In Another Form?

Sue Gray gave Lord Alli a Downing Street pass in return for £10,000 towards her son's successful election campaign. It will be worth keeping an eye on that angle. Here in "the regions", we are to welcome Gray as the Prime Minister's Envoy to us. Haven't we suffered enough? As for Morgan McSweeney, he was the Director of Labour Together when it was fined for having failed to declare £730,000 worth of donations and for having broken electoral law more than 20 times.

Wearing their United Nations blue helmets, many Irish soldiers have been killed in Southern Lebanon by whoever it is that bombs the place and periodically invades it, but this time the world will be watching. What will McSweeney say then? And by "then", we may mean tonight.

As an Irish national, McSweeney would be specifically excluded from the list of those allowed to leave Gaza, the only European nationality to be so treated. Tell yourself that Celtic and Liverpool fans do not know what they are talking about, although people who can lay their hands on a PFLP flag have nothing if not a more than average level of engagement. But American Democrats, and their wannabes from Canberra to Clyde Valley, get out of the fact that Israel is at war with Ireland. It is astonishing that you have ignored that fact until now. Yet even you will very, very, very soon be unable to do so.

Ireland's relationship with the British Empire is contestable and contested. Ireland was never a colony. It returned full voting members of the House of Commons on the same franchise as obtained in Great Britain. The Potato Famine needs to be set in the context of rural poverty and the responses to it, or lack of them, throughout these Islands in and around the 1840s. Sir Michael O'Dwyer was not a unique figure, or even an especially unusual one. Australia is a purely colonial entity with no federal or state-level treaty relationship with any of its indigenous peoples. Irish Catholics were its largest minority for most of its history, to enormous cultural and political effect, and it is currently governed by a party that remains very close indeed to that community. And so on, even before mentioning the Empire that still exists, which is the American imperium, foreign and domestic.

But Irish popular identification with anti-imperialism is profound. Anti-imperialism has a technical meaning that those who seek to apply it to, say, Ukraine either do not know, or choose to ignore in an adolescent attempt at humour. But let us play along. Where do sympathies lie in relation to Israel, Palestine and Lebanon among the demoi of Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Ukraine at least without Crimea and the Donbas, Moldova at least without Transnistria, Bulgaria, Hungary, Slovakia, Czechia, Poland, and what was once East Germany? (Romania, Albania and the former Yugoslavia are more complicated affairs.) John Pilger, whose family has set up that wonderful site with all of his films and a very great deal more material, called the transfer of the Chagos Islands to Mauritius without the democratic consent of the Chagossians, "colonialism in another form." Will those countries join the call for the direct representation of the Chagossians in the negotiation of the treaty? Will Ireland? And if Ireland did not, then what would the anti-colonialist Irish people have to say? What would McSweeney have to say? What would he have to say if it did?