Editorial

ISR 2

Editorial The internal politics of Northern Ireland’s one million-strong Protestant community have not received the same attention from the British Left as their Catholic counterparts. In many ways this is understandable. The long battle against British domination in the Six Counties has naturally placed the Catholic community at the centre of attention, with the Protestants operating as an unattractive mass pressure group on successive British Governments to get tough with Irish nationalism in all its forms.

But this long-standing failure to get to grips with the politics of Unionism and Loyalism has undoubtedly proved detrimental to the need for a broad political analysis of the Northern Ireland state. Articles attempting to explain splits amongst the Unionist populace are all too often simple, journalistic descriptions without any solid implications for an understanding of the internal dynamics of Protestant political life. A common assumption is that the description of Unionism and Loyalism as right wing movements is adequate for most purposes of explanation. But for a British audience, the term right wing carries with it a whole set of implications about the political programme of the movement; i.e. anti-working class, hatred of trade unions, opposition to the welfare state , and state intervention in the economy etc.

: The weakness of applying these standards of right wing t politics to the followers of Paisley, Kilfedder, Molyneux et. al.

i has been noted by a number of ‘two nations’ theorists. It is ' certainly true that Protestant workers cannot be simply dismissed as supporters of British Toryism and in many ways their political attitudes are not a million miles away from the social democracy of sections of the British trade union and , labour movement. Some opponents of Irish nationalism in the British labour movement have gone to the extent of generating their own myths about the alleged progressiveness of Protestant workers.

These groups range from the small Labour Campaign for Representation in Ireland through to the supporters of the ‘Militant’ tendency, and a few sections of the British Communist Party. These groups all have an extremely 1 optimistic view of the capacity for economic struggles over issues such as wages and employment to provide the basis tor a socialist programme uniting the Northern Ireland working class: an argument which is very hard to sustain in the light of the historical evidence to the contrary.

Is there an alternative view of the Protestant working class that avoids the pitfalls of regarding it as either uniformly reactionary or uniformly progressive? Three of the articles in this issue of ISR have a direct bearing on the answer to this question. Firstly, Geoff Bell, in The Protestant Working Class ~ still ‘no surrender’, provides us with a statement of the argument from a more or less orthodox left wing view. Bell examines the splits within the major Loyalist parties over the last decade and asks if these developments have any class content insofar as they might increase the polarisation between Protestant labour and Unionist capital.

Bell concedes that the leaderships of these latter-day Unionist parties appear to have ‘bread and butter’ issues closer to their hearts than the previous generation of Unionist leaders, but still the insistence on support for the partitioning of Oe Ireland presents an absolute block to the development of ‘socialist politics amongst these workers.

In order to throw light on present-day problems of analysis, Bob Purdie returns to a period when the specifically Labourist response of the Protestant working class in Belfast was a good deal stronger than it is today. Belfast Labourism 1905-25 presents us with the full extent of the dilemma of the Protestant labour movement. We read of a working class movement which was capable of appealing to advanced ' socialist internationalism in its arguments against Irish nationalism — yet still allied itself with the extremes of ‘Protestant reaction in defence of the Union with Britain.

Purdie’s analysis suggests that there is nothing in principle to prevent a certain level of socialist ideology gaining broad support amongst Protestant workers in certain circumstances, but the ultimate limitations of any progress made at this level will be judged by the stand taken on the national question.

The third and final article in this discussion is Richard Chessum’s extended review of the recently published book by Bew, Gibbon and Patterson, The State in Northern Ireland, A main part of the discussion in this book concerns the nature of the class alliances beiween Protestant workers and the Unionist bourgeoisie which provided the social underpinning to the State in the period up until 1972 (when the authors claim the Northern Ireland state was smashed and replaced ’ by the UK State). Bew e¢ al discount the importance of notions of ‘nation’ and ‘nationality’ as explanations of the maintenance of the Protestant cross-class alliance. Instead they draw attention to the overt populism of the dominant fraction of the Unionist ruling class, which was, in their opinion, the major factor which ensured that Protestant workers were kept on the side of the Union.

Each of these three articles has its own points to make about the complexity of the Protestant working class in Northern Ireland. Hopefully they will provide further discussion and investigation around these themes, taking the present level of analysis beyond the present simplistic tendency to see the Orange working class as either wholly evil or wholly good. FRO ok ae oe eo oR ok OK oR ok OOK OE OR Ok ok KK In other articles in this issue, Keith Savage reviews some of the latest developments in the politics of the Social Democratic and Labour Party, the major Catholic party in the North. Once again, the SDLP is frequently dismissed by the British Left without any of its ideas being properly discussed or understood. Readers should find this piece enlightening in this respect. Similarly, many people on the Left in Britain have only the dimmest idea of the politics of the Provisional Sinn Fein in , Ireland and the type of debates which take place within " that party. All too often this lack of knowledge leads to the . PSF being dismissed as simple right wing nationalists, or even _ as proto-fascists, Readers who have inclined in this direction ~ will therefore find the report on the recent Ard Fheis (National Conference) of the PSF particularly interesting. The importance of socialist ideas to the debate within the party, . and the impact which movements such as feminism has had on sections of its membership, is explained by Sue O’Halloran, . -the PSF Press Officer in Britain.

We are aware that some readers will disagree with O’Halloran’s assessment .f the political developments at the Ard Fheis, We look forward to receiving the various views on this subject for publication in a future edition of JSR.

Finally, once again we have had to increase the price of ISR. The new price, 60p, represents something closer to the economic cost of producing a left journal by an independent editorial collective with limited financial resources. We are confident that readers who appreciate the importance of Ireland to the development of Marxist politics in Britain will understand that 60p still represents good value for the work ISR is engaged in. rr Articles and correspondence should be addressed to: Ireland Socialist Review, 60 Loughborough Road, London SW9.