Some months ago I suffered a life-threating illness and have been in hibernation trying to recover since. So, as I began to lift my head and look around the political world of Northern Ireland I decided that, bar riots happening in Winter, nothing much had changed. As I prepared to back into hibernation again the MSM and various social networks began to flash that Fred Cobain had defected to the DUP.
My first thought was to check the strength of my tablets because surely, surely,I had started hallucinating… but no, indeed “Red” Fred, the man noted for both his strongly socialist outlook and for reportedly being conned by the DUP at the last Assembly election has indeed defected, possibily courtesy of the offer of a council seat in Carrickfergus.
Leaving aside my views on why anyone would go to a party which so screwed him over so recently I did begin to wonder how Fred’s left-wing views will be seen in a party where most members are regular Daily Mail readers. Despite Sammy Wilson’s previously proclaimed view that he’d be Labour if in England, the DUP is not a party noted for its left-leaning ideas. Nor indeed, is Unionism in general noted for great socialist thinking.
However, there once was a Labour Party in Northern Ireland which had cabinet ministers among its ranks, and it’s worth briefly looking at the failure of the Labour movement in this part of the world following partition.
On a personal level, my maternal grandfather came of strong trade union stock, forged in the Glasgow and then Belfast shipyards. If he wasn’t actually a card-carrying communist, he wasn’t far off in his views. This was a man who fought against the hold of Orangeism in the working classes and who despised the UUP even more than the DUP for betraying the working man. I have no idea who he voted for after the demise of the NILP, but vote he did.
This dichotomy has struck me recently as worth exploring, especially in light of the 2010 UCUNF experiment and the more recent move by David McNarry to UKIP. Unionist-leaning voters have a plethora of right-of-centre parties to choose from, but where do the lefties like Grandpa and Fred go?
Historically, the trade union movement never really got off the ground in Belfast the way it should have, given the industrial base where it should have found massive support form both Nationalists and Unionists: at one point West Belfast was an NILP seat in the Stormont Parliament and at Westminster, but no longer.
Partly, this was due to partition and the choice of Labour in England to allow the Irish Labour Party to be the only organising force in Ireland. After partition, and this being a country where politics fractures at every chance, the NILP came into being and found support within Belfast’s working class and won seats in three of the four Belfast constituencies – East, North and West. At one point n the mid-1940s it even had a Westmister MP in West Belfast, Jack Beattie.
This should have been fertile ground to grow the seeds of a strong Labour movement which could have seen Northern Ireland as a strong Labour heartland similar to the other industrial regions of the UK.
But it didn’t happen.
Partly, the failure of any left-wing party to fully engage both working class communities and the continued dominance of the Orange Order over the Protestant working classes hampered efforts. Partly, the failure of the British Labour Party to recognise the Border and its continued appointment of Northern Ireland spokesmen like Kevin McNamara, Mo Mowlam and Peter Hain who all shared a pro-Nationalist outlook helped alienate pro-union types.
These provided the seeds of destruction for any serious Labour movement, which is a pity for the same reasons a broken Conservative and Unionist link is bad: the damage to the development of politics along left-right lines.
By such small measures we are remembered and the failure of Labour to exploit the potential of fully participating in Northern Irish politics is one measure whereby we have been deprived of the chance for left-right politics to develop along non-sectarian lines.
So, this week, socialist Fred Cobain moved to a fundamentally conservative party which implements conservative welfare policy without a murmur. How the mighty are fallen…and Labour has only itself to blame.
So, listen, my children, and you shall hear
of the midnight ride of the lefties,…
Hardly a man is now alive
Who remembers the NILP…
(With apologies to Longfellow)
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2 comments
Open Unionism
January 20, 2013 at 4:14 pm (UTC 0) Link to this comment
We have received the following comment via email:
“Beautifully written Deirdre, encompasses my political thinking in a nutshell and demonstrates why there is no oppositon at Stormont, ie all the Parties of Government are right of centre to one degree or other. However a Government is only as good as its opposition who hunt and harrie them day and daily. That could possibly explain why the Government of Northern Ireland are so pathetic, they don\’t give a toss about the consequences of their actions because they know they won\’t be seriously challanged in the House. This sham, for thats what it is has a limited shelf life, sooner or later the wheels will come off the gravy train. Then and only then will a credible alternative emerge along centre left lines with the possiblity of real politics emerging as envisaged by your article.”
Colin Reid
January 21, 2013 at 10:52 am (UTC 0) Link to this comment
I’ve long been fascinated with the left in Ireland, before and after partition. The difficulties that lefties faced when propagating a purely socialist worldview, however, was the salience of the national question – to put it crudely, are you a Protestant socialist or a Catholic socialist? The binary unionist-nationalist breakdown has broken every socialist-inclined movement in Irish history: think of the split between William Walker and James Connolly during the Edwardian period (http://www.marxists.org/archive/connolly/1911/connwalk/) or indeed how the NILP tettered between pro- and anti-partitionism before embracing the Union in 1949 (which alienated many Catholic voters). Added to the internal divisions within the left is the appeal of ‘red’ nationalism and unionism: the UUP set up a working class association in 1918; independent unionists, who combined hardline loyalism with socialism held working class seats around Belfast for decades after partition; while SInn Fein sporadically crossed socialist rhetoric with republicanism since 1919. All this effectively neutered labourism in Ireland, locking ‘true’ lefties out of the political mainstream. Unionism has been historically terrified of the left, and has long pushed the national question in Ireland/Northern Ireland to crush dissent within the Protestant bloc and to build unity.