The Covid-19 politics of Ireland and Britain

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Just over a month ago my wife and I visited my daughter, her boyfriend, and my sister in Glasgow and had dinner in my sister’s house.  Two weeks later this would not have been possible, I would have been breaking the Covid regulations; in fact, my daughter and sister couldn’t have done it together even without us. They could, however, have met together in the pub, which of course doesn’t make much sense, as this Scottish blogger argued.

This week new restrictions were introduced in the North of Ireland, and even more stringent ones in Belfast and a number of other areas, making breaking of the regulations inevitable.  This has led to the targeting of students returning to University and partying in the Holyland area.  As some students have pointed out – we can’t party in numbers in our houses or on the street but we can all go to the Hatfield bar and ‘socially distance’.

When more restrictions were to be introduced by the Government in Dublin it was also stated that it would be looking at opening ‘wet’ pubs (that don’t serve food).  Later it suffered complete derision by asking publicans to keep receipts showing that punters had indeed ordered a panini costing at least €9 when they had bought their pint of Guinness.

This week it unveiled a new strategy that had five levels of restrictions, leaving Dublin to fall into level two and a half!  The Health Minister took sick on the day of the launch and had to isolate, causing the rest of Cabinet to briefly join him.  Since all these rules and regulations are based on assigning individual responsibility for avoiding the virus it wasn’t a good look.

In all these jurisdictions the number six has become a new guideline for people meeting up, the number to be made up – or not made up – of children and belonging to one, two or three households, sometimes differing between indoors and outdoors.  Overall however the differences seem less and less important.

The timing and severity of lockdown has proved no protection as infection rates increase in Dublin, Belfast and Glasgow while various parts of England are subject to greater restrictions every week.  In all places the threats of a second wave reveal the failure of the measures to deal with the first, and in all of them, despite its much-vaunted role, the test and trace systems are not operating as the should.  The readiness of the health services is unclear, but only in so far as the extent of new wave of infection is unclear, otherwise the inadequacies of each health service is perfectly clear.

Such inadequacies were the subject of a column in the Belfast paper ‘The Irish News’, in which was noted the absence of protest at the local NHS having almost closed down.  The lockdown has led to much reduced access and reduced capacity, on top of waiting lists much worse than those in Britain.  It has been justified in terms of keeping Covid out of hospitals and preparing for the second wave but deaths have now arisen in two hospitals – so it isn’t working.  In the South, the number of people screened for cancer was down 60 per cent in the first six months of 2020 compared to the previous year and the already unprecedented waiting lists have increased.

The so-called second wave was to be addressed by much improved test and tracing systems.  Unfortunately, the system in England is reported to be collapsing and the Irish one is nowhere near what was projected as necessary in April.  While still considering itself better than the British, the Irish are testing 1.8 per thousand people while the UK is doing 2.43, and has been achieving this only by using scarce heath care staff to do the testing, meaning they can’t do their day job.  In Scotland pressure on the system has meant results are taking up to ten days to come through with this reported to be threatening the regime for care workers in elderly persons’ homes.

In all countries extra funding for health services have been announced as if this will quickly address the neglect and austerity these services have suffered for years.  The additional funds are a reiteration, on a much greater scale, of repeated funding for new initiatives that are periodically announced but that rely on recruiting health professionals from other parts of the service, which create problems further back.  It’s as if you can deploy thousands of trained medical, nursing and other professional staff in a matter of weeks or months despite taking years to train them and years to put in place new facilities for them to work in.

The announcement of potential fines of £10,000 in England is many things, but an effective public health measure it is not.  It will discourage compliance with the rules and disaffection with the whole public health campaign.  The call for respect for the law, given the exclusion of Dominic Cummings from its requirements and the threat to break international law over the Brexit Withdrawal Agreement, is too obviously hypocritical to be acceptable.  The result will be intensification of blame on the general population for the Government’s failures.

Irish public health officials have warned of an increase in cases in the over-75s, the most vulnerable group and those who have suffered the greatest loss.  The argument advanced is that the whole population must suffer increasingly arbitrary and unenforceable rules to protect its most vulnerable section.  But all this achieves is failure to focus on targeted measures that might work in protecting the vulnerable, through steps to support their social distancing, ensure safe care home environments and safe hospital care when they need it.  It is impossible to square the idea of widespread social distancing to protect the vulnerable with the return of schools, colleges and the necessary return to some sort of normal working by many workers.

One noticeable aspect of the approach of all these administrations has been their failure to protect the old, through their being dumped out of hospital into homes without testing or even after testing positive. None of them has made a genuine attempt to investigate and report the lessons of their failure.  The traditional centralisation of power and secrecy in Britain has not been shattered by devolved administrations but reproduced.  The Scottish and Stormont regimes show exactly the same tendencies to secrecy, centralisation and lack of accountability.  They also show exactly the same instincts to authoritarian measures that substitute for an effective policy that goes beyond nationalist slogans.

Statistics are still paraded as proof of one jurisdiction being more successful than the other although this is fraught with difficulties and assumes that the statistics reflect the impact of respective Government measures: that it is the virus that is being controlled for either better or worse, rather than the virus determining mistaken responses to it, which is more obviously the case.

Lockdowns have been relaxed in each and the virus has flared up again, alongside dire warnings from Governments and their official advisors.  In circumstances where many are asymptomatic the possibility of testing and tracing systems identifying the source of every or most infections and then closing them down, even if efficiently carried out, is unlikely.  Not unless we face complete shutdown, which is not going to happen and which is now both too late and impossible to sustain in any case.

Comparisons drawn are always carefully chosen.  Sweden was the comparator not to be followed, except that at the beginning of September the Irish State recorded 30.6 cases per 100,000 while the Swedes reported only 23.4.

On 19 September the death rate for the four parts of the UK were reported below:

Area Deaths Rate per 100,000 population
England 37,076 65.9
Northern Ireland 575 30.4
Scotland 2,505 45.9
Wales 1,603 50.8

https://coronavirus.data.gov.uk/deaths

It is clear that England has performed worst and Northern Ireland best.  Scotland has done better than England, and my relatives confirmed reports that the SNP Government is getting credit for this.

Scottish nationalists claim that the dire performance of the Tory Government shows that Scottish independence is justified, and sometimes use comparisons to judge the Scottish performance poorly because of membership of the UK.  So, for example, this blog damns membership because Scotland did not match the performance of some Scandinavian countries. Of course, its comparison at that time excluded Sweden.

So not only do the nationalists get to pick their comparators but they get to pick whether being worse means that Scotland should separate from the UK and being better (especially than the English) also means they should separate.  If these statistics were the product of good Governance one must marvel at the so-far hidden wonders of the Stormont regime in Belfast that some believe works best when it doesn’t work at all, which it frequently doesn’t.

The Irish State in turn has been compared favourably to Northern Ireland, both of which recorded their first cases only two days apart.  Crude mortality rates calculated by two economists, one from the North and one from the South, showed a mortality rate at that point in time of 44.5 per 100,000 in the North but only 35.8 in the South.

They recognise however that the majority of deaths, in what they call the first phase of the pandemic, was of the over-65s, 93.5% between March and June in the South and 92.8% in the North.  They noted that a higher proportion of the population in the North is over 65 – 15.8% compared to 13.9% in the South. Adjusting for the age profile in each jurisdiction produces a mortality rate of 35.6 per 100,000 in the North (if it had the South’s population distribution – the rate in the South itself was 35.8), and the mortality rate in the South using the North’s population distribution would be 45 per 100,000 (the actual rate in the North was 44.5).  So in fact not much different at all.

The following graphs show first, the daily new cases, and the following two graphs the cumulative total cases and death rate per million for a number of different countries.

 
 
 

The first graph shows that there are increased numbers of cases in a number of countries giving rise to the concern about a resurgence.  The second graph however puts this into perspective, that growth in the cumulative number of cases is not at all as high as it was initially or in the first 50 to 100 days.

The third shows that the increase in the number of deaths has slowed even more than cases and the lines in the graph have flattened considerably.  The point is not comparison between countries but the common pattern of reduced growth of both cases and especially deaths over the whole period of the pandemic.  The first graph shows that this is the situation while cases have and may continue to increase in a range of countries.

The first of the following two graphs shows that across the world the number of new cases continues to grow but the second that the number of deaths is not following the same trajectory.  A strategy that assumes the opposite will be increasingly exposed and indefensible.

 
 

Despite claims that Covid-19 and state responses to it are not political issues, it is clear that in every country this is not the case.

Dominic Cummings and his Government are determining the strategy in England; the centralising SNP is doing so in Scotland, and the dysfunctional Executive is doing it in the North of Ireland.  The latest strategy out of Dublin makes explicit that the National Public Health Emergency Team has been downgraded and that decisions will be taken by politicians.  The punitive fines being introduced in England are eminently political and make for potentially violent confrontation.  That Keir Starmer supports them shows only that he will contribute to that coming confrontation.  Maybe he will be looking for his old job back.

There is widespread deflation, if not complete surprise, that the incompetent mess that we are passing through has not led to more precipitate decline in Tory support in opinion polls.  The ‘secret’ of course is the solid nationalist and reactionary support behind Brexit that clings to the Tories in order to deliver the promised new Jerusalem.  The more Johnson fails to deliver the more some will cling.

Considerable responsibility for this must be laid at the door of the Labour Party whose previous leader acted as if a good Brexit was possible, but whose new one has collapsed into more or less criticising that the Tory deal has not been implemented.  The idea that Brexit and its effects must be gotten out of the way, and Labour can then compete more effectively with the Tories afterwards, forgets that the effects of Brexit that have already been severe have only started.

At the moment the British press is full of articles that show that the real opposition to Boris Johnson comes not from the clever lawyer and stupid politician opposite but from those behind him.

This view that there is a good, or at least defensible Brexit, is held even by sections of the left who correctly opposed it in the referendum.  Against all the evidence of its toxic character socialists are asked to unite against the specifically Tory Brexit.  But far from the Tory Brexit being as far away as possible from the Brexit supported by the nationalist left’s Lexit, the Johnson version is exactly what they have demanded.  There is no reason for these people to unite against a Tory Brexit with those socialists who supported Remain and there is no reason for the latter to renounce total opposition to Brexit when its every step is a disaster.

The other opposition comes from the nationalists of the SNP, which have always employed English nationalism to strengthen their own and are now successfully hiding their own failures over Covid by pointing to the worse failures down south.  The difference is mainly presentational, with Sturgeon substituting seriousness for bombastic incoherence.  It is noticeable that the growth in support for separation appears not to be based on any confidence that things will be so much better but that it couldn’t be worse.

Scottish nationalism appeared in a ‘Yes’ campaign to offer some positive solution to Scottish workers’ problems even if the experience of the SNP Government provided no grounds for such a view.  The movement for it appeared more progressive than the objective itself, at least to those inside it.  Its renewed support is based on a hope and a prayer that somehow an ‘independent’ capitalist Scotland, by virtue of this alone, will solve problems.

The North of Ireland shows the complete bankruptcy of nationalism.  Just as England has an opposition that wants Government policy implemented (competently), and Scotland has a divided and discredited one, the regime in the North of Ireland can’t afford to have an opposition at all.  In Ireland the governing parties may have to accept that the current opposition is not really an opposition and will have at some point to be trusted.

Governing parties and States have gotten accustomed to exercising control and issuing dire warnings tempered only by the knowledge that a new lockdown is unaffordable and unenforceable without money.  Only the far-right has so far opposed the restrictions on civil liberties while pushing insane conspiracy theories and dangerous health edicts.

The justification for these restrictions reduces with every case that does not result in a death, while deaths of the vulnerable are their responsibility.  A danger is that the right leverages legitimate opposition to repression of civil rights into acceptance or tolerance of other reactionary parts of its programme.  Passivity and acceptance of the state’s increasingly unjustified repressive public health measures facilitates development of this possibility and does nothing to prepare workers for the disaster of a no-deal Brexit or, more likely, a Brexit sealed with a rotten deal.

The shared anti-Covid strategy of these Governments appears increasingly at odds with reality and is generating indifference and resentment.  Socialists need an alternative view of the pandemic rooted in observable fact, one that avoids any support for undemocratic measures or calls for more restrictive lockdown. We also need to renew opposition to Brexit and expose its effects while seeking to draw attention to the bursting of its illusions.  On their own, Covid-19 and Brexit would be a major threat, together the effect is multiplied.  But opposition requires some coherent view of what is happening.

Ireland’s Dominic Cummings moment

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Well that didn’t take long.  No sooner had the new restrictions to deal with Covid-19 been introduced but they had been broken, and not just by anyone.

They have been broken by the members of the Oireachtas Golf Society at their dinner in a Co Galway hotel, the first time anyone had heard of it.  Apparently, it’s a collection of TDs, ex-TDs, Senators and ex-Senators, councillors, a former high-profile RTE journalist and the Chief Executive of the Banking and Payments Federation – where would a gathering of the political class be without a representative of the banking fraternity?

Four names stood out, first the Minister for Agriculture Dara Calleary. He who complained loudly, when he originally didn’t get the job, that “I had hoped to lead a department. That’s always been my ambition and I can tell you that it’s still my ambition and it will happen, it will absolutely happen.”  And it absolutely did, for just over five weeks, which was better than his predecessor who lasted less than four. New Fianna Fail may be as scandal-prone as the old one but they’re not as good at getting away with it.

It had taken Calleary one day from approving the new guidelines at the cabinet to breaking the new guidelines, in fact even breaking the old ones, forcing him to resign quickly, along with the leas-chataoirleach of the Senate, Jerry Buttimer.  This could hardly be avoided.  What many people want now is for the other two high-profile names to do the same.

This includes EU Commissioner Phil Hogan, whose approach has been to deny that he did anything wrong, shift the blame onto the organisers of the dinner and the hotel, and avoid an apology, until it seemed absolutely required in order to avoid anything more serious.

The most embarrassing is possibly that of Séamus Woulfe, the former Attorney General who held that post when the rules were being introduced, and is now a Supreme Court judge.  He reprised the same deflection as Hogan by attempting to shift the blame onto the organisers and hotel, but he also added “I ended up in a situation where breaches may have occurred.”  It’s funny how things like that can just sort of happen to you.  We can look forward to that plea of mitigation at the next trial to come before him.

There is no doubt that the rules were broken and a Garda investigation has begun.  The recent change to the regulations limited such gatherings to six people, but since over 80 were present the gathering broke even the previous limit of fifty.

Media reaction has indicated widespread anger from a general public that has generally stuck by the rules quite rigorously.  It exposed those making the rules to the charge that everyone is not all in this together and that there is one rule for the powerful and a different one for everyone else.  The credibility of the new Government has been seriously undermined as have its demands for social distancing.  Very much the same in other words as the actions of Dominic Cummings in Britain.

In fact, it is surprising how little this parallel has been drawn, as if the national self-satisfaction at having performed better than the British could not be allowed to give way to acceptance of being just as bad.

The opposition, including Sinn Fein, has condemned the Government for its hypocrisy and disorganisation, another parallel with the Brits, but given its own embarrassment over the breach of the rules at IRA leader Bobby Storey’s funeral they don’t make very convincing purveyors of unimpeachable conduct themselves.

Mary Lou McDonald has called for the recall of the Dáil as has People before Profit TD Bríd Smith.  This in itself is not wrong, it provides a forum to expose the Government’s hypocrisy, but this is only useful in so far as it has a further purpose, and one beyond seeking a bit of party advantage for electoral purposes.

Without an alternative it is mainly posturing and without anything additional it miseducates workers that only within the Oireachtas can these issues be pursued and settled.  It tells them that the voice of workers is within these walls and the Oireachtas must be left to deal with the Oireachtas Golf Society.

This unfortunately is where we are with the left in the Dáil.  If it has a policy of its own it is that the lockdown must be more restrictive, address questions such as the working conditions in meat processing plants and direct service provision centres that hold asylum seekers, and that we need better testing.  It’s a call to action – directed to the state.  And that’s the problem.

The arguments about the lack of action in meat processing plants and direct service provision centres, and the need for better testing, are all fair enough but the action they say workers themselves should take are follow-ups to the demands on the state and are so generalised as to be ritualistic incantations.  They are a dead letter.  We know this because there is no workers’ action.  The most prominent has been that of the Debenhams’ workers, which is itself at least partially a result of the lockdown the left wants more strictly enforced.

The original justification for electoral participation, that it would support and promote workers action, has disappeared only in the sense that it never appeared in the first place.  The cart has long been in front of the horse which explains, at least to some extent, why the working class movement hasn’t moved forward.

The proposals of the left include mandatory sick pay for all workers, full reinstatement of the €350 a week Pandemic Unemployment Payment, more teachers hired on permanent contracts and private hospitals to be taken under public control.  There is no inkling that you cannot pay workers to do nothing for very long and no warning that all this spending will have to be paid for.

This requirement isn’t a feature of neoliberalism but a fact that socialists acknowledge by putting forward an alternative.  The idea that public ownership, i.e. state ownership, of hospitals is the answer ignores the disastrous performance of the NHS in the UK and its failure to protect the old, who aren’t mentioned in some left analysis, and its responsibility for having exposed them to infection.  The NHS didn’t even properly protect its own staff.

Above all, and specifically, these measures would not “move us towards zero Covid” as claimed.  Not only could they not but it is utopian to believe that the virus can be suppressed and eliminated.  Any attempt to do so would see an endless lockdown until a vaccine was found and even then this might not see final eradication, no more than flu has been eliminated by vaccination.  The attempt to do so would incur costs that would inflict much more damage in economic and health terms than the strategy of the Irish State.

A couple of days ago I noted that the strategy of the state was unravelling and the latest drama is a further example.  It faces its sternest test with the return of schools, which itself calls for enormous levels of cognitive dissonance: support for mass transport and containment of children when a deadly virus requires such stringent controls in the home, at work and elsewhere.  You do not have to be very smart to realise it doesn’t add up.

In other words, the moral outrage of the left, upon which its politics is based, would lead to a worse outcome than that of the current Government.

So, while we all condemn the state elite that dines out on its hypocrisy, the left needs to educate workers to show social solidarity in order to protect the vulnerable, to protect themselves and to prepare for the bill that is mounting up from the lockdown.  Without such an approach the left simply becomes the liberal conscience of the state whispering good advice in its ear, for in reality this is all the grandest and loudest speeches in the Dáil currently amount to.

The Covid-19 strategy in Ireland starts to unravel

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At the beginning of the week it was reported that the 14-day average of Covid-19 cases per 100,000 in the Irish State had risen to 22.1 compared to 18.6 for the UK and 16.3 for Germany.  The Acting Chief Medical Officer warned this was because people were socialising with each other “recklessly”, the disease was spreading “really widely” among younger people and was likely to spread to older people “unless we change what we are doing, and do something different.”

“We are seeing outbreaks among younger people, but once it gets into nursing homes we would see a much higher mortality.”  Meanwhile ‘senior Government sources’ complained about growing anxiety about “Covid fatigue” among the public.

As a result the Government announced a series of new measures this week, with immediate effect, and promised to provide a new plan for the management of the virus over the next six to nine months.

It was reported at the same time that the 14-day average of Covid-19 cases per 100,000 had increased to 26, up from four earlier in the year.  The Health Minister noted that “we are at tipping point.  Ireland’s rate of growth in new cases over the last two weeks is the fourth highest in Europe.  In the last two months we have gone from a low of 61 cases in one particular week to 533 cases last week.”

The Taoiseach announced that “if the current increase continues, it will be impossible to stop the spread of the virus to our most vulnerable and most compromised”, while The Irish Times reported that ‘there are significant concerns that a big increase in cases is on the way in the coming days.’  All this when it has also been reported that the test and trace system has been slowing down.

To put this in context it should be recognised that the number of deaths has been low:

Date Number of Deaths
19-Aug 2
18-Aug 1
17-Aug 0
16-Aug 0
15-Aug 0
14-Aug 0
13-Aug 0
12-Aug 1
11-Aug 1
10-Aug 0
09-Aug 0
08-Aug 1
07-Aug 4
06-Aug 5
05-Aug 0
04-Aug 0
03-Aug 0
02-Aug 0
01-Aug 0

One commentator in The Irish Times however stated that “the public gets increasingly restive – some resentful of those flouting the lockdown; others fed up of it and wondering why Ireland’s lockdown is one of the most stringent in Europe despite relative success in containing the virus over the summer.”

In truth, the Irish State is in danger of repeating the same mistakes as before, despite its self-congratulation at being better than the British, which is currently no longer the case according to its own quoted metric.

It hadn’t occurred to this newspaper commentator that it was the virus that had contained the population, and it was this that was one of the most stringent in Europe; or that this is why opening up has inevitably resulted, as it has all over the world, in the renewed spread of the virus.

It has happened now, before winter, when it was stated that we faced a potential second wave when the weather turned for the worse.  Yet despite this earlier warning we are now informed that the Government is working on a new strategy when surely the existing one for the second wave is already waiting to be taken off the shelf?

The inevitable spread explains what many see as the anomaly between previous success and the forecast increased transmission, and highlights the many contradictions in the Government’s policy pointed out immediately after the introduction of the new measures.

What strikes one first in looking at them is their meagreness, the main impact of which seems to be to delay the easing that was planned.  The new measures include:

  • All visits to home limited to six people from outside the home and from no more than three households, with outdoor gatherings limited to fifteen people
  • The closing time for restaurants, cafes and pubs (serving food) to be extended by half an hour
  • Sports events to be held behind closed doors
  • Public transport to be avoided and in private transport mask wearing is advised where there are mixed households and
  • The over-70s are asked to exercise individual judgment in their social interaction (which it must really be assumed they have been doing already)

It has been pointed out that while the over-70s are advised to stay at home Masses and other religious services are to continue as before.  While still told that they are allowed to holiday in the State by the Taoiseach, the Acting Chief Medical Officer warns that “at the moment we wouldn’t be recommending that someone would go to a hotel.”

Weddings are still allowed attendance by 50 people, despite public health advice that it be limited to six, while gatherings at home are limited to six.  Even a ‘Government source’ described this as “incoherent.”

The move to close sporting events has been described by a professor of experimental immunology from TCD as “bizarre” given that (some) pubs are open, so that you can watch games on TV in the pub but not outside from the sidelines, adding that public transport was not an area of great transmission. While accepting that there must be some rise in cases he hoped that the new measures represented a more “finessed and tailored” approach than the previous lockdown, which might be like the proverbial lipstick on a pig.  It has been noted that there are no specific measures for meat plants, which have been significant sites of transmission.

The public health advice is clearly stronger than the measures introduced and is warning that a full lockdown may have to be reintroduced, something already rejected in private by the Government.  It is clear that a full lockdown will not work, as has already been proved, and will cause much more significant long term problems than it solves as I have argued in a number of previous posts on the virus.

Unfortunately, while the politicians reject a complete lockdown they also warn that development of the current situation threatens those most at risk – the old and vulnerable – yet there is no focus or strategy on this group, except advice that your actions are at your own risk.  Having tried a complete lockdown the Government has failed put together a more limited strategy to protect those most at risk, calling into question, for anyone who cares to think about it, the previous lockdown and all its costs.  The more it tailors and finesses the less sense it appears to make.

While many people are angry at the measures in place either because they are fed up with them and don’t see the risk to them or the death toll as justification, others are blaming this group for the growth of infections.  Like the strategy of the Tory Government in Britain, including Scotland and also the North of Ireland, the Government’s responsible for the failure to protect those known to be at risk are setting themselves up to blame those they rule.  If people are angry now they should be made aware that the bill is in the post and will not be limited to billions of Euros, but will include the effects of ill health brought on by economic deprivation.

As an alternative it is possible to demand a coherent strategy that focuses on protecting the vulnerable and that avoids the inconsistencies of the existing strategy, which claims justification from public health advice that it cannot and will not implement.

Similar comments could be made in relation to the measures introduced in the North and the promise of more stricter measures that have just been flagged.

Confusion now does not bode well for the future need for a well-grounded resistance to the austerity that is coming, or the blame that will inevitably be seeking a target.  In this respect we should remember the claim after the financial crash that ‘we all got carried away’ as the explanation for the failure of the Celtic Tiger.  Given the buy-in by so many to the Government’s approach blaming it will not be as simple as blaming the bankers, not that that did any good anyway.

The significance of John Hume

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One newspaper columnist described him as “without doubt the greatest Irish political leader since Charles Stewart Parnell.”

He was a “great hero and a true peace maker” according to Taoiseach Micheál Martin and a “visionary” according to Tony Blair.

His successor as leader of the Social Democratic and Labour Party, Colum Eastwood, described him as “20th century Ireland’s most significant and consequential political figure” and the Irish President praised him for having “transformed and remodelled politics in Ireland.”

Another columnist agreed that he be compared to the Liberator – Daniel O’Connell – of whom James Connolly said, “felt himself to be much more akin to the propertied class of England than to the working class of Ireland”, castigating him for him having “stood between the people of Ireland and the people of England, and so “prevented a junction which would be formidable enough to overturn any administration that could be formed”. . .  to prevent any international action of the democracies . .”  Hume was leader of a Party that was not a party of Labour and was not committed to social democracy in any meaningful sense.

The same writer found room in the column to also compare him to Parnell and describe him as “the Irish equivalent of Martin Luther King.”  He was famously awarded the Nobel Peace prize in 1998 and also named a Papal Knight of St Gregory in 2012.

Words of appreciation and celebration of his life came from all quarters, from Bill Clinton to Boris Johnson and from Unionist leaders to Sinn Fein.  How could such a person have “transformed” politics in Ireland with such commendations?

A little vignette from his award of the Nobel peace prize provides a clue to the answer.  After the ceremony, in an Oslo hotel, he sang an Irish ballad – The Town I Loved so Well – with an official of the Ulster Unionist Party whose leader David Trimble had shared the prize.  As’ a gesture to the unionist community’ he sang The Sash, a sectarian Orange song.  Apparently an Irish ballad of no political consequence needed to be balanced by a sectarian hymn.

That night Norwegian children marched into the square in Oslo with lanterns lit singing the civil rights song – ‘We Shall Overcome’.  Hume couldn’t sing that, not just because his Unionist partners would not have accepted it, but because he hadn’t.  Partnership with sectarianism is not its overcoming.

But then Hume didn’t set out to transform Irish politics but to preserve it in aspic, to freeze without motion the division that existed.

His (‘single transferable’) speeches were often trite and platitudinous: “all conflict is about difference; whether the difference is race, religion, or nationality”.  “Difference is an accident of birth . . . The answer to difference is to respect it.”

He has been praised for bringing peace and for the Good Friday Agreement by his being central to the process.  He could speak both to the Provisionals and to the other parties – the British, Unionists and the Southern Government.  He also played a major role in involving Washington and Brussels, through the traditional Irish politician’s activity of lobbying and seeking favours.

So he was certainly at the centre of affairs, but being at the centre should not be confused with being the central player or being the central force in determining the outcome.  The eye of a hurricane is not where it matters.  It might for example be asked how his ‘single transferable speech’, repeated so often this rather vain man was even aware of its tedium, could suddenly appear to point to the solution when it had gotten nowhere for so long.

What brought the IRA to the table, what brought the British to the table and also the unionists was not the cogency of Hume’s pious calls for peace but the fact that the British state employed greater power and violence to defeat the republicans.  Hume, Southern politicians and US politicians all gave them the cover for their surrender.

The most reactionary commentators were angry that the Provos claimed some sort of victory but this didn’t bother the main players and certainly didn’t bother Hume. So great was Hume’s feat that he managed not only to cover for the republican’s defeat but turned them into a more powerful version of his own party, which didn’t seem to unduly upset him either.

There was no doubt some political skill involved in all of this, but given that everyone that signed up to the Good Friday Agreement wanted the defeat of the republican project, it is ridiculous to claim that he transformed Irish politics.  His political philosophy couldn’t possibly do anything like this.

The answer to difference when faced with sectarianism is not to respect it or to sing its songs.  The answer to violence is not to accept the policy of the most powerful, those able to inflict the greatest violence.  The answer to division is not reconciliation to division but to seek a unity that dissolves it.  Now that would be transformational; but that was never part of Hume’s project.  Even in the civil rights movement his objective was accommodation with the Unionist regime.

In this he failed, but if all political careers are said to end in failure then perhaps Hume can claim some success.  The Good Friday Agreement limps on, mired in corruption, incompetence and bullshit.  Sectarianism hasn’t been eradicated, simply given an institutional framework that it is hoped will keep it frozen.  This indeed is John Hume’s legacy. But better not to talk about it.

In Ireland, libel laws prevent journalists and others speaking ill of the living and it is an old Irish custom not to speak ill of the dead.  But your deeds outlive you and by these deeds and their legacy shall you be judged.

 

The end of Lockdown and mass murder

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Boris Johnsons has more or less announced the end of lockdown in his own incoherent way, while some on the left in Britain are claiming the advent of (further?) “mass murder.”

” Workers who do not feel safe returning to their job should continue to be paid by the furlough scheme.”

It must be said that thousands of people, especially the old, have died unnecessarily.  Their deaths could have been prevented by prompt and appropriate Government and State action.  Their deaths are to be laid at the door of both.

The article points out the undoubted incompetence, mendacity and utter shambles of the response to Covid-19, but on the face of it it makes little sense.  Workers are not afraid of mass murder, at least not the ones I work with or those I meet.  They fear, to a greater or lesser extent, catching Covid and being exposed to the risks involved.  Those risks for the majority of the population are small and most people know it.

Those who are vulnerable have a greater fear, of their being lumped in with the greater population on the way out of lockdown in the same way as they were in the way in: that is without proper appreciation of their vulnerability and the necessary measures to protect them.

By exaggerating the threat to the general population the threat to them was underestimated because it failed to adequately distinguish between them.  This lack of differentiation removed the focus on those most at risk, and then the price that they paid, by a Government that couldn’t protect them, so pretended it was going to protect everyone – by declaring instead that it was going to protect the NHS.

A policy of blanket opposition to a return to work does nothing to help.

First, everyone will have to go back to work before any possible second wave because the Government and employers will compel them and because the effects of continuing to pay people for not working will be worse.  The demand for furlough payments might seem revolutionary because it challenges the profitability of the capitalist system but if there is no real possibility of overthrowing capitalism in the next few months (pretty much a given for me) then simply proposing bankrupting the state and multiple businesses is not socialism but a form of nihilism.

Second, most workers are working and drawing a line in the sand over those not doing so, or like me working from home, is really to have missed the fact that the majority of workers have been working away throughout, and we would be facing many more deaths had they not done so.

In my own work, the local union committee is discussing with management how the staff are coping with working from home, and we have successfully argued that consultation on returning to work can wait until this is completed.  This is a reflection of the concerns of staff.  But as I have just said, this is unsustainable and the local union committee is clear that the issue will quickly turn to what terms we return on.  For a socialist the question is – how do we impose some control over that return?  No one, and certainly not me, will be declaring the potential advent of mass murder.

The virus has not inflicted the casualties many predicted.  It is clear most people have relatively little to be concerned about.  The point now is to protect the most vulnerable in a way that was not done before when the lockdown was first implemented.  Saying everyone is facing massive danger doesn’t help this task but detracts from it.  If the danger facing everyone is at this level why have the vulnerable suffered so much more?

Over half the deaths in the North and South of Ireland have been in care homes for older people and the failure to protect them has been repeated in many countries.  In the North of Ireland (and also in relation to services in the South) and in Britain, the NHS stopped doing its day job and became a National Covid Service.  Countless people will die because of this.  Countless, in the sense of very many and countless in the sense that many will not be identified as having died from lack of health services that they might otherwise have received. And this isn’t an issue belonging to the past.

The disastrous performance of health services resulted from their working to a political agenda determined by the Governments in power, whether it be the Tories in Britain, the unelected Fine Gael in the Irish State or the coalition of reactionaries in the North of Ireland.  For them the issue was one of political performance and credibility.  The Tories highjacked the NHS brand, so easily done since they are in charge of it; the Irish administrations did the same with perhaps less outrageous brass neck, and they all did what politicians do and fight a political campaign as well as a public health one.

The Tories showed their utter incompetence while Varadkar’s Fine Gael gained popularity with a combination of nationalism, fear, an overwrought initial threat of the virus that didn’t materialise, subsidies to workers and business; the fact lockdown hasn’t lasted too long, and of course the fact that the Irish State sits between its two greatest cultural and economic influences – Britain and the US – who are widely regarded as having f****d it up.

Now they face two issues.  The backlog of healthcare cases, which in both Irish States is horrendous, as it also is in Britain, and how to approach a second wave. Oh . . .  and how the bill for the lockdown is going to be paid and who is going to pay it.

If what I have heard about Belfast is correct and applies more widely, the health systems are still going to be focused on Covid and how they are going to address the second wave.  The excuses trotted out everywhere for the failure to protect the most vulnerable do not inspire confidence that they will receive the protection and support they need the next time, if there is one.

Promises that cancelled and postponed services will be renewed are not completely reassuring when this is caveated with ‘explanations’ that re-creating these services will not be as quick as shutting them down, and that some services will return at much reduced capacity.

At the start of the lockdown it was argued that what was going on was not social distancing but physical distancing, and that this was a more accurate description.  But that has not really proved to be the case.  One metre or two depends on the expert medical advice you listen to.  The fear and confusion involved with Covid-19 has led to a situation of social distancing in which the State and mass media has imposed a climate of fear that has justified the most draconian restriction of civil and democratic rights, and without the protest it has deserved.

Dependence on the state and its propaganda that (some) socialists have lamented and opposed has grown enormously.  To oppose it has been seen as the preserve of the deranged right, who unfurled the banner of freedom only as outriders for that part of the capitalist class that most exploited it workforce or who otherwise wanted out of the lockdown as quickly as possible.  The left’s penchant for highlighting opposition to the far right kicked in with warnings that this would assist the secret project of less extreme Government leaders getting ready for implementing the same policy.

Only the protests against the state murder of George Floyd in the US, encapsulated in the Black Lives Matter protests, has shattered the instruction that the people must do as they are told.  Social distancing was more or less ignored.  Social isolation, whether in terms of ‘stay at home’ or unemployment, is no basis on which to create a working class movement, a task not suspended by the virus.

The left, or much of it, has saddled itself with a policy of maintaining a lockdown that largely doesn’t exist for many; will not exist for much longer; is unsupportable; that incurs costs workers will face paying or an almighty fight to oppose, and misses the main issue, which is not to extend lockdown but to try to help workers take some form of control over how it is ended, while accepting that it will and it must.

There is of course the alternative to what I have just said; that what I am advocating is a continuation of mass murder and that this is what we are about to face.

Civil Rights and Socialist strategy 5 – New Left Review interview 1969

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Two years after the formation of the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association and after the October demonstration in Derry, O’Neill’s reform package, the Burntollet march, and only a week before Terence O’Neill’s resignation, members of Peoples Democracy were interviewed by New Left Review (NLR) on 20 April 1969.  It is an invaluable record of what left wing leaders were thinking at the time.  As one participant, Cyril Toman, said “coming together for this interview is probably the first time people here have discussed problems in any depth for months.” Apparently, the interview was rather chaotic.

The interview is a contemporary record of the many problems discussed in these posts, expressing the confusion that existed among the participants.  As Bernadette Devlin says “we are totally unorganised and totally without any form of discipline within ourselves.  I’d say that there are hardly two of us who really agree . . .” While Michael Farrell stated near the end of the interview that “we cannot form any high level organisation. As we do not yet have the theoretical basis for any clearly determined policies, in fact we have not even discussed some elementary problems.”

The NLR interview asks some of these basic questions. One of the first is why socialists were raising reformist demands, and we have discussed this question in a previous post.  Eamonn McCann argued that the “transformation of Irish society necessary to implement these reforms is a revolution” and that therefore “we are definitely in a pre-revolutionary situation in the north . . . by supporting these demands in a militant manner, we are supporting class demands . . .“  How does this judgement stand the test of time?

In other posts it has been noted that class demands were viewed as separate from the demands for civil rights and that there was not enough emphasis on the former.  In this interview the participants appear to assume that socialists should attempt to lead the civil rights struggle although this, of course is not in itself an answer.

I have also expressed that, in my view, what existed at that time was not a ‘pre-revolutionary situation’, at least not as would refer to socialist revolution, and at most the grounds existed only for overthrow of the Unionist regime (not of British rule), which of course happened three years later.

While Michael Farrell argued for participation in the broad civil rights movement and the employment of civil rights demands to radicalise the Catholic working class, and to join these with agitation over ‘class’ issues that would have the potential to unite Protestant and Catholic workers; McCann states that “we have failed to get our message across.”  “The consciousness of the people is still most definitely sectarian” he says, and argued that “the reason we have failed to get our position across is that we have failed to fight any sort of political struggle within the Civil Rights movement.”

This proved to be a major difference between McCann and Farrell, who argued that “we have radicalised the Catholic working class to quite a considerable extent and to some degree got across to them the necessity of non-sectarianism and even the fact that their Protestant fellow worker is almost as much exploited as they are.  But we have failed to get across at all to the Protestant working class.”  The rebuttal by Farrell is therefore not an unqualified one.  Bernadette Devlin then argues that the real difficulty was “support from Catholic capitalists and bigots.”

The participants are asked to what extent they have leafleted Protestant areas, to which McCann argues that “all our failures spring from the lack of anything even resembling a revolutionary party.”  This remark seems not to be a statement of the much-repeated non-explanation offered by many small left wing organisations for the lack of success in what they view as revolutionary situations.  This is often a non-explanation, because such a party is the creation of the working class and if it has not been created this reflects not simply, or mainly, on socialists but in the under-developed class consciousness of the mass of workers.

In the case of Northern Ireland, the consciousness of workers was formed by sectarian division and support for nationalism and unionism.  Too often the objective determinants of class consciousness are under-estimated, ironically by Marxists, and lessons drawn from a different set of historical circumstances, often ones where there has obviously been socialist radicalisation of mass sections of the working class.  Lessons are then mechanically applied to circumstances where this is very definitely not the case.

Rather it seems to be a statement that independent intervention by socialists had not been coherent enough, that the civil rights movement would specifically not issue a leaflet and opposed issuing one.  For McCann the lack of organisation stemmed from being dissolved politically into the Civil Rights movement – “a crucial error and a grievous one.”

Cyril Toman argued that the original difference between themselves and “the bourgeois Civil Rights leaders was that we advocated action and they didn’t” but that they have now “begun to advocate action themselves.”  He then warns that such actions would propose “mindlessly militant actions across the province, and that instead of forming any socialist party (we) will have to chase all over the place trying to scrape up some meaningful debris from these actions.”

The interviewer poses the question whether socialists were performing a service for the Civil Rights Movement rather than vice versa, to which Toman replies that “yes, this is broadly true.”

Socialist activists across many struggles and campaigns have often been told that they must be the best builders of any campaign in order to win recruits to their ranks but the example of the Irish civil rights movement is that being the most militant fighter for a cause short of socialism, while good and often necessary, is not sufficient to advance the ultimate aim and does not necessarily entail the development of class consciousness in those participating in the struggle.

The struggle for civil rights did not engender a significant socialist movement and the struggle against imperialism that commenced following it didn’t either.  Asserting the primacy of ‘anti-imperialist’ demands as the first step in approaching struggles, sometimes involving support for purely nationalist demands and movements, has also not proved fruitful for socialists.

Undoubtedly the complexity of the situation facing socialists at this time created much confusion, but this was caused more by the restriction of the struggle to the North of Ireland, which hampered its development in a socialist direction.   The weakness of socialists was reflected in arguments over how sectarian the Catholic population was and how there was no movement in support from within the Protestant working class.

This led Farrell to speculate on dual power in Catholic areas versus pursuit of working class unity around reformist demands.  It might be said that at this time socialists in effect fought for the latter and then later for the former, and both failed.  This is not a question of blame but of recognition that socialists were subject to very unfavourable forces, that constrained them more than they shaped events.

McCann argued against any notion of ‘Catholic power’ which he argued existed in Catholic run councils, which although was a reasonable point, is not quite what Farrell speculated on. His alternative, in so far as he could express it in such an interview, was – giving the important example of housing – that socialists should demand nationalisation of the housing societies.

As expressed many times in this blog, nationalisation is not socialism, and in this case the nationalisation by the Unionist state, that socialists were fighting to destroy, could only mean nationalisation by the British state, whose power and rule they would later explicitly seek to remove.

The particular character of nationalisation in these circumstances makes clear the nature of such a demand: reliance on the capitalist state to do what socialism requires the workers to do themselves.

For McCann “we have failed to give a socialist perspective because we have failed to create any socialist organisation’, although he goes on to argue that “we cannot form a Bolshevik party overnight . . . we must try to set up some sort of radical socialist front between republicans and ourselves.”

As I have argued already, Irish republicanism is a form of militant nationalism and this proposal from McCann appears not to be consistent with drawing a clearer demarcation between socialists and the representatives of purely Catholic rights, which he also advocated.  Nor does it appear consistent with the emphasis on seeking support from Protestant workers.  The point here is not to damn McCann for inconsistency but to look at the arguments than recur again and again among Irish socialists.

So, in 1969 there was to develop a more or less open struggle within Irish republicanism about the way forward, between advocates of a more left-wing direction and more traditional republicans.  The traditionalists opposed dropping the customary policy of abstentionism in the Dial and continued to advocate the overwhelming primacy of armed action.

In this situation McCann could be said to be correct to seek some form of approach to unity with left members of the republican movement in order to advance socialist politics and organisation.  It is more than unfortunate that this leftward move was to take the form of Stalinism, which ironically represented an incomplete break with nationalism (see their descendants’ support for Brexit) and also ended up in a dogmatic adherence to limited reform of the North.

The problem with this approach was not that unity among the working class was to continue to be pursued, but that pursuit of this led more and more to capitulation to the unionist politics of the Protestant working class to which this unity was directed.  When practical political unity seemed only possible through ditching politics that would have made such unity worthwhile and progressive, and in the interest of the working class as a whole, the Official Republicans ditched the politics while failing to achieve any unity around even a mildly reformist programme.  If they have had some consolation, it is the poor one of seeing their Provisional rivals consummate the defeat of their alternative.

In answer to McCann, Farrell emphasised that “we have to explore the radical possibilities of the base that we do have, at this moment, among the working class, and that base is the Catholic section of the working class.” This too might seem to some degree obvious, as in having to start from where you are, but the question raised next in the interview was where that was – “you all seem to agree that the road to socialism in Ireland must pass via the Protestant working class.  Is that so?”

Toman said “I would answer that by saying bluntly, yes”.  Baxter qualifies this by saying “you cannot move in a socialist direction unless you have the support of some sections of the Protestant working class.  Otherwise they will start a sectarian struggle, and all the forces of Catholic reaction will swamp us.”

Farrell answered differently by arguing that “Northern Ireland is completely unviable economically . . . The unification of Ireland into a socialist republic is not only necessary for the creation of a viable economy, it must also be an immediate demand, because only the concept of a socialist republic can ever reconcile Protestant workers, who rightly have a very deep-seated fear of a Roman Catholic republic, to the ending of the border.”

While it is true that there has always appeared little interest for Protestant workers in supporting a capitalist united Ireland, the fact remains that for many, their reactionary sectarian politics means that they are in complete opposition to any concept of socialism as well.

Decades of elections have demonstrated this, and while the more recent defeats of the Catholic Church in the South of Ireland have undoubtedly lessened antipathy of many Protestants to the Irish State, this has revealed Unionism as perhaps the strongest standard-bearer of reactionary social ideas that generations of socialists have claimed was the real cause of Protestant workers opposition to a united Ireland.

How difficult winning Protestant support would be was made clear at the time in a document produced by Eamonn McCann that recounted the experience of taking the civil rights and socialist message to Protestant workers in the Fountain area of Derry.

McCann and Bernadette Devlin went into the Fountain and found themselves talking in front of a small audience in a kitchen, during which McCann explained that the civil rights line was one of “justice for all sections of the Community etc., and put it to them that the minority rule of Derry Corporation was indefensible.  How could they justify it?  A middle-aged woman told me immediately: “But if you Catholics were in control there would be no life for us here.  We would have to leave our homes and get out.”

McCann told them that this was ridiculous and that they had been brain-washed by the Unionist Party, but he gives them an alibi, that the movement had not made it clear what it was for, it had attacked unionism – the political philosophy accepted by most Protestants – but not any form of nationalism or any Catholic, which within the movement would be “howled down.”

As we have seen in the previous post, this was put forward as a real problem but it was not one that could be solved by any organisational change, but reflected the interests of the middle class leadership of the Derry Citizens Action Committee and the mass of Catholic workers unwillingness at that point to challenge it.  Inside or outside the DCAC it would still have to be challenged and it is at least arguable that socialists were in too much of a minority to stand outside making the argument.

Above all, this episode illustrates the central tragedy of the civil rights movement and its anti-sectarian objectives.  Faced with the argument that minority rule in Derry was unjust the Protestant woman explained that it was justified and that Catholics could not possibly be in control.  Equality was not acceptable.  This was the message that led the civil rights struggle to be submerged by sectarian division.

Concluded

Back to part 4

Civil Rights and Socialist strategy 4 – the failure of the Left

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In looking back at the civil rights movement Eamonn McCann argued that “the left had a lot of influence in the early days of the civil rights movement. We frittered it away. No question of that. We frittered it away. We have to learn lessons from that and look back.”  In doing this on the fortieth anniversary of 1968 he wrote that “in the long run, we didn’t punch our weight.”

McCann also noted the weakness of republicanism in Derry in the 1960s, which won less than 3,000 votes in a constituency with more than 25,000 Catholics in 1966, while in West Belfast IRA leader Billy McMillen came fourth out of four with just 6.3 per cent of the vote in 1964.

However, McCann also made the point that the radicals of around twenty to thirty in Derry were weak – a “relatively small, raggedy band of socialists”; “no sizeable socialist party was built from the experience, no distinctive socialist current emerged”. “What was needed . . . were clear ideas and coherent organisation, which wasn’t our strong suit.”

He complained that it was difficult to engage in political debate within the Derry Citizens’ Action Committee, with anyone raising class politics denounced as splitting the all-class unity of the Committee.  He remarked on the radicals “blithe disregard for organisation and structure, because we had underestimated the depth of the sectarian division and the hold of nationalism on the Catholic community, because we had not been engaged in building a serious socialist party.”

McCann states that there was no clarification of differences, with “little serious effort to draw a line of demarcation with nationalism.’  This was especially needed in 1969 as the anger of youth flowed “through unimpeded among nationalist channels, eventually, into the IRA.”

He noted the way barricades were thrown across the entrance to Catholic areas, which he saw as confirming sectarian division, and the absence of the organised workers’ movement from the civil rights struggle.  In relation to the latter “we were too far out in front. [We] had lost contact with the main formation of the class and the only institution in the North which organised across the sectarian divide, the union movement, in which we might have grounded ourselves, or cleared ground for a new departure.”

McCann does record that in the 1969 Stormont election Peoples Democracy “was able to address mainly-Protestant workforces, emphasising the class basis of its hostility to unionism . . . but given the spontaneous nature of the socialists’ main organisational expression – the PD – and the absence of clear-cut ideas, the militancy came across as much as a reflection of gut opposition to the Northern state as of conscious adherence to socialist politics.”

He quotes Bernadette Devlin, after she won a by-election to become a Westminster MP –“there may not be 30,000 socialists in this constituency, but it has a socialist MP.”  As he also records, “events had been rushing forward, pell-mell, helter-skelter, at a pace never previously experienced in stultified Northern Ireland, hurtling, as we thought, towards a possibly imminent resolution.  It was vital not to be left behind.  So no time to stop, analyse, synthesise.  In the blur of activity, we missed the moment.”

“This is not to say that if we had all been hardened revolutionaries with clear ideas, working patiently, efficiently to build a revolutionary socialist party, things would have worked out very differently”, acknowledging the historical weight of communal rather than class allegiance and the failure of the official labour movement.  His “realistic possibility” was one of “recruiting relatively rapidly from angry, urgent working class youth” and “entering 1969 not as a hubbub of socialist individuals but as a serious socialist organisation, capable of taking on and competing for popular support. . .” (all quotes from ‘Socialism and 1968’, in ‘Spirit of ’68’ edited Pauline McClenaghan)

If we review this argument, we can see that it isn’t altogether consistent.  It is argued that the left did not punch its weight but began the struggle as a “small, raggedy band”.  Before civil rights agitation took off the group was presented with a perspectives document that acknowledged their poor prospects, with the great mass of people seeing “religion, not class, as the basic divide in our society.”

Elsewhere he notes that although the left played a prominent role in organising marches; putting out leaflets and bulletins; running a radio station and in standing as candidates in  elections, that during their speeches “when the people were applauding [it] was not so much what we said but the way we said it.”  He notes correctly that prominent involvement in mass agitation did not mean that they had real political leadership or, as Bernadette Devlin put it – she was a socialist MP but not elected by socialist constituents.

McCann argues in his book ‘War and an Irish Town’ that mass influence is meaningless “unless one is in the process of forging a political instrument necessary to lead such agitation to victory . . .” and “we have learned that it is impossible to do that if one is not forearmed with a coherent class analysis of the situation and a clear programme based on it.”

Both of these are claims are true but his later assessment that things might not have worked out very differently had this been the case – and it can be argued that socialists at the time did argue vociferously for a socialist approach – nevertheless is also true.  These two requirements posed by McCann were not enough and their absence itself needs explanation, not simply in terms of the failures of individuals involved.

Perhaps they could have done better, as we can all have done better in our political careers, but this does not make our failure to do things as best they could be done the cause of wider failure by the movement or the class.  The point of this series of posts has been to understand what happened in order to do better now, but what happened was the outcome of forces much stronger than the left input into these events.

The left perspective document in 1968 quoted by McCann was not wrong to note the strength of sectarian division and the unionist and nationalist politics that divided workers within the North.  As I have noted a number of times, the short duration of the civil rights struggle, as well as its very uneven development, meant there was little time to challenge the historically developed political consciousness already imbued within Irish workers.

And this partially explains why republicanism, despite its obvious weakness in Belfast and Derry, was able to grow rapidly while the left did not.  Irish republicanism is not an alternative to nationalism but simply a variety of it, its most militant manifestation.  The transformation of consciousness required to move from support for the Nationalist Party to Republicanism is qualitatively different from one required to move from any sort of nationalism to socialism.  It should be recalled that, for many Catholic workers, this move to more militant nationalism was not made until republicans stopped being republican, in the traditional militant sense, and had given up armed struggle.

McCann notes that it was difficult to engage in debate within the Derry Citizens Action Committee (DCAC) because this would be denounced as political and divisive of Catholic unity.  He also argues that not enough was done to distinguish the socialist case from the nationalist one.  But there is ample evidence of socialists arguing the case for class politics through many of their interventions, and while their failure to build a significant socialist organisation was something that might otherwise have been achieved, this outcome was not primarily due to their failure to distinguish themselves as socialists.

Both McCann in Derry, Bernadette Devlin in her election campaign, and Peoples Democracy generally, were all loud in their opposition to green capitalism and their support for working class unity.  They failed because of the strength of its division, and while as Marxists this may be regrettable to have to admit, it is not at all incomprehensible. The difficulty of intervening in the DCAC that McCann noted did not make refusing to enter it an answer, but reflected the consciousness not only of the middle class leadership of the DCAC but of the Catholic workers it led, as McCann himself has noted.  The difficulty also remained outside the DCAC and most leftists joined it (although it would appear with little influence) because they feared isolation outside it.

The forces overwhelming the small and divided socialist movement, as McCann appears to recognise, were the events that “had been rushing forward, pell-mell, helter-skelter, at a pace never previously experienced in stultified Northern Ireland, hurtling, as we thought, towards a possibly imminent resolution.”

A whirlwind of events can sometimes suggest more fundamental changes occurring than actually are, and that requires analysis, which McCann notes was missing.

But this is still true today, with this lesson still unlearned, with the left now bigger but no nearer building a genuine working class party, which requires not just a much bigger mass membership but a class conscious class from which to draw its ranks and a democratic culture that can provide the analysis with which it can take leadership.

Today the left in Ireland, and not not just Ireland by any means, is still too much impressed by action and not by the consciousness that drives it, and is in turn derived from it.  Honest and sober analysis still escapes it, with support for Brexit a particularly egregious example of a mistaken political programme.  Even when criticising what he sees as the failure of the left in the late sixties to build a serious socialist organisation he repeats the idea that what was needed was to recruit “rapidly from angry, urgent working class youth”, themselves the product of the “pell-mell, helter-skelter” of events that the left sought to keep up with.

As these lines are posted mass demonstrations and riots are taking place in the US following another racist killing by the police.  References have been made to this being an American ‘revolution’ when in fact we are a very long way from the American working class posing a socialist revolution,  Presenting the missing ingredient as a revolutionary party begs all the questions about the nature of the working class and its movement from which it alone can be created.

The erection of barricades to separate Catholic areas under attack from the RUC and loyalists, symbolising for McCann the obstacles to unity between Catholic and Protestant workers, is testament to the strength of sectarian division but does not make their erection mistaken.  Hence the tragedy.

His speculation that socialists might have grounded themselves in the trade union movement, but had become separated from it, does indeed argue correctly for an orientation by socialists to the working class as it is, and not to counterpose one’s own sectarian interests, organisation and programme to the workers own movement, but McCann himself notes the passivity of the official movement and its effective abstention from the civil rights campaign.  To reverse this would have required a fight inside the trade unions, against its leadership, and this could only have succeeded in a struggle in which socialists had won the support not only of many Catholic workers (from nationalism) but also Protestant workers (from unionism).

No one can claim that this could have been achieved in a few years; it is the work of many years and involves forces greater than exist within the six counties.  In the meantime it could not have been wrong to orient to those willing to campaign for democratic rights in order that they might be directed to such an orientation.

That there is still no settled view on what socialists should have done in 1968 – 69 is not surprising since this is largely fed by what socialists think we should be doing now.

Back to part 3

Forward to part 5

Farewell to a Comrade

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My comrade and friend Kevin Keating died on 8 May following a diagnosis of Glioblastoma in March last year.  He had asked me to say a few words at his funeral but circumstances did not permit this.

Instead I submitted a few personal words to his wife Anne, but I now write about the political example that Kevin’s life embodied.

The two are not separate. Kevin’s qualities as a person are integral to a political appreciation.  He was warm and kind, as prepared to listen and learn as he was to speak and teach.  His honesty and integrity were fundamental to his political beliefs and practice, so that he recoiled from the cynicism and hypocrisy that characterises much left political practice.  His political commitment was without any personal calculation and arose spontaneously from his revulsion against oppression and his belief that there was a socialist alternative.

His history of political activism shows that this was a consequence not of opposition to any particular oppression but was motivated by universal opposition to all oppression.  It developed into an abiding commitment to Marxism as the only politics adequate to ending all exploitative and oppressive social relations.  It was evidenced in his youthful radicalisation and his participation in international solidarity movements; more recently his support for abortion rights in the Repeal the Eighth campaign and in his opposition to clerical control of the new National Maternity Hospital.

He was born into a working class area of South Dublin and drew his developing political views from this background – his position as a young apprentice in a militant working class – and from the experience of working class revolt that had spread across the world in the late sixties and early seventies.

He briefly encountered the Young Socialists in the early 1970s, and after Bloody Sunday in 1972 he joined the Republican Movement.  He left that movement due to misgivings over its secret negotiations with the British State and the exclusion of the rank and file of the movement, not only from any input into them but full knowledge of their conduct.

As he notes in an interview with him here not long before he died, this was not the only time the Republican Movement involved itself in secret diplomacy, always to the detriment of the struggle its volunteers were engaged in and the people it claimed to be fighting for.

Kevin later joined Peoples Democracy at the time of the republican hunger strikes, convinced that it provided the way forward for the campaign for political status and the struggle in the North.

While many members of Peoples Democracy subsequently left that organisation for Sinn Fein, believing that anti-imperialism meant defending republicanism which meant supporting republicanism, Kevin was convinced of the correctness of his move to Marxism, a journey very few took before or since.

This commitment to socialism has been described as inspirational by his comrades, while the modesty with which he defended this commitment has also been recalled.  The two are not unrelated.  Kevin inspired because of his modesty, a quality he had despite the rarity of his journey and the perspicacity of his political judgement.

I still remember his criticism of the politics of much of the Irish left that, just like Oliver Twist asking for more, this did not mean seeking the end of the workhouse system.  As Karl Marx once said “Instead of the conservative motto, ‘A fair day’s wage for a fair day’s work!’ they ought to inscribe on their banner the revolutionary watchword, ‘Abolition of the wages system!’”

This modesty made him his greatest critic, never content with received wisdom and always open to learning.  He neither forgot the world-wide radicalisation of the period in which he became politically aware, nor did he simply believe it would return in the same form.  He never looked back from his departure from republicanism but neither did he renounce opposition to partition, imperialism and its division of the working class.

He never denied defeats, but never disallowed that victories were possible.  His certainty about Marxism did not prevent him acknowledging problems, from asking questions and seeking answers.  His physical courage so evident in his political activism, and his living with cancer and its horrendous treatment, was matched by an intellectual courage that was not afraid of listening to the views of others.  He was not dogmatic but still remained committed to the fundamental ideas of Marxism.

My fondest memory was when we spent a week together at a World Congress of the Fourth International, spending hours walking and talking in between sessions about the issues being debated.  For him no authority, and especially of those in working class and socialist organisations, was beyond questioning or criticism. In fact, they, above all, were to be subject to them.  This is what working class organisation was all about.  Why republicanism was to be rejected, why trade union bureaucracies were to be fought, and why socialist organisations should be models of free debate and criticism.

An Australian at the World Congress told us that Bruges was a short distance away so we decided to take a day away from the congress and take the tram and train instead.  It was extremely cold as we walked the cobbled streets of Bruges, which ‘forced’ us to go into one of the many pubs for a drink.  We decided to take turns buying a round and to get a different drink at each round.  Because we were in Belgium the bar had dozens of different beers of all prices and strengths.  One round would cost a fortune and the next one would be cheap.  One would taste like diluted water and the next one would blow your head off.

Neither of us being able to hold our drink, we gave up after about four rounds and decided to go home.  Neither of us satisfied the image of a stereotypical Irishman who could drink until the cows came home.  I said that we should rather think of ourselves as Brendan Gleeson and Colin Farrell in the film ‘In Bruges’, and that he was the Brendan Gleeson character and I was the Colin Farrell one.  From the smile on Kevin’s face it was clear that he thought not only did he not look like Brendan Gleeson but I didn’t look like Colin Farrell.  And he was, of course, correct.

It is as a friend that I will miss him most but also politically.  As I normally sit down to write a post on this blog the person I would think most often of as my audience, whose opinion I would anticipate and consider most intently afterwards, was Kevin’s.  His lifetime commitment to socialism was well encapsulated by his choice of song at his funeral, Phil Och’s ‘When I’m Gone’ –

Can’t add my name into the fight while I’m gone
So I guess I’ll have to do it while I’m here.

In life, so now in his death, he has inspired his comrades to continue to dedicate their lives to the struggle for socialism under the banner of Marxism. “Life is beautiful. Let the future generations cleanse it of all evil, oppression, and violence, and enjoy it to the full.”

Derry TUC publishes a Workers’ Charter

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On May Day Derry Trades Union Council (DTUC) launched a Workers’ Charter and published it in local newspapers.  It argued the need for trade unions and for workers to organise to push for real change.

The Charter raised ‘the Red Flag of workers’ unity and socialism’, calling for ‘a Living Wage for all’ and ‘a shift in the balance of wealth and power away from corporations and the rich and towards the rest of us.’

We should therefore ask ourselves – what does this wealth and power consist of, where does it come from and how do workers shift the balance?

If the Coronavirus crisis has taught us anything, it is that the wealth of society is the product of the labour of the working class, with some of the lowest paid workers recognised as key to the functioning of society.

So if they are so crucial, why is this not recognised in the remuneration they receive?

The reason that they enjoy so little of the fruits of their labour is that their labour power is exercised for the production of profit, because production only takes place in pursuit of it, and is derived only from the labour performed by workers for which they are unpaid.  That is why they must now work and why they are paid so little.  They don’t own or control the corporations that they work for, which provides the enormous incomes and wealth of those who do, so the economy is not a function of need but of the expansion of this unpaid labour.

The supermarket workers do not own Tesco, which is paying out a £900m dividend to its owners despite getting a tax break, but they are absolutely necessary for this dividend to exist.  Many firms loaded with debt will get Government bail outs while the private equity firms that own this debt sit on $2.5 trillion of cash.  The state will not take this into account as they do the meagre incomes and savings of workers who apply for welfare.

The rich owners of corporations are rich because they own the means of producing the wealth of society. Their wealth and power comes from control over the production that generates current income and accumulated wealth. Health Service workers such as cleaners, nurses and doctors are exposed to danger because they also don’t own and control the NHS. They have no more control over their pay and conditions than those who work in private hospitals or private care homes.  If they did the shortage of personal protection equipment would not have existed.

The answer to shifting the wealth and power in society is therefore to shift ownership and control of production to the people who work to create this wealth.

Derry TUC correctly point out that vast sums of money have been found to cover the Covid-19 emergency after years of tiny wage increases for health service and other workers – ‘the money was there all along’.  It wants a tax-free payment of £1,500 for all front-line workers plus an additional four bank holidays a year.

But the money wasn’t there all along.  It has been borrowed.  It’s now a question of whether, how and who will pay it back.  Money was found for the financial crisis of 2007-08 but austerity was imposed to pay for it.

The DTUC statement says that the government is putting the ‘economy’ and profits ahead of protecting people and public health.

But the ‘economy’ is also about the production of all the goods and services that are required to protect people and their public health.  Not only the goods and services the NHS needs, that NHS workers need, but all the other economic activity that pays the taxes that funds the health service and other services, including any tax-free payments of £1,500.

The ‘economy’ is not something separate from the activity of working people, that has needs wholly separate from their needs.  That is the lie peddled by the Government and bosses.  The working class is the working class because it is the prime productive force of the ‘economy’.

The ‘economy’ is not just the production of profit but also the production of what people need in order to live in a civilised society.  We cannot survive without continuing to produce and no amount of additional money will be of any use to us if we cannot continue to produce.  Working people will be the first to suffer, and the last not to, if whole parts of the ‘economy’ are closed down.

That is the prime contradiction of the capitalist system – that it is production for profit but must also satisfy human need – and capitalism incurs crises because of this opposition.

The battle now is to ensure that the terms and conditions of those workers who return to work are safe and acceptable, and that depends on workers being ready to go to work organised and ready to stand up to the demands of their bosses.  That is the lesson from health workers already having to face a lack of PPE.  This requires introducing as far as possible mechanisms of workers control.

It also means the organisation of all those workers who are now unemployed and who are threatened with being idle in the longer term.

Workers cannot afford not to work, they aren’t capitalists, and capitalism does not pay for workers unless it is profitable.  It would be the height of stupidity to say that we should not return to work because this is demanded only because the bosses want to make money.  Of course they do!  Until we have a new society based on production for need, and not profit, we have no choice but to recognise this reality, to face up to the economy we actually live in and struggle within it to defend ourselves while also fighting to change it.

Capitalism will not be overthrown by refusing to work, or pretending we can change its laws by simply demanding that profit no longer rules.

Once again, it is workers ownership and control of production that is key to workers’ defence and a socialist alternative.

The DTUC says that ‘globally, one per cent of the population holds half the world’s wealth.  We need a new system’.  But why is this true?

The world’s decisive capitalist class and its corporations (with its various States) holds the vast majority of wealth creation – that is what defines them.  They are smaller than even one per cent, and own or control much more than half.  Their lavish riches composed of multiple residences, private islands, yachts, private planes, fancy cars, jewellery, stocks and shares, and bank accounts with millions, are only the product of their real wealth and power, which is their ownership of production and the political power that derives from it.

Derry TUC points specifically to the amount of money spent in the UK defence budget, ‘set to reach £55 billion’.  But why only this? UK ‘defence’ spending is only 2.1% of GDP.  What about the other 97.9% that is all produced by workers?  Should it not also be directed to their needs?  And how else would this be done except by controlling it, which means owning it?

The statement calls for ‘a government of the people’, investing this money in areas such as green energy, but why should the State own and control this?  The Irish State already owns significant parts of the energy industry in the North of Ireland as well as in the South, and this isn’t socialism. Governments already invest significant amounts in Green energy through subsidies to wind farms and taxes on consumption but this has not brought the transformation of society any closer.

The point is not to increase this state ownership but for workers to develop their own energy production, something more and more possible with smaller and more distributed renewable power generation. The point is to increase the wealth and power of the working class, not the State that defends the existing capitalist system and subsidises the capitalist class.

Derry TUC says that ‘politics has taken power away from the people moved towards the major corporations.’ But this is misleading.

The most fundamental power has always lied with the capitalist class, its system and the laws by which it operates.  The capitalist class and its state has increased its power over many years but it has always had power over the working class.  Working people can defend themselves and resist, but to create their own power and to create a society in which their power prevails requires an economy owned and controlled by workers and by no one else.  To fight for this requires more than bigger and better trade unions; it requires the creation of a mass democratic working class Party.

This is the lesson we must re-learn and teach every May Day.

In his inaugural address to the workers of the First International Marx extolled –

‘the still greater victory of the political economy of labour over the political economy of property. We speak of the co-operative movement, especially the co-operative factories raised by the unassisted efforts of a few bold “hands”. The value of these great social experiments cannot be overrated. By deed instead of by argument, they have shown that production on a large scale, and in accord with the behests of modern science, may be carried on without the existence of a class of masters employing a class of hands’

To achieve this, Marx said, ‘the great duty’ of the working classes was to ‘conquer political power’ and this required the organisation of a working class party.

The policy of that Party cannot afford to defer the tasks of the working class to the capitalist state, or to pretend that tinkering with the distribution of the fruits of labour through increasing wages etc. is a substitute for revolutionising the distribution of the ownership and control of production.

As Marx said in the ‘Critique of the Gotha Programme’, a programme representing an earlier Workers’ Charter:

‘Any distribution whatever of the means of consumption is only a consequence of the distribution of the conditions of production themselves. The latter distribution, however, is a feature of the mode of production itself. The capitalist mode of production, for example, rests on the fact that the material conditions of production are in the hands of nonworkers in the form of property in capital and land, while the masses are only owners of the personal condition of production, of labour power. If the elements of production are so distributed, then the present-day distribution of the means of consumption results automatically.’

‘If the material conditions of production are the co-operative property of the workers themselves, then there likewise results a distribution of the means of consumption different from the present one. Vulgar socialism (and from it in turn a section of the democrats) has taken over from the bourgeois economists the consideration and treatment of distribution as independent of the mode of production and hence the presentation of socialism as turning principally on distribution. After the real relation has long been made clear, why retrogress again?’

Why indeed?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

‘Protecting’ the NHS

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I watched the BBC Panorama programme on the NHS and the Government failure to prepare properly for the Covid-19 pandemic, despite warnings.  It focused on its failure to stock and resupply adequate amounts of appropriate Personal Protection Equipment, and to spin the amount of PPE newly received by, for example, counting a pair of gloves as two items and including cleaning disposables as equipment.

The Tories cannot legitimately complain if they have made the NHS the centre of controversy because it is they who put it to the fore – ‘Protect the NHS’ is the slogan, with ‘success’ of its whole effort defined as the NHS not being overwhelmed by casualties of the virus.  It is important we don’t buy into this.

We are implored to ‘Protect the NHS’ when it is the function of the NHS to be the last line of defence for us.  Instead it has become the last place anyone wants to go.  Having scared everyone by the lockdown, vast numbers of existing and prospective patients have either been told not to attend, had their treatment cancelled or postponed, or have been unable to get diagnoses and tests they badly need.  The NHS isn’t dealing with them – it has been estimated that 18,000 extra deaths from cancer might result, currently around half of those recorded as dying from Coronavirus.

Not only has the NHS moved from defending us to us being exhorted to defend it, but the NHS is actually a threat, including to its own staff, over a hundred of whom have been estimated to have died from the virus.  While appointments and operations are cancelled, and Emergency Department attendances have collapsed, we are invited to acclaim the empty Nightingdale hospitals and empty beds as a success!  We are expected to recognise as successful an NHS that has become the site of infection and the one certain place to avoid unless you have absolutely no choice.

We are to applaud a service that has stopped being a National Health Service and become a National Covid Service following a transparently political agenda.  As I have written before, we are invited to ‘Protect the NHS’ when truthfully what we are invited to protect is the Government that has so denuded the NHS of resources for so long, and made such a mess of the current outbreak, that it simply cannot cope with doing its day job and deal with the virus at the same time.

By making sure that the NHS is able cope we ensure that the cuts and their effects are hidden despite the crisis; but rather than seeing this as a grotesque choice we have been forced to accept we have been invited to greet it as ‘success’, as Johnson so glibly and cynically put it.

And we do this because the NHS is one indivisible saintly entity without a bureaucracy that heads it, or an amoral Government that directs it, that unproblematically reflects the innate compassion of humanity – despite the evidence that doctors, nurses and purchasing managers have all complained that this organisation is failing its own staff never mind those it is there to serve.

The NHS, created to put an end to dependence on charitable provision, has become the biggest charity case in the country.  No doubt many people want to help, but the greatest help is not the individual resources many have had to fall back on but development of critical political consciousness.

We are supposed not to pay attention to the censorship of NHS staff who complain about their lack of protection but invited to applaud every week the protection these people are supposed to give us.  We are simply to accept that cancer patients will not get their treatment because on balance they would then have their immune system too compromised if they became infected, which is only the proper choice if we already accept that they cannot be protected.

We are to ignore that the NHS has taken PPE from elderly care homes while moving infected patients from hospitals into them: ‘Protect the NHS’ does not apparently mean Protecting Social Care.  Their clients’ deaths weren’t even counted in the headline daily total until very recently.

It becomes ‘pragmatic’ to downgrade the level of PPE required by NHS and care staff because the real scientific advice, unencumbered by Tory political pressure, would demand a level of PPE that the NHS cannot provide.   So the ‘objective’ scientific advisors objectively become conspirators in covering up Tory austerity, neglect and incompetence.

This is a surreal world of spin and lies and suppression of facts, fairness and free expression that has worked because of fear and ignorance and lack of accountability, and because we really do rely on the NHS.

The Government has not been held to account by the Labour ‘opposition’, has only begun to face some media criticism recently, and has benefited from the social isolation of social distancing.  This distancing includes distancing from reality, substituted by what Marxists call reification and alienation that amplifies the worst media influences and instincts to defer to authority.  This authority would have us rally round flags standing either side of Government spokesmen who substitute for the primacy of the people clichéd totems of Britishness and itself.  Real solidarity is replaced by calls to the police by snitches reporting neighbours who don’t get out to clap the NHS and its workers.

So, in Belfast we were told that 15,000 people would die but now only 1,500.  We have appointments and procedures cancelled and postponed and over 70 Covid-19 beds created, that last week saw only around half occupied, while a further 200 plus have been set up.  A hotel has been taken over but only one floor is so far used.  Never mind, this may be ready for the next surge in September – October, which will perhaps translate as another Johnsonian ‘success’.  Ring for a service and you can be told that resources are being devoted to the treatment of Covid-19.  Appear in the City Hospital and find yourself inside a ‘clean’ area that unfortunately has just had red signing put up to indicate Covid-19 areas as the green signs disappear.  In some locations work is hectic while in others activity has hardly been lower and there are only the rituals of infection control.  Similar stories could be told across the NHS but it is all socially and politically invisible.

The NHS is a bureaucracy as well as a service, but it has become a saintly institution which it is blasphemous to criticise, and one that the Government has wrapped round itself to shield itself.  In the Orwellian world of 2020 those who have spent ten years weakening it are holding up the banner of its defence against those whom it should serve and have suffered from the years of austerity inflicted on it.  Just as NHS staff have been blamed for PPE shortages so patients are held responsible for its inadequacy.

It is therefore not ‘Our’ NHS.  It doesn’t even belong to those who work in it.  Working people should be asking themselves how all this is the case and what it is we really should be defending.  Socialists should ask themselves just what a genuinely socialist service would look like.  The NHS hasn’t been hijacked, it’s simply following orders