BRAINS OF STONE

Geoffrey Wheatcroft on the lessons

for both Left and Right, following the latest debacle for British policy in Ulster

TOO LONG a sacrifice can make a stone of the heart — and it can also dull the brain. The most tragic thing about the past 25 years in Ulster is of course the thou- sands of violent deaths. But almost as depressing in its way is the complete mis- understanding of the subject on both polit- ical sides, Right and Left.

'Right' here doesn't mean the Govern- ment or most Tories, who don't so much understand or misunderstand Ulster as simply long for it to go away. The Govern- ment's policy is a more sophisticated ratio- nalisation of this yearning. But then Sir Patrick Mayhew is only the latest in a long line of British politicians — Lloyd George with his 1920 Act being the outstanding example — who thought that the problem could be spirited away by legislative pres- tidigitation or constitutional colloquies. It would be nice, but far too optimistic, to think that the republicans' latest decision to continue with tried and trusted methods ('Sinn Fein blocks way to peace', in the Guardian's unimprovable headline last Monday) will end these illusions.

One group on the Right is certainly interested in Ulster. Romantic Tories and the Fogey Press make a cult of 'the Union'. This is linked to an obsession with 'sovereignty' (the same obsession as under- lies the Fogeys' hostility to Europe, distort- ing their view of that question, too). Sovereignty in this absolute sense is a quite recent concept, and a misleading one. In real life, sovereignty is often qualified by internal federation or external treaty. Enoch Powell, the apostle of sovereignty, and the Fogey Right's presiding guru, has opposed devolution for Scotland because 'there can be no halfway house' between full union and independence. The devolved parliament and executive which existed at Stormont for half a century con- futes this. It was an historical accident, and an unhappy one, but there it was.

The romantic Right spoil their case by a dogmatic assertion that Northern Ireland is as British as any part of England, which is obnoxious to reason and observation. This dogmatism may be what David McKie of the Guardian has in mind when he sneers at 'the "say never and mean it" solution . . . frequently advocated in places like The Spectator by people per- haps too much influenced by the memory of their prep schools.' (I'm not sure I get the last phrase; were these fogeyish scrib- blers made to recite the Ulster Covenant before lights out, or taught to sing 'The Auld Orange Flute' on the rugger touch line?) But no one sane ever says 'never' about any political arrangement. The Union is neither necessarily permanent, nor one of those cardinal political princi- ples like (at the risk of being sententious) the rule of law, constitutional government or free speech. Perhaps one day a clear majority of the people of Northern Ireland will want to leave the United Kingdom for the Irish Republic and will express this wish by returning a clear majority of like-minded MPs from the province. Until then, the case for partition is quite simply based on democracy and self-determination.

Which is why, viewed objectively, the Right is not as absurd about Ulster from its own point of view as the Left is from its. No blather about the sacred Union can match the mindless mysticism surrounding the words 'united Ireland', especially when they are used by those who call themselves liberals or democrats or socialists. It is not just the naked contempt which the Left shows for the one industrial proletariat in Ireland, the Protestants of eastern Ulster. It is not just the Left's loathing for Orange Unionism, in its way one of the great pop- ulist nationalisms of Europe. It is not just the Left's desire to force those Protestants into what Alan Watkins of the Independent on Sunday calls, with only a touch of hyperbole, the most reactionary theocracy west of Tehran. Leave aside even the undisguised affection which some self- 'I hate you, you go brown so quickly.' styled socialists have for the most success- ful fascist movement in western Europe, Provisional Sinn Fein-IRA (to be fair to 'the Left', it shouldn't be judged by John Rees of the Socialist Workers Party, who believes that 'Gerry Adams advocates the use of force . . as part of a wider struggle for greater freedom and democracy').

Beyond all that is something else. The Labour party favours a 'united Ireland'. But no Labour politician — or anyone else — has ever explained why a united Ireland should be inherently desirable. When you do stop to ask that question you find that a `united Ireland' is an essentially reactionary cause.

Labour favours unification 'by consent', which is not so much reactionary as hypo- critical or nonsensical. When the Democrats adopted this same policy as a plank for the presidential election ten years ago, the Washington columnist Michael Kinsley wrote that they should have fol- lowed 'a united Ireland through consent' with 'and cheaper air fares through the abolition of gravity'. The plain fact is that a million Ulster Protestants do not consent to be ruled by Dublin, and will not consent in any foreseeable circumstances. The Dublin government has begun to grasp this, at least in principle. For some 60 years, as John Bowman puts it in his masterly book De Valera and the Ulster Question, 'while Fianna Fail insisted that unity must be based on the unionists' consent, they dog- matically denied to them any right to refuse that consent'. Dick Spring, the Irish foreign minister, has now conceded that for consent to mean anything it must include a right to withhold it.

That is more than our own Labour Party does. It advocates 'that Ireland should be united and that this should be done on the basis of consent and by peaceful and demo- cratic means,' but adds the minatory and ugly rider (in terms all too similar to Sinn Fein's) that 'no group or party should be allowed to exercise a veto'. This is the lan- guage of the rapist. He tells his victim, 'Do as I say and don't struggle and you won't get hurt — but if you do resist and get hurt, it will be your fault.' Are the Protestant union- ists not a group? And why should their refusal to join the Irish Republic be con- demned as a 'veto'? Does Labour believe in representative government or not?

At this point advocates for united Ire- land change the subject and say that there is a nationalist majority in Ireland as a whole. Apart from the fact that this may well not be true — opinion polls suggest that there is neither a majority in the 26 counties nor among six-county Catholics in favour of joining Northern Ireland to the Republic — it is a purely circular argu- ment, petitio principii, a begged question, Indeed a succession of petitiones principii. You answer the question in advance by defining its terms. A century ago, Unionists argued that the question of Home Rule could only be decided by the people of the

United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ire- land as a whole. That may now seem absurd. But it is no more absurd than say- ing that it should be decided by the people of Ireland as a whole. That United King- dom did at least exist as an internationally recognised state for 120 years. While the salient historical facts are that no indepen- dent Irish state ever existed before 1922, and that Ireland had never been politically united in its history except under the English crown.

It became politically disunited (as Irish republicans and their fellow-travellers will never see) when a popular franchise, and especially a secret ballot, ensured that Nationalists won most parliamentary seats in Ireland, but not in eastern Ulster. Parti- tion arrived, despite intense reluctance on all sides. And then something funny hap- pened in the process. Throughout the 19th century, Irish nationalism had advanced its claim on the rational and 'modem' princi- ples of representative government and self- determination. Unionism (tout court, at the time not 'Ulster Unionism') could only take its own stand on the ancien regime princi- ples of legitimacy and prescription: Ireland and Great Britain were united and for that reason alone must remain united. With par- tition the debate was reversed. Now Ulster Unionism — or separatism-from-Ireland was, and could only be, defended in terms of democracy and self-determination, while a 'united Ireland' became a reactionary and undemocratic cause, based on legitimacy and prescription.

Comparisons elsewhere in Europe make the point. The left-wing columnist Neal Ascherson is among the advocates of a united Ireland. I don't know how much he knows about Ireland, but he knows a great deal about central Europe. Does he also favour a united Germany, incorporating Silesia, Bohemia, Austria, all unquestion- ably part of the historic German Reich and as ripe for the 'reintegration of the nation- al territory' of which the Irish constitution speaks? Or a united Hungary the ancient, not to say 'apostolic' kingdom which was dismembered at just the same time as the kingdom of Ireland (and for the same rea- son); the Hungary which included what are now Slovakia, western Ukraine, south- western Rumania, northern Serbia? Any- where else in Europe, irredentism based on vague historical claims in defiance of national rights is seen as what it is, reac- tionary and anti-democratic. With Ireland, the Left waives all its own rules.

The truth is that proponents of a united Ireland can say only one of two things to Ulster, both of which one would think were highly unpalatable to socialists and liberals. One is that the Ulster Protestants are 'really' Irish. This might at first sound almost friendly, until you reflect that it denies them the elementary right of sub- jectively defining their sense of nationality. This game of definition is characteristic of nastier little nationalisms. Athens insists that there are no Macedonians in north- western Greece, only 'Slavic Greeks', Ankara says there are no Kurds in south- eastern Turkey, only 'mountain Turks'. Is it really much different, or more engaging, when Dublin says that there are no Ulster- men, only Protestant Irish?

The other tack is more aggressive: it is to say, or at least imply, that the Ulster Protestants don't belong in Ireland at all, certainly not on their own terms, This is just what Eamon de Valera — the central figure in Irish history this century — did imply. Sometimes he pretended that the Ulster Protestants were 'all Irish, and equally dear accordingly', but sometimes he came clean, saluting Ulster as the 'land of the O'Neills, the O'Cathains, the Mac- Donnells, the Maguires and the MacGuin- nesses'. And the further implications of that are clear enough.

Politically correct opinion — and it real- ly is correct in this case — deplores the concept of 'transfer' in Zionist political thought, all the way down to the plans of the late Rabbi Kahane for wholesale eth- nic cleansing of Arabs from the lands con- trolled by Israel. How many of those who share that deploration remember de Valera's repeatedly saying that the final answer to the Ulster question might have to be a transfer of population? Like other tidy-minded nationalist zealots, de Valera dressed up transfer as 'exchange': the Protestants would return from Ulster to Scotland or England whence 'their fore- bears had migrated a mere three centuries earlier, while the Irish living on the British mainland would return home. It is quite true that very large numbers of Irish Catholics — at least three-quarters of a million, or a fifth of the native population of the Republic — live in that part of the United Kingdom called Great Britain, where they famously enjoy the right to vote and draw welfare payments. This in itself casts an interesting light on Sinn Fein's claim that it is intolerable for a rather smaller number of Irish Catholics, about 650,000, to live under British rule in that part of the United Kingdom called Northern Ireland.

Further to the Left are more elaborate evasions. Eamon McCann, the London- deny activist, insists that Sinn Fein and its 'military wing' must be understood as fighting not only for a united but a social- ist Ireland, for a 32-county 'Workers' Republic'. I may not know the country as well as Mr McCann does, but I know it quite well, and I can only tell him that, par- titioned or united, Ireland will become an Islamic republic before it becomes a social- ist one. It is no accident (as Marxists used to say) that Ireland is the most socially and economically conservative country in Europe; no accident, just something which requires fanciful explanation or evasion. As the Irish historian R. F. Foster drily says, 'The psychological reasons for this deter- mined evasion are easy to find: it is difficult, if not morally impossible, for the Left to admit that the independent Irish state has become so decisively different from the Left's vision of what it should be.' An intelli- gent English Tory was more perceptive than the Left. 'If the predominant middle class in Ireland asserts itself', Lord Crawford wrote in December 1921, as the Anglo-Irish treaty was being signed, 'we may all live to see Cork the most reactionary corner in the Empire.' Was he wrong?

How to explain the tenderness among English liberals and socialists for this reac- tionary cause? One answer is what Orwell used to speak of, the masochism or nation- al self-hatred of the English Left, who will always show sympathy for anyone, however obviously mad or repulsive, whose rhetoric is sufficiently anglophobic. A more charita- ble explanation is that Labour is caught in a time warp, and has never tried to think its way out. Or until recently: the Democracy Now group, led by the MPs Kate Hooey and Nick Raynsford, have urged Labour to organise in Northern Ireland and run its own candidates, for whom Protestants could vote (as they scarcely can for the sec- tarian SDLP). This is hard to argue with on democratic grounds. Standing in its way are official policy, adopted in its present form at the time of the Bennite ascendancy, and Kevin McNamara, Opposition spokesman on Northern Ireland, an ardent Irish nationalist and Mr Major's best friend (as the Tory majority in the Commons dwin- dles, no Unionist MP will ever do anything to eject this government in favour of one which includes Mr McNamara).

Here is an opportunity for the new Labour leader. If he looks into it, Tony Blair will make a curious discovery. He was elected leader partly thanks to the votes of people who cannot join the Labour Party: 50,000 contracted-in union members in Ulster, where they could vote as such but where there are no constituency parties for them to join, or Labour candidates for them to vote for. It is a nice example of the absurd contradictions which result from Labour's — and from British — policy.

Mr Blair is married to a Catholic and is free from any possible accusation of Protestant bigotry. If he were to adopt a truly democratic line on Ulster, with a spokesman who favoured encouraging and listening to its people instead of punishing them, if he could promise Ulster non-sec- tarian British democracy, he could pull one of the cleverest political strokes of the age. Is he up to it?