A DISARMING QUESTION

Neil Lyndon argues that

the British people should be consulted about Northern Ireland

IT MAY have been for expedient and self- ish reasons that Margaret Thatcher con- ceived her violent passion for 'the supremacy of the voice of the people' — a voice to which she was not always attentive when she was the leader of governments elected by a minority of the people. On the question of European union, she may have a point in saying that voters who are opposed to further union will be unable to express their feelings in a general election where all parties are committed to forms of federalism. But would Mrs Thatcher apply the principle she has advanced to other issues upon which all-party alliances in the House of Commons preclude choice? I am thinking not of questions such as abortion and hanging, upon which free votes have been allowed. I am think- ing of vital budgetary, military and strate- gic issues, upon which the votes of MPs have been determined by three-line whips, agreed by the leaderships of all three par- ties. I am thinking especially of Ulster.

Twenty-two years have now passed since the present troubles in Northern Ireland got started in the Bogside and the Creggan in those August nights of street-fighting between Catholics and B Specials. Throughout the whole of that period, through three changes of the party in gov- ernment, no divisions of opinion have been allowed in the House of Commons on the main purposes of the executive. For the best part of a quarter of a century, all my adult life, the British electorate has been presented with a unified and undifferenti- ated line from Downing Street and the Palace of Westminster which declares, at root, 'We agree: you pay.'

It is worth looking back at the moment when Cabinet determined the policy which we have been unable to oppose ever since. Richard Crossman noted the occasion in his diary for Tuesday, 19 August 1969:

The only thing I need really record has been the big Cabinet meeting where the main sub- ject was Northern Ireland . . . Harold and Jim had really committed the Cabinet to putting the troops in and once they were there they couldn't be taken out again, so we had to ratify what had been done . . There wasn't any tremendous disagreement . . . It was a case where in a sense our mind was made up by events . . . It wasn't so much deciding what policy to have as being able to excuse it.

Succeeding governments have felt obliged to assume the attitudes of the Cabinet which Richard Crossman attend- ed: they have been required to excuse and to defend the status quo which Harold Wilson and James Callaghan created in Northern Ireland. They have not been asked to consider with an independent mind the most intractable political prob- lem which has existed for two and a half decades within the borders,of a nation in the Western world. They have seen that their straightforward duty was to resist ter- rorism and to defend the rule of law.

The leaderships of Her Majesty's Oppo- sitions have marched in close order with governments of the day and the House of Commons has, broadly, trodden in their leaders' footprints. Seeing that they had no choice — 'our mind was made up by events', as Crossman said — they have given the electors no choice.

'Actually, it's one of Terry Waite's.' The single voice they utter is courageous and noble. It is also sympathetic and understandable. When Mr Major spoke to the House of Commons after he became the second successive British prime minis- ter to feel upon his own person the shock of an IRA atrocity, he dismissed with con- tempt the mortar attack on Downing Street and declared that assassins would not budge the Government from its policy, an attitude which Neil Kinnock and Paddy Ashdown followed, supported and endorsed.

The ghosts of some 3,000 people are mustered behind those declarations. In the front rank of that army of the murdered stand Lord Mountbatten, Airey Neave and Ian Gow. To keep faith with those who have died so foully, our political leaders sense that they must resist terrorism, must refuse to give an inch. They are cornered by a brutal logic and by lines of loyalty.

' In consequence, the citizens and voters of Great Britain have been disenfran- chised. The electorate has been powerless to express an opinion on the expenditure of its taxes in Northern Ireland. Anybody who wished to vote for a party which might form a government was required to vote for the status quo in Ulster. Succeeding governments have not known what the electorate truly thinks or feels.

The voters may feel grudging about the cost to the United Kingdom of garrisoning and policing Northern Ireland, variously calculated at present at between £650 mil- lion and £1,000 million a year. They may feel that the duty to protect barbarian mobs of religious primitives from each other is a post-imperial legacy which they would be happy to hand on to a United Nations peace-keeping force or to renounce outright. They may be sorely pressed to see any benefit returning to the nation as a whole from Ulster which might be worth the inconvenience of a train delay, still less the life of the innocent com- muter who was killed at Victoria station last winter.

Citizens may express these views to each other. They may not express them in their votes. They may feel that democracy is, arrogantly and wrongly as Mrs Thatcher blazed over Europe, not heeding or repre- senting their opinions. On the question of Ulster, they may be right.

The orthodox account of Government policy towards Northern Ireland is to say that the constitutional rights of the loyalist majority in Ulster must be defenued. Under the terms of logic of a parliamentary democracy, therefore, it seems that the British Government has an unavoidable duty towards that majority. But the most curious and striking aspect of Government policy towards Northern Ireland in the last 22 years is the extent to which it has been determined by a fraction- al minority of the electorate, as a whole.

The population of Northern Ireland is about the same as a big county in England. It comprises roughly 2.5 per cent of the entire population of the United Kingdom. The Protestant majority in Northern Ire- land, about one million people in all, rep- resents less than 1 per cent of the total population of these islands.

The interests of 1 per cent of the popu- lation are thus determining policy for the entire nation. Our leaders courageously say that they will not be budged by terror- ist outrages because they will not submit to an extremist minority; but the uncomfort- able truth is that British policy has been hijacked by an extremist minority — the loyalist majority in Ulster which may not command the sympathies of the whole electorate.

In their resistance to terrorism, in their refusal to give an inch, the probity and the personal courage of members of the execu- tive have been proved repeatedly. The doubt is not about their motives; the doubt is about their mandate. It would require courage of a different order to ask the electorate for its opinion; but the question might produce an answer which would relieve the Government of its irresolvable dilemmas. Weary of paying for nothing and of sacrificing the lives of innocent citi- zens, the electorate of the United King- dom might wish to turn its back on Northern Ireland: in which case, the Gov- ernment would be obliged to do its duty.

A referendum would do the trick nicely.