Straight Talk, Indeed

The Straight Talk interview with Kate Hoey was very good indeed. We almost never hear that the Civil Rights movement in Northern Ireland was not initially anything to do with Irish Nationalism (the old Nationalist Party, never mind Sinn Fein, had no part in its initial structures), but rather a campaign for the things that the British Labour tradition defines as among the essentials of Britishness and of British citizenship.

Although Hoey did not mention it, it was the Parliamentary Labour Party that voted against the partition of the United Kingdom, the only entire party to do so. It was the Attlee Government that first ever accepted the principle of consent with regard to the constitutional status of Northern Ireland. It was the Wilson Government that deployed British troops to protect Northern Ireland’s grateful Catholics precisely as British subjects. And it was the Callaghan Government that administered Northern Ireland exactly as if it were any other part of the United Kingdom.

Hoey did, however, speak powerfully of the disenfranchisement of the people of Northern Ireland by the failure of the main British parties to organise there, thus making the constitutional question the point of elections, even though very few (and very rich) must ever have been those who woke up every day worrying about it.

The Tories’ little-known organisation in Northern Ireland was, and is, meaningless in the absence of that of the others, and constitutes the ridiculous spectacle of an integrationist secession from the UUP under the aegis of what is itself the party of the Anglo-Irish Agreement.

Although there is much of the unsung prophet about Robert McCartney, it is nevertheless hard not to chuckle at the thought of an integrationist party which existed only in Northern Ireland; Trotskyist parliamentary candidates, and anarchist parties, do rather spring to mind. But then again, what alternative did he have? (Although what stopped him, once an MP, from joining Labour at the address of the flat that he presumably kept in London, and then applying for the Labour Whip?)

Westminster politicians and their approved pundits may and do bemoan the carve-up of Northern Ireland’s government between the most grotesquely exaggerated expressions of the two “sides”. But, going at least all the way back to the creation of Stormont, they have only themselves to blame.