which developed in Scotland in the aftermath of the successful anti-poll tax struggle.

The SNP and the Labour unionist precedent in abandoning a consistent secular approach to society

The SNP has learned more from the Labour Party, though, than the necessity to advocate social democratic reforms to win working class support. Because the Labour Party developed within, and increasingly adapted to the existing UK state and British Empire, with its constitutional monarchy and its established church, it departed from the earlier Radical, and never adopted the continental Social Democrat tradition, which then championed a republican and secular society, as the best means to integrate people from different religious and ethnic backgrounds.

In the nineteenth century, as those rising middle class members, who owned industries and other businesses, joined and broadened the traditional British ruling class, their Liberal principles became increasingly compromised. This was because they began to fear more Radical challenges from the ‘lower orders’. They sought their own rapprochement with the existing British unionist and constitutional monarchist order with its established church.  This became especially clear in their attempts to deal with those challenges they faced in Ireland.

The majority of the British ruling class decided that, rather than push for a secular Ireland, which might bring together ‘lower order’ Catholics, Protestants and Dissenters  – the old republican ideal – they would look for influential allies who would help them maintain their overall control. The widening of the franchise, first to the middle class, then later to tenant farmers and workers, meant that they could no longer rely on the old ‘Anglo-Irish’ Protestant Ascendancy alone. They found a powerful ally in the Catholic hierarchy.

However, winning the hierarchy’s support also meant granting it significant concessions.  These included the recognition of the papacy’s right to appoint bishops in the UK, and giving the hierarchy control over educational and elementary social provision (hospitals, children’s homes, etc). This was consistent with earlier Liberal capitulation to Protestant denominations over the provision of education and social provision in Ireland (particularly the North), England, Scotland and Wales.

In Ireland, both Daniel O’Connell and later, Charles Parnell went along with the Catholic hierarchy’s demands for a greater political say, in return for support for more political recognition of Ireland within the Union. The hierarchy also ensured that its full weight was thrown behind the suppression of the Radical alternatives represented by Young Ireland, the Fenian Brotherhood and the more Radical wing of the Irish Land League, and that loyalty to the Queen, UK and British Empire was upheld.

This ruling class attempt to broaden the base of ‘Britishness’ by making political concessions to the religious and ethnic leaders in particular communities has become the hallmark of a top-down state managerial approach to win the loyalty of people from different religious and ethnic groups in the UK. Today, this is officially promoted as ‘multiculturalism’, at the same time as the UK constitution and state retains a hierarchy of religious and ethnic privileges. This is highlighted by the continued existence of an established church (the Church of England, with semi-established status for the Church of Scotland too) and the state promotion of ‘British values’ (first developed in and heavily influenced by the context of systematic clearances, enclosures, various types of forced labour, brutal punishments and the worldwide imperial looting of the planet). State promoted multiculturalism is not based on the idea of universal equality of the members of those ethnic and religious groups living in the UK, but by the recognition of a hierarchy of privileges meted out to ‘their’ state-approved representatives [1].

In the nineteenth century, by departing from a consistent secular approach, the Liberal party, helped by the Catholic hierarchy, was able to win the vote of the majority of immigrant Irish. It was the passive votes, not the active participation of the ‘lower orders,’ that they wanted. In the twentieth century, the Labour Party increasingly adopted this approach too, but took it much further. It was also able to gain the support of many Catholic members of Irish origin, once the Catholic hierarchy had been won over and offered its lead. Labour accepted the state funding of specifically Catholic schools, which were placed under the immediate control of the hierarchy.

Several things helped the Catholic hierarchy in their endeavours. First the ‘non-denominational’ state schools were, in effect, still dominated by the different Protestant churches found in England, Scotland, Wales and what soon became Northern Ireland. The Conservative and Unionist Party, and the Church of Scotland still had strong Orange Order connections. They publicly displayed strong anti-Irish prejudices.  Therefore, it was argued that separate schooling would shield Catholics from the entrenched discrimination, which was certainly still prevalent, particularly in Scotland, in 1918 (and until much later), at the time such schools were set up.

However, the other side of this was the acceptance that religious (or anti-Irish) divisions were a permanent feature of society and could not be overcome. This gave the Catholic hierarchy exclusive control, not just over religious education, but over most other aspects of education and pastoral care for children in their crucial formative years. Unlike the Loyalists and Orange Order, particularly in Northern Ireland, the Catholic hierarchy did not push for other measures of segregation, e.g. to cover employment and housing, to further entrench their influence. Such measures would just confine those of Irish Catholic origin to the worst jobs and homes and not have been popular. Therefore, the hierarchy went along with the majority of Catholics who fought against discrimination by demanding proper access in these economic and social arenas.

The best way to promote wider social integration is to adopt a similar secular and non-discriminatory approach to education too. Few people (apart from Loyalist bigots in Northern Ireland) want separate provision of housing and jobs. A secular approach would mean ending the church establishment, and removing any remaining privileges by eliminating the existing Protestant aspects of ‘non-denominational’ schools. Of course, those Protestant bigots, who campaign for the ending of Catholic schools, don’t wish to end such Protestant privileges. They want to reassert Protestant British supremacy. This why they also call for the promotion of royal events, by celebrating the British Protestant monarchy in schools.  In contrast, secular schools would provide education about religions and other world outlooks, rather than permitting any religious indoctrination. However, such an approach is also still vehemently opposed by the Catholic hierarchy, which would lose the privileges it currently enjoys. In upholding this stance they have the backing of the Labour Party, particularly in Scotland.

Labour attacked the SNP, for much of its history, for wanting to create a Presbyterian Scotland. Labour strongly suggested that Scottish independence could only lead to the creation of a new ‘Stormont’-type regime here. As recently as 1994, Labour accused the SNP of anti-Catholic sectarianism in the Monklands by-election. However, just as the SNP has been able to out-social democrat New Labour, so, under Salmond, it has become as adept as Labour in courting the support of religious leaders, including the late Cardinal Winning and the current Cardinal O’Brien.

To win their influential support, the SNP has carefully politically positioned itself to appear less tolerant of gays and abortion rights than Labour, without officially adopting anti-gay or anti-abortion stances, which could lose it liberal support. Furthermore, the SNP has managed this, whilst at the same time courting such prominent Protestant fundamentalists as the homophobic Brian Souter, owner of Stagecoach.

Labour too was long able to play to such seemingly contradictory galleries. Prominent anti-Catholic bigot, Sam Campbell, member of the Orange Order, was the one-time Provost of Dalkeith and prominent Midlothian Labour councillor. Furthermore, Labour also currently enjoys the electoral support of the Orange Order, since it is seen to be the largest and most effective pro-unionist party in Scotland. Labour certainly doesn’t loudly trumpet this, preferring, if challenged, to appear as a mediating influence between religious or ethnic ‘extremes’.

In the recent past, Labour has extended the approach, initially adopted towards the Catholic hierarchy, by seeking the support of Muslim religious leaders in order to win the electoral support of mainly Asian migrants (particularly from Pakistan and Bangla Desh). Following this particular precedent, Salmond has also developed close relations with such people as Osama Saeed of the Scottish Islamic Foundation (which went on to receive state funding under the post 2007 SNP Holyrood government). Saeed became an SNP Westminster candidate in 2010 and he advocates ‘faith schools’. Just as the earlier Labour/Catholic hierarchy rapprochement helped to long cover up persistent child abuse in Catholic institutions, so SNP/Muslim religious leader rapprochement, especially if it were to lead to the setting up of ‘faith schools’, would likely provide cover for the sexist treatment of girls and women.2

Only a secular approach to society can guarantee the right of individuals to practice the religion of their choice without imposing their values on others, and at the same time guarantee universal rights to women, children, gays and lesbians, often granted fewer ‘rights’ or facing real discrimination under religious rulings. Following the earlier path adopted by the Liberal and Labour Parties before it, the SNP has not chosen a principled secular approach.

This is because the SNP, despite having a paper commitment to political independence, has also been very much moulded by the legacy of British unionism and imperialism. This can be seen in the party’s acceptance of the Crown (which fronts so many of the anti-democratic features of the UK state), the United Kingdom (the Queen would remain head of state), its support for Scottish regiments (serving US/British imperial interests) and of sterling (which means recognition of Scotland’s economic subordination to the City).

The SNP leadership does not really offer us a political road to effective Scottish self-determination. Instead it offers itself to both overseas and Scottish business leaders as the best potential management for declining British imperialism and the UK state, in the territory ‘north of the border’. It accepts the continued dominant role of US/British imperialism and corporate capital in the north-east Atlantic. It wishes to uphold this order, but preferably through a saltire-flagged, non-nuclear, military contribution to NATO.

The SNP leadership does hope though that there will still be enough small change left from government revenues to provide a few social democratic reforms, after meeting the continually increasing costs of maintaining a crisis-ridden capitalism. To win wider support for this strategy, it is trying to paint as much of the inherited machinery of the UK state with a good lick of ‘tartan paint’ as possible, beginning with the British Army’s Scottish regiments.

The SNP’s current confident stance is designed to offer a somewhat brighter future than the grim prospects offered by the present Scottish Labour leader, the well-named Iain Gray. However, committed first to meeting the needs of the banksters and other corporate spivs, the SNP’s illusion-mongering can only work as long as workers lack the self-confidence to organise and to take action to meet our own needs.

Real Scottish political self-determination can only be won through the consistent upholding of a democratic secular approach, which strives for the equality of all those currently living in Scotland, in an alliance with others in England, Wales and Ireland to break up the UK state and the US/British imperial alliance on the basis of an ‘internationalism from below’ strategy.

Such a strategy can not be separated from the need to develop a new socio-economic order to replace an increasingly crisis-ridden capitalism. To achieve this means breaking from all those who have become trapped in the web of institutions bequeathed by the successive phases of global capitalism both under the dominance of British and now US/British imperialism. In the nineteenth century, the Liberals succumbed to these pressures, as Labour did in the twentieth century, and as the SNP do  today. This is why it is so important that we begin to learn deeper lessons from the most recent failed attempt to do this – the Scottish Socialist Party. There is so much at stake.

Allan Armstrong, 10.8.11

1]           However, just as social democratic economic and social measures are being  scrapped to meet the needs of crisis-ridden capital, so too, have Cameron’s Conservatives decided to  undermine ‘multicultural’ state backing for selected  ethno-religious leaders (particularly Muslim), the better to promote old-style racist divide and rule policies amongst the working class.

2]             Of course, this is not to imply that such reactionary thinking and practice are confined to these particular religions or denominations. Neither the ‘liberal’ leadership of the Church of England nor the Church of Scotland is prepared to face down the homophobia of influential sections of their churches. The Church of England is committed to retaining its own denominational schools in England. The Church of Scotland has ostracised one of its own female ministers, Helen Percy, after she was raped by a church elder.

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.