Ninety Years On

Two points are raised by the ninetieth birthday of Bert Ward.

One is that since the dissolution of the Communist Party of Great Britain in 1991, there has been nothing to do even what it ever could, and it was a very imperfect instrument, in order to anchor the Left while also engaging fully in the battle of ideas at every level of cultural life and of the education system, while refusing to consign or confine demotic culture to “the enormous condescension of posterity”, and while co-ordinating broad-based and inclusive campaigns for human rights and civil liberties, for peace (including nuclear, radiological, chemical and biological disarmament, and including against the arms trade), for environmental responsibility, and for the defence and extension of jobs, services and amenities. It is a very British gap, urgently demanding to be filled.

The second point is that the Welfare State, workers’ rights, full employment, a strong Parliament, trade unions, co-operatives, credit unions, mutual guarantee societies, mutual building societies, and nationalised industries (often with the word “British” in their names) were historically successful in creating communities of interest among the several parts of the United Kingdom, including between Great Britain and Northern Ireland, thus safeguarding and strengthening the Union.

The Parliamentary Labour Party voted against the partition of the United Kingdom, which was also the partition of the Irish Catholic ethnic group in these Islands. The first Labour Government resisted any independent role for the Irish Free State at the League of Nations, and upheld the ban on the issuing of passports that did not include the words “British Subject”.

The Attlee Government’s was the first ever acceptance of the principle of consent with regard to the constitutional status of Northern Ireland, opposed by a handful of Labour MPs, mostly Soviet agents or sympathisers, and resulting in no negative reaction from unions and local parties, numerous of which were dominated by Irish Catholics at that time. The Wilson Government deployed British troops to protect Northern Ireland’s grateful Catholics precisely as British subjects.

The Callaghan Government administered Northern Ireland exactly as if it were any other part of the United Kingdom. Two Ulster Unionist MPs voted to save the Callaghan Government when both Irish Nationalists abstained. Both the fact that they did so and the reason why are significant.

The last integrationist MP to date elected specifically as such was the Labour-minded Robert McCartney. The Ulster Unionist who defeated him, Sylvia Hermon, has since left that party due to its alliance with the Conservatives, allying herself to Labour and even to positions generally associated with the Labour Left, notably opposition to nuclear weapons and to European federalism.

The Irish-speaking Sammy Douglas, who was a Labour activist when he lived in Great Britain, and who is now a very well-known cross-community activist in East Belfast, has used the Democratic Unionist Party to secure a seat in the Northern Ireland Assembly. Northern Ireland trade unionists sit as Labour peers.

The British State is of continuing importance in protecting Northern Ireland’s Catholic interest against Protestant domination, whether under devolution pursuant to the Good Friday Agreement, or within such federal Irish structures as may ever be acceptable to a Dublin Establishment at once profoundly unconcerned about Northern Ireland’s Catholics and profoundly influenced by the theory of two nations with an equal right to self-determination.