[A-List] UK state: Northern Ireland & 'Irish Roadmap'

["Michael Keaney" <michael.keaney@xxxxxx>]

Thanks to James Daly for forwarding this.

John McAnulty writes:

The truth is that the whole restoration process in the North of
Ireland has taken one more enormous step to the right that makes it
blindingly obvious that the imperial power and their native
collaborators do not have a strategy that will restore capitalist
stability.

<snip>

British policy is now a mass of contradictions.  All the military
organisations maintain a structure, but only the Loyalist
organisations continue a sectarian campaign which is extremely vicious
and extremely visible.  They now plan to heap punishment after
punishment on Sinn Fein while continuing to supply massive public
subsidies to the main band of loyalist killers, the Ulster Defence
Association (UDA). As if to underline this contradiction senior
officers in the RUC/PSNI met with the Ulster Political Research Group
(UPRG), the nearest the UDA thugs can come to a political
organisation, for a 'very useful' meeting on the day following the IMC
report.  This meeting was so useful that the UDA felt free to publicly
intimidate Catholic residents in an apartment complex in Belfast city
centre within a week of the meeting.  The police response to visible
preparation for a sectarian frenzy in July is an announcement by RUC
leader Hugh Orde that they will be unable to do anything about the
massive bonfires being assembled and the increasing intimidation as
these are community relations issues.

This pleases no-one.  The unionists complain that the proposals are 'a
tax on terror' and argue that if Sinn Fein are criminals then they
should be excluded from the political process - an impossible demand
given the electoral base of Sinn Fein as the North's largest
nationalist party.  Republican supporters are all too aware of the
policy of killing the Loyalist organisations with kindness, that they
clearly have state immunity from prosecution for their deeds and that
criminal intimidation is being redefined by the state as community
difference, where the victims have to engage with and conciliate the
sectarian aggressor or face the condemnation of police, equality
boards and all the other organs of the state.

------

My own view is that there is a will within the British state apparatus to
disengage itself from Northern Ireland (a problem which, from the British
point of view, is as incomprehensible as it is intractable), but that
willingness to disengage is mitigated and ultimately neutralised by a
combination of factors that serve to unite, objectively speaking, the
tactical interests of the British state with those of the unionists, when in
fact their strategic interests are very much divergent. It is analogous to
the problem of regulatory capture, where the state regulator attempts to
impose limits to the discretionary powers of the monopolist, but ends up
being subject to multi-faceted lobbying and entrapment by the monopolist,
not least because of the hopelessly contradictory position of the regulator
in the first place -- an appointee of the state committed to ensuring both
the facilitation and legitimisation of accumulation. In the case of Northern
Ireland, on each occasion when the British state has intervened to effect a
"fair" solution, its position has, over time, inexorably aligned itself with
that of the unionists. Thus the troops being sent in originally to protect
catholic communities against loyalist intimidation, only to become
instruments of repression when their superiors, already alive to the menace
of "bolshevism" (with which republicanism was equated during the 1970s by,
among others, MI5), rely upon the local state apparatus for guidance,
regardless of the fact that it is the very same local state apparatus that
is responsible for creating the conditions in which the catholic communities
are being intimidated and oppressed. Then reactionary elements within the
army view the whole exercise as a wonderful testing ground for
counter-insurgency methods (Kitson) which, married to local unionist
hegemony and rampant anti-communism, created a heady brew of reaction that
led inexorably to Bloody Sunday.

The Sunningdale agreement was the last concerted effort at "fair play" by
the British state for two decades, prompted by increasing alarm within
government circles about the deteriorating situation and its apparent
intractability, coupled with underlying recognition of the iniquitous
position of those communities oppressed by loyalists whose identification
with the British state is completely alien to those who actually embody it.
But again the reactionary element, led by MI5 and the Kitson faction within
the army, sabotaged the whole thing via the UWC strike in 1974, where
unionist sabotage was fully supported by the organs of state working against
the Wilson minority government (the "communist cell in No. 10"). Meanwhile
the conciliatory moves between the British state and the Provisionals, led
by MI6, were supplanted by the reaction of MI5, which conducted its own war
of attrition within Northern Ireland against both republicans AND those
servants of the British state whose loyalties were not to the empire of old
but to more pragmatic concerns surrounding Britain as a European power (see
Fred Holroyd's revealing testimony:
http://archives.econ.utah.edu/archives/a-list/2003w23/msg00081.htm).

It was MI6 which was the instrument of kick-starting the current "peace
process", following the evident failure of MI5/Thatcherite "shoot to kill"
take-no-prisoners policy during the 1980s. It coincided with a reorientation
of British state policy towards Europe, as evidenced by the putsch that
deposed Thatcher in 1990 and John Major's rearguard against the punk
Thatcherites throughout his premiership. Blair's election rode the crest of
that wave, although he has since been diverted, primarily by the appointment
of Bush in 2000. Everything since then has been a frantic juggling of
conflicting and contradictory policies, under an ever more intrusive
hegemony that has capitalised upon contradictions and cleavages within
"Britain". This has been to the detriment, once again, of the "progressive"
wing of the British state, whose goal of gradual disengagement from Northern
Ireland has been subverted both from within and by the unionists and the US,
with the assistance of the Irish government.

McAnulty's analysis confirms the disarray of British state policy, albeit
from a very different perspective than the one presented above. Nevertheless
it is precisely this morass of contradiction that will force the British
state to return, sooner or later, to its efforts to disengage for as long as
it remains entrenched in the northern part of Ireland. Whatever backward
steps and shoddy compromises are being made now, and for the foreseeable
future, the fundamental problem of occupation remains. Sinn Fein's vacated
space on the republican left will be filled, one way or another. The ongoing
intimidation and oppression of catholic communities is an affront to
bourgeois justice, whose prolonged inability to protect those so afflicted
will result in an inevitable recourse to armed struggle. Meanwhile there is
no economic benefit of occupation to Britain since reunification of Ireland
within the context of both countries' membership of the European Union
changes nothing with respect to the capitalist order. What we have is a
holdover from an earlier imperialism which has bequeathed to the present an
anachronism that is an embarrassment even to those who now hold the reins of
a state that is itself an anachronism within the wider context of European
integration. As has so often been the case since 1945, that same state has
allied itself with the US in order to preserve the status quo -- utterly
forlorn, given the impossibility of achieving such under the hegemony of an
apparatus committed to the subjugation of all before it.

Michael Keaney