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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 04 October 2019
The purpose of this article is to draw attention to a fact about the situation in Northern Ireland which has been almost universally overlooked or misunderstood where, that is, it has not been deliberately concealed, and to draw out its principal implications. This is that the people of Northern Ireland are excluded from the party political System which determines the government of the United Kingdom (the State of which Northern Ireland nominally forms part), that they have not chosen to exelude themselves but have been excluded by the actions of the major British political parties and that their continuing exclusion is today sustained by deliberate decision of the leaders of those parties.
1 This article is a revised version of a paper first presented, under the title ‘Re-thinking the Northern Ireland Question: the challenge to the parties’, to the annual conference of the United Kingdom working group of the Political Studies Association, held at St Peter's College, Oxford, in September 1986. I should like to express here my gratitude to Professor Richard Rose, Lord Beloff and Professor Ernest Gellner for their comments on the original paper.
2 This debate has been animated by a new and entirely unprecedented movement, the Campaign for Equal Citizenship for Northern Ireland, founded in March 1986, led by Robert McCartney QC, former Official Unionist Member of the Northern Ireland Parliamentary Assembly and now the Prospective Parlimentary Candidate for North Down. Public interest in the CECNI's main demand that the British political parties accept members and contest elections in Northern Ireland is evident from the letter columns of the Belfast and local press, and from the well-attended meetings which thc CECNI has been holding all over the province. An ‘equal citizenship’ resolution moved by McCartney at the OUP annual Conference on the November, 1986 was only prevented from carrying the Conference by the device of a blocking amendment moved on behalf of the OUP leadership by Enoch Powell MP in a Session hold unexpectedly in camera, These and other associated developments have been fully covered by the media in Northern Ireland and entirely ignored by the media in Great Britain.
3 Max Beloff and Gillian Peele, The Government of the United Kingdom: political authority in a changing society, London, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2nd ed., 1985, p. 211.
4 Beloff and Peele, op.cit., p. 212.
5 Beloff and Peele, op.cit., p. 331.
6 Beloff and Peele, op.cit., p. 334.
7 Beloff and Peele, op.cit., p. 328.
8 Rose, Richard, ‘Is the United Kingdom a State? Northern Ireland as a Test Case’, in Madgwick, P. J. and Rose, Richard (eds). The Territorial Dimension in United Kingdom Politics, London, Macmillan, 1982, Pp. 100-36, p. 125.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
9 Private communications from Mr Joseph Keenan, of Belfast, and Mr J. Cobain, also of Belfast, whose applications to join the Labour Party were rejected in 1982 and 1986 respetively.
10 Viz. clause 2, section 4; clause 4, section 1 and clause 9, section 2(a).
11 Judgement of The Industrial Tribunal in Case No. 24364/85/LS (H. McAlister v The Labour Party), London (South), 1 November, 1985.
12 Unlike their counterparts in Great Britain, trade unionists in Northern Ireland do not automatically pay the political levy unless they deliberately choose not to, but the opposite. The payment of the levy by Northern Ireland trade unionists to a party which refuses them membership and never seeks to represent them politically is thus a most remarkable act of solidarity, The figurc of 70,000 is that given in Labour Party Organisation in Northern Ireland: Observations by the National Agent, a paper prepared by the National Agent of the British Labour Party and considered by the party's National Executive Committce (NEC) on 23 November 1977. This paper was never published but is cited in The Labour Party and Northern Ireland: an historical account of the relations between the Labour Party and the Northern Ireland Labour Party, a research paper prepared by the Labour Party Research Department for the Labour Party Northern Ireland Liaison Committee in February 1984. This paper has also never been published by the Lahour Party, but has been published in full by the Campaign for Labour Representation in Northern Ireland (CLRN1), together with other very interesting documents, in its pamphlet The Labour Party and Northern Ireland: an offical history, London and Belfast, CLRNI, October 1986.
13 Merlyn Rees, Northern Ireland, A Personal Perspeitive, London, Methuen, 1985.
14 Arthur, Paul, ‘Labour and Ireland’. Government and Opposition, vol. 21, No. 3, Summer 1986. pp. 372-76.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
15 Walker, Graham. The Politics of Frustration: Harry Midgley and the Failure of Labour in Northern Ireland, Manchester. Manchester University Press, 1985 Google Scholar. For a Kuller discussion of this book, see the review article by Peter Brooke in New Ulster, Belfast, Winter 1986. pp. 18-19.
16 This omission is all the more striking for the fact that Walker's book can not itself be faulted on this score, as Brooke points out (art.cit., pp. 18-19).
17 It is necessary to emphasize this fact in view of the confusion which is persistently entertained in relation to it by front-bench Labour Party spokesmen on Northern Ireland. Thus Stuart Bell MP, in his evidence on behalf of the British Labour Party to the Northern Ireland Parliamentary Assemibly on 7 January 1986 claimed that the British Labour Party had contested Northern Ireland seats in the general elections of 1959, 1964 and 1966. (Northern Ireland Assembly: Committee an The Government of Northern Ireland: Tuesday 7 January 1986, Minutes of Evidence, page 8.) In fact, only the NILP did so, but Bell refes to the NILP. as 'we', a usage which would be understandable in respect of an affiliation, but which is indefensible in respect of an entirely distinct party, such as the NILP always was.
18 CLRNI, op.cit., pp. 16 and 18.
19 CLRNI, op.cit., pp. 18–19.
20 CLRNI, op.cit., pp. 11-15. This payment was £300 in 1952 and had risen to £2,000 per annum by 1975, when the payment was suspended definitively in the context of deteriotating relations between the two parties. These modest Subventions must be set against the far greater sums accruing to the British Labour Party from the political levy paid to it by Northern Ireland trade unionists. Following the BLP's detision in 1920 not to organize in the province, the NILP claimed these levy payments for itself. The BLP rejected this Claim and it remained a dead letter thereafter (CLRNI. op.cit., pp. 11-12); as a result, the NILP was chronically short of funds throughout its existence.
21 Letters from Conservative Central Office to Miss J. Trewsdale, of Newtownards, 2 February, 1984 and co Miss O. Stewart of Belfast, 2 July, 1986.
22 Laski, Harold, The Dangers of Obedience, London. 1930, p. 17.Google Scholar
23 Rose, art.cit., p. 111.
24 ibid.
25 Rose, art.cit., p. 115.
26 ibid.
27 I have discussed these terms at some length in my essay, Northern Ireland and the Algerian Analogy: a suitable case for Gauillism?, Belfast?, Athol Books, 1986, pp. 11-16. They have also been discussed by Brendan Clifford in a series of pamphlets: Parliamentary Sovereignty and Northern Ireland, Belfast, Athol Books, November 1985; Parliamentary Despotism, John Hume's Aspiration Belfast, Athol Books, January 1986 and Government Without Opposition, Belfast, Athol Books, July 1986. These pamphlets are of unequalled profundity and to anyone familiar with them, my own debt to them will be self-evident.
28 Daily Telegraph, 14 July 1986. Mr Scott was promoted Minister of State for Northern Ireland Affairs in the autumn of 1986.
29 A summary of the evidence from opinion surveys, including NOP and MORI polls from 1974 to 1982, will be found in Towards Equal Citizenship, Belfast, Integration Group, September 1984.
30 See the exceptionally lucid pamphlets of Jim Davidson Integration, A Word Without Meaning, Belfast, Athol Books, May 1986 and Electrol Integration, Belfast, Athol Books, n.d. but circa November 1986.
31 Walter Bagehot, Letters on the French Coup d'Etat of 1851, addressed to the Editor of ‘The Inquirer’ 1852.