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From Socialist Worker, No. 103, 4 January 1969, p. 4.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’ Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
RECENT EVENTS in Northern Ireland have made clear to most British socialists the existence of a police state in Britain’s backyard.
To explain what this means in practice it is necessary to describe in detail the act which, side by side with the British Government of Ireland Act 1920, functions as the real constitution of the Six Counties of Northern Ireland.
This act, the Civil Authorities (Special Powers) Act (Northern Ireland) 1922, is one of the most all-embracing pieces of repressive legislation anywhere in Europe. Section One of the Act contains a blanket clause giving the government power ‘take all such steps and issue all such orders as may be necessary for preserving peace and maintaining order.’
Section Two, subsection three makes it a criminal offence to fail to inform the police of suspicious, not to say illegal, activity.
Section Five provides for the punishment of political offenders by judicial whipping.
Section Six prescribes the death penalty for infringement of certain sections of the Act.
Section 10 gives the government or police the power to interfere with coroners and juries.
Taken together these and other sections of the Act represent a charter drawn up by the Northern Ireland Tory government with the aid and assistance of Britain, and presented to the police as a composite plan for the efficient castration of any opposition.
The reason for the severity of the Act is to be found in the artificial nature of the Six County statelet. The cause is clear – a division in the Irish ruling class, originating in economic differences which was then manipulated by British imperialism.
The Northern ruling class kept its close links with British imperialism. In maintaining these links, the northern capitalists were aided by British troops who assisted in holding sufficient people and territory to make the Northern state viable.
Had the Orange enclave been confined to the immediate environment of Belfast, its popular base might have allowed the development of normal bourgeois democracy. But this was never on the cards: economically, the base is not big enough; politically, without British aid for the northern rulers, the southern regime would undoubtedly have swallowed it.
The necessary inclusion of a nationalist population amounting to one third of the total means that opposition to the regime, from whatever political quarter, tends to become opposition to the existence of the Six County State as such. Hence the need for the Special Powers Act.
From this follows the importance of the struggle for democracy in Northern Ireland. This struggle must be based on a programme which rejects Toryism, Green as well as Orange.
The Northern worker will never be won to a programme which calls for the absorption of the Six Counties into the present southern regime with its Rome-rule-in-the-schools which tends to confirm his ever-present fear that a break with Orange Toryism will open the floodgates and relegate him to the position of a second-class citizen.
He will only be won for the establishment of a republic, when it is clear in his mind that what is envisaged is a Workers’ Republic, in which he as a worker will control bis own destiny without fear of Thames or Tiber.
The complexity of the situation has in the past been used by many in the labour movement in Britain as an excuse for doing nothing, or else indulging in the old British habit of telling the Irish how to run their own affairs.
This British paternalist – not to say nationalist – attitude to Ireland will come as no surprise to Irish revolutionary socialists, who have long recognised, if not accepted,the inability of the labour movement in Britain to show an understanding of the Irish problem.
The result of this attitude in practice is that even the best-informed British left-wing organisations fail to take any part in the struggle against British imperialism in Ireland.
What is to be done? First and foremost British socialists must refrain from penning long high-flown theoretical articles (which all end by telling Irish socialists what to do) and instead launch a campaign of solidarity with the Irish movement. In this campaign the best thing British socialists can do is demand:
Last updated: 15 January 2021