Major's Irish Offensive
* Ireland/Britain
" We have no strategic... we have no economic interest in staying there" So said Patrick Mayhew, the British Minister responsible for Northern Ireland, in an interview with Die Zeit in 1993.
When the IRA declared a ceasefire in August 1994 they had been led to expect direct talks with the
British within three months. After
18 months of growing frustration in the ranks at British delaying tactics, the cease-fire ended with the Canary Wharf bomb in
February 1996. The British (and the Unionists) could have had a deal at any time over those 18 months. That they chose not to is not to be explained simply by the
Tories dependence on the Ulster
Unionist Party in a series of crucial votes in Parliament, nor by the distraction of the sea of troubles which beset Major, clinging to power after 17 years in Government.
It is a symptom of a more fundamental fragmentation in the
Conservative Party and the British State quite clear that if they were allowed into negotiations they would have to work within the framework of the Unionist veto. A document put to the 1995 Ard Fheis (Annual Conference) of Sinn Féin spoke of the likely internal settlement which would emerge from talks as a "transitional" arrangement on the road to eventual unity.
The bitter historical irony was that the 1921 agreement with the British which had partitioned the country in the first place, was sold on the basis that it was a stepping stone to unity. IRA leader Michael Collins who led the delegation which signed the Treaty with the British was killed in the Civil War which followed a split in Sinn Fein over the Treaty. Recent the war" — namely the defeat of the IRA.
As the cease-fire progressed and the
British put up a series of barriers to
Republican participation in talks it became clear this was no mere softening up exercise in advance of negotiations. Of course, the more the Sinn Féin leadership could be forced to concede in advance, the easier would it be for the British to broker a solution favourable to themselves when the talks did happen. But there is also a significant section of the British security and military apparatus which wants a rematch with the IRA. For them the purpose of the "peace process" was to divide, isolate and then inflict a military defeat on the Repub-licans. This view has an echo in Dublin where one source spoke recently of the need to eradicate the cancer of republicanism from the island of
Ireland".
series of British
A whole initiatives were calculated to provoke Republicans. Private
Lee Clegg a British soldier imprisoned for the murder of a
Befast teenager was released and later promoted. There was no release of prisoners even though many have served more than 20 years in British prisons. In fact, conditions itself. British Prime Minister John Major David Coen April 16th 1996
The British knew at the time the ceasefire was announced that the Republicans had drawn well back from their historic demands of a negotiated British withdrawal and Irish unity. The Republican leadership had not gone so far as endorsing the Downing St Declaration or the later Framework Document, agreed between London and Dublin, which made explicit Britain's guarantee to the Unionist minority on the island that there would be no united Ireland without their consent. But it was 20 International Viewpoint #277 graffiti in Republican areas of Belfast have reminded Gerry Adams of Collins' fate.
The IRA's only demand when announcing the cease-fire was a place in negotiations and this, combined with the knowledge that the Sinn Féin leadership had to some extent already accepted an internal settlement, enabled the British to pressure the Republican leadership to accept the corollary to this abandonment of the armed struggle and the handing over of weapons. As one Sinn Féin member put it angrily, "the British were seeking to win by diplomacy what they had failed to win in for prisoners got worse. as reported by a delegation of Dublin TD's (Members of Parliament). Marches by the sectarian Orange Order were driven through Nationalist areas by the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC).
In February, John Major side-stepped the US Senator Mitchell's Report on the decommissioning of arms in favour of elections to a new Northern Ireland "Assembly" favoured by the Unionists. More importantly, he went back on an agreement with Dublin that there would be all party talks by the end of February. It was clear he was going for a break.
The bomb which ended the cease-fire was a message to Major that he could not
split the IRA. At the same time, it was serious mistake by the Republicans. Peace was popular. During the cease-fire even the most rabid anti-Republicans were forced to admit that Major was the main obstacle to negotiations but the bomb put the onus back on the IRA. It allowed a hysterical wave of anti-republican sentiment particularly in the South. If, people asked, 25 years of war had not forced the British out, what was the point in resuming the armed struggle? The IRA may have preserved its unity but the "pan-nationalist alliance" so painstakingly constructed between Sinn Féin, the Social Democratic and Labour Party (SDLP), Dublin and Irish American worthies has fractured. Getting back into talks, which apparently remains the Republicans objective, will mean even bigger concessions to these forces in the future.
Major has now promised all party talks in June after the elections. He has won the reluctant support of the SDLP, Dublin and the Clinton Government. He holds a strong hand. Elections in the North will form the basis for negotiations. The outcome is thereby clearly signalled as internal, i.e. within the existing boundaries. There will be no concessions to Irish unity. Dublin will be offered some loose role as guarantor of the rights of Nationalists in the Six Counties in return for giving up its historic claim to jurisdiction over the whole of Ireland. Sinn Féin participation will mean an IRA cease-fire and the early handing over of weapons. If they don't take part, the settlement will be imposed over their heads. Political isolation could lead to big military defeats.
But Major's negotiating skills should not conceal the weakness of his position, nor should the spineless "me-too" -ism of the British Labour Party under Tony Blair, who has backed the Tories on this, as on other issues of domestic and international politics. In previous crises of de-colonisation the British ruling class were able to impose a solution even if that meant sacrificing a section of their own class in the interests of the class as a whole. Major is incapable of doing that in Ireland without dividing the Tory Party from top to bottom.
Hence, John Major's dependence on the 11 members of the Ulster Unionist Party at Westminster. Not only are the Tories divided on a series of issues, but Major is much less capable than his predecessor, Margaret Thatcher, in holding the party together behind his central projects. But he knows very well that important elements on the party right - right wing populists, English nationalists and xenophobics, are strongly pro-Unionist.
In 1985 Thatcher, much against her own unionist instincts, signed the Anglo Irish Agreement, because she recognised that it was politically necessary to involve the Dublin Government in order to stem the rise of Sinn Féin. Aside from Major's much narrower majority in Parliament, there are reckoned to be about 20 Tory MPs who are die-hard unionists and who take their political lead on Northern Ireland as much from Ulster Unionist Party leader David Trimble as from Major. The election defeat which the Tories seem certain to face before mid - 1997 is likely to lead to an outbreak of bloodletting and internal feuding in the Conservative and Unionist Party not seen since the 19th or early 20th centuries. The splits reflect fundamental divisions in the British ruling class about the long term strategic interests of British capital. Put crudely, the question is this: Does it lie with closer integration into the European Union or with continuation of trans-Atlantic links with the US? In general, big capital favours EU integration, while smaller domestic capital is against. The problem is that the Thatcherites who have led the Tory Party for 20 years and who now dominate it are
Ireland/Britain * virulently anti-EU. A small group of them are willing to risk defeat of the Government in order to oppose European integration.
Major's Parliamentary difficulties are also interesting for the light they cast on the splits in the ruling class as a whole on the question of Ireland. In a post Cold War world they have less of a strategic interest in Ireland. In the Die Zeit interview mentioned earlier, Mayhew bemoaned the economic cost: "3bn for 1.5 million people". Nobody believes for a minute that the British are willing to spend such sums year after year to protect the "democratic" rights of the Unionists. Not even the Unionists - despite the close historic ties between themselves and the Conservatives.
While the British may have no strategic or economic interest in remaining in part of Ireland they have a political interest in defeating Irish Republicanism because of the threat it has posed historically and continues to pose to British rule in Ireland. In that sense, Sinn Féin and the IRA can never concede enough: they must be eradicated without any prospect of being revived. This desire is shared by the Dublin ruling class who have had a number of shocks as a result of the war in the North. The most recent, in the early 1980s saw the rise of Sinn Féin following the Hunger Strikes threaten to combine dangerously with the economic crisis and destabilise the Southern State.
Of course terror on the scale required to obliterate Republicanism is not politically possible so close to home, though the policy was implemented in more distant colonial struggles such as Aden and Kenya and by the French in Algeria. That is not to say that a low-level variant was not used in Ireland with "shoot to kill" and the use of loyalist terror gangs. It may or may not be surprising that the last die-hard exponent of this policy in Ireland was Labour Northern Ireland Secretary Roy Mason in the late 1970's.
The critical move away from this occurred in 1985 with the Anglo Irish Agreement. The Tories under Thatcher who had until then resisted any encroachment on British "sovereignty" in the North of Ireland, came round to the view that since the IRA could not be defeated militarily, they needed to enlist the help of the Dublin Government to politically isolate them. It was this which laid the foundation for Dublin's key role in both the Downing Street Declaration and the Framework
International Viewpoint #277 21
treland/Britain Document setting out the terms on which the British wanted to stabilise the Northern statelet.
Sinn Féin's strategy in the pannationalist alliance with Dublin and the Social Democratic and Labour Party (SDLP) has been to press Dublin (and they would prefer Fianna Fail over Fine Gael) with the help of the American Irish lobby to lever concessions from the British. Such concessions as the British are willing to make — and there has been little enough of these so far — will be in the context of strenthening partition. They have not given up their desire to defeat Republicanism, merely changed tack in the belief that the Dublin ruling class can do it more effectively.
While the Canary Wharf bomb showed they could not split the IRA, it is very difficult to see how a dangerous split can be avoided if the leadership continues along its present course. There are historic precedents for British intervention in support of pro-British elements in Ireland. The Civil War following the 1921 Agreement which partitioned the country was fought between two factions of Sinn Féin one of whom received military help from the British. It is the British interest in a split in the IRA, if not outright civil war, in pursuance of the desire to inflict a once-and-for-all defeat on the Republicans which is the most likely cause of a "bloodbath" in Ireland today.
One of the odder sights in the recent history of Ireland has seen the British build massive military fortresses along the border between North and South of Ireland at the same time as the Single Market, and the consequent dismantling of trade barriers, came into existence. At the very time when the border opened economically the British determined to close it militarily. Clearly, a solution along the lines advocated by John Hume of the SDLP would make sense from the point of view of both the London and Dubl in Governments, if only Major was capable of enforcing it on his Europhobic right wing.
This political paralysis extends not just to Ireland but also to other national 22 International Viewpoint #277 questions within the British state which threatens to blow it (and the Tory Party) apart. And it is precisely atrophy which threatens Major's plan for Ireland. If he concedes the principle of local government in Northern Ireland he can hardly refuse it in Scotland. The Labour Party favours a Scottish Parliament because they believe it will save the union by heading of the proindependence Scottish National Party. It is quite likely that the opposite will be the case, as the Scottish bourgeoisie decide to throw in their lot with a dynamic west European capitalism rather than remain tied to a declining British one.
The truth is that for all Margaret Thatcher's boasts of putting the "great" back into Great Britain, her 10 year reign was a managed decline and pulling back from the pretensions of empire. Euphoria over the Malvinas ("Falklands") war, the permanent seat on the UN Council, the "special relationship" with the US and the US sponsored "nuclear deterrent" could not disguise the relative economic decline over a long period. The problem was and still remains one of finding a military and political role to match its lowlier economic status in the
It is unlikely that the British ruling class will seriously divide over Ireland although there are historical precedents for that. The fault lines are more likely to be along questions such as the relationship to the EU and to the US. However it is not impossible that the Irish question could loom larger in the lowered horizons of post imperial Britain, even if only as the detonator to the explosive tensions building up within the British state since the early 1970's.
Military defeat would be unthinkable: British overseas interests rely for their security on the perceived military might of the British state. Anything which weakens that, even in a minor colony such as the North of Ireland, would be extremely dangerous. The stakes in are higher than might first appear.
In the post-war de-colonisations, the Labour Party, with the help of the US, was willing to step in and do what the Tories were incapable of doing, pulling out. "New" Labour under Blair seems totally incapable of providing options for the ruling class.
There has been very little criticism of Blair's position from inside the Labour Parliamentary Party. Former shadow
Northern Ireland Secretary Kevin MacNamara has criticised Blair's support for Major's planned elections on May 30th. MacNamara's successor Mo Mowlem has carefully cultivated the Unionists and rarely criticises the Tories. In fact, one of MacNamara's main criticisms was that the Unionists were getting so much reassurance from Labour that they could drive a harder bargain with Major and the Tories on issues such as whether Sinn Féin should be allowed into negotiations. The Chair of the Socialist Campaign Group of Mps, John Austin Walker, attended the recent Sinn Féin Ard Fheis in Dublin and spoke in a personal capacity. Nearly 30 Labour MP's voted against the renewal of the Prevention of Terrorism Act against the advice of the leadership. The same number opposed a piece of legislation rushed through Parliament by the Tories which allows the police to cordon off and search people entering or leaving an area without having to show reasonable cause. Shadow Home Secretary, Jack Straw, promised Labour Party support simply on the basis of Intelligence reports, further strengthening his right-wing populist image.
Unity by consent, which has been official Party policy since the mid 1980's has been abandoned in practice as Blair and Mowlem talk of creating "a level playing field " for the negotiations between Unionists and Nationalists.
What has changed, even since the beginning of the current phase of the struggle, is the context. The British state is decaying from within as the economic and political crises become entwined. Ireland has sometimes been the cause of splits in the British ruling class, often the catalyst for long and bitter battles. It is as incapable of imposing a solution on Ireland as it is of finding a way through the problems which beset it on all sides.
Labour is no more capable than the Conservatives of imposing a solution, even with the assistance of the Dublin ruling class. It may even be less able as the Tories "rally to the flag" in a desperate effort to win the next general election and little Englandism grows on the Tory Right. The one certainty is that the new "settlement" will go the way of previous British efforts: the long struggle between Irish Republicans and British imperialism will continue.
For socialists, the demands remain: for British withdrawal and self-determination for the Irish people. *