POLITICS
The peace process is still the best deal in town, but it is not safe with New Labour
BRUCE ANDERSON
The Ulster Protestant paramilitaries labour under a number of related disadvan- tages. To the extent that they could claim to be defending the rights of a democratic majority, their case is less ignoble than the IRA's. But except in the immediate after- math of its atrocities, the IRA has always been able to shelter behind romantic mythology. In Britain, America and Europe, millions of people who ought to know better are prepared to sentimentalise terrorism and homicide when committed by Irish Republicans. The IRA often manages to seem glamorous; no one has ever tried to glamorise the Protestant paramilitaries.
Their second drawback is that they are exclusively working class: perhaps, indeed, the only genuinely working-class political movement that there has ever been. The militants of the UDA, UVF, et al. have far more tattoos than 0-levels. But in the absence of an educated leadership, the Protestant paramilitaries not only sound thick; they are thick. The tattoos are implanted on their brains as well as their forearms. Their recent outbreak of self- destructiveness would lead any rational observer to conclude that there could only be one justification for their behaviour: they are now working alongside the IRA and its sympathisers in order to destroy the Union. But that would be to apply reason and logic to profoundly sub-rational per- sons who know not what they do.
They are not the only ones. It is possible to make excuses for semi-literate despera- does; it is impossible to excuse the behaviour of those in official circles who have fawned on these squalid creatures. For many years now, such so-called 'loyal- ists' — absolutely unworthy of the name have financed themselves by drug-dealing and protection rackets; they are hoodlums as well as terrorists. Despite its public image, the Unionist community is deeply law-abiding, so it is hardly surprising that the paramilitaries enjoy negligible public support. But the Blair government has con- sistently acted as if it placed a high priority on strengthening their position. At the Assembly elections, the two loyalist paramilitary political parties received 3.7 per cent of the vote between them. In any sensible system, that would have kept them well away from the legislature. In Ulster, however, the electoral system had been rigged to ensure that the larger paramili- tary party, the PUP, was represented in the Assembly.
But there has not only been a wholly unmerited representation. To a revolting extent, David Ervine, the head of the PUP, has been fawned over by those who ought to know better. At the same time as Mo Mowlam was snubbing and alienating the Unionists, and deriving far more pleasure from her social calls on murderers in the Maze prison than from her meetings with David Trimble and his colleagues, she went out of her way to confer a virtually heroic status upon Mr Ervine. In her case, this may have been no more than a characteris- tic misjudgment: an infantile leftist's admi- ration for political rough trade. But others may have had more sinister motives.
The PUP's finances are mysterious. Far healthier than its negligible membership can explain, they may have been supple- mented by more than one form of racke- teering. There are suggestions that organs of the Irish government have encouraged donations to the PUP, with a single end in view: to weaken and discredit Unionism. The hope is that world opinion will put the Unionists on all fours with Sinn Fein. Just as it has its military wing, the IRA, so do the Unionists: the loyalist paramilitaries. That is, of course, an utterly dishonest argument, which skates over the fact that Mr Trimble and his party despise the Protestant paramilitaries as much as they do the Provos. But no libel against Union- ism is too gross to gain currency among the influentially ignorant.
In near despair at the damage to Union- ism, many mainland friends of that great cause — most notably, Michael Gove of the Times — argue that the blame lies with the peace process. It is true that from the out- set that process did involve moral hazards. It not only required British ministers to speak out of all four corners of their mouths at once. It also offered rehabilita- tion and indeed ministerial office to those who had neither earned the one nor deserved the other.
It is easy to recoil in revulsion from many aspects of the peace process. It is also self- indulgent, and wrong in two respects. The first is 30 years of history; the second, more recent history. Those Unionists opposed to the peace process ignore the inescapable conclusion that by the 1990s no better option was available. That need not have been so. If only the British government had acted rapidly and decisively in 1968/69, if only Sunningdale had not collapsed, if only the Anglo-Irish Agreement had never been signed. Even one of those 'if onlys' might have made it possible for a Tory govern- ment in the early 1990s to come to Union- ism's defence in a wholehearted manner. Instead, there was — at best — covert sup- port, in an ambiguous rhetoric which might have been designed to maximise Unionist insecurity.
But given the international climate, given the historical legacy, and, above all, given the state of mainland public opinion, which could not have been won over to a thor- oughgoing Unionist initiative, the peace process, however flawed, was the best deal available to Unionism. It still is, and rather than criticise it, Unionism's mainland friends ought to be trying to rescue John Major's initial concept of the peace process from the Blair/Mowlam/Mandelson version, a blend of mismanagement and malignity.
At least until 1997, decommissioning was regarded as an integral part of the peace process. If there had still been a Conserva- tive government including the likes of Robert Cranborne and Michael Howard, that would have remained true, because otherwise they and others would have resigned. It is also inconceivable that a Major government would simply have opened the doors of the Maze gaol and turned terrorist prisoners into terrorist reinforcements. It is equally inconceivable that such a government would have allowed the peace process to become a means of hollowing out Ulster's Unionist identity. Even if Chris Patten had been commis- sioned to report on the RUC, no Conserva- tive government could have accepted his insults to its name and cap badge.
In view of all these Tory and Unionist constraints on a Conservative govern- ment's room for manoeuvre, it is possible that the peace process might have col- lapsed. But as decommissioning is as far off as ever, and as this government's attempts to boost the status of the Protes- tant paramilitaries have been so magnifi- cently successful, it is also possible that the Blair version of the peace process will col- lapse. If so, the blame should be put where it belongs: not with the ministers who designed the peace process, but with the ones who have perverted it.
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