The British Labour Party and twentieth-century Ireland

The cause of Ireland, the cause of Labour

Laurence Marley

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN:
  9780719096013
• eBook ISBN:
  9781784996444
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: American Government
• Index: Politics & International Relations

At the beginning of the twentieth century, the British Labour Party was broadly supportive of Irish home rule. However, from the end of the First World War, Labour anticipated a place in government, and as a modern, maturing party in British politics, it developed a more calculated set of responses towards Ireland. With contributions from a range of distinguished Irish and British scholars, this collection of essays provides the first full treatment of the historical relationship between the Labour Party and Ireland in the last century, from Keir Hardie to Tony Blair. By widening the lens on Labour's responses to the 'Irish question' over an entire century, it offers an original perspective on longer-term dispositions in Labour mentalities towards Ireland and on the relationship between 'these islands'. It will prove essential reading for those with an interest in modern Irish and British history, Anglo-Irish relations, and the current Northern Ireland peace process.

1

A tangled legacy: the Irish ‘inheritance’ of British Labour

Gearóid Ó Tuathaigh

The period from the founding of the British Labour Party to its emergence, by the later 1920s, as a credible alternative party of government, coincided with the decisive phase of the long-standing Irish nationalist demand for self-government. The solutions to Britain’s ‘Irish question’ arrived at during 1918–22 resulted in a controversial partition settlement: a twenty-six-county Irish Free State, with substantial autonomy, and a six-county enclave in the north-east, with a local unionist majority, remaining an integral part of the United Kingdom, though with limited, devolved ‘home rule’. How British Labour responded to the emerging Irish settlement of 1918–22, and its later relations throughout the twentieth century with the independent Irish state (in its foreign policy and in particular in its conduct of British–Irish relations, not least in relation to partition) and with Northern Ireland, is, understandably, a story of considerable complexity, demanding close attention to particular episodes, issues and personalities. However, it is a story that also demands a longer perspective, if it is to be fully comprehended or explained.

This chapter suggests an approach to that longer perspective, situating the twentieth-century relationship of British Labour with Ireland within the broader historiography of British radicalism and its understanding of and attitudes towards Ireland and, specifically, to Irish nationalism.¹ The chapter considers the nature, the extent and the constancy of British radicalism’s supposed sympathy with the claims of Irish nationalism from the later eighteenth century – from Jacobinism to Chartism, through Gladstonian Liberalism, various socialist groups and the ‘new’ trade unionism, to the pioneers of the early Labour Party itself. The competing claims of class solidarity and ethno-religious communal loyalty are considered, not simply as ideological positions, but as they operated in a developing British industrial society and imperial state, at the heart of which was settled an Irish immigrant community frequently characterised (on ethno-religious grounds) as an alien and resented ‘other’.

In considering the complexity of attitudes and reforming impulses operating within and between the main political blocs, Liberal and Conservative, with regard to Ireland, throughout the period of the Union, it is vital to stress that for both parties, for long periods and in different areas of policy, the reforming impulse was securely grounded in an underlying commitment to making the Union work: creating a secure base of Irish support for the Union.² In short, prior to the emergence of the Irish home rule movement in the 1870s, there is little evidence that mainstream British Liberal opinion, any more than its Conservative rival, harboured sympathy with any version of Irish claims to self-government, however modest. The Gladstonian conversion to home rule in the 1880s was, therefore, a fateful moment in the history of British Liberalism’s dealings with Irish nationalism, and indeed in the disposition of the British political establishment as a whole towards the future prospects of the Union: a largely bipartisan and solid defence of the Union had been breached.

The split in the Whig-Liberal Party on the issue of Irish home rule in 1886, and the reconstruction of late Victorian Liberalism in a more progressive direction, initially under Gladstone’s leadership, has been the subject of extensive analysis and interpretation for several decades.³ A central issue in this historiography has been identifying what role, if any, was played by the home rule split and Liberal reconstruction in the emergence and growth of a separate Labour Party, and its eventual replacement of the Liberal Party, as the party of the ‘left’, the alternative party of government to the Conservatives. However, in tracing the currents of political opinion on Ireland that would nourish the foundations of the British Labour Party of the twentieth century, we must look beyond the binary terms of mainstream political blocs at Westminster. It is within the radical tradition – championed outside Westminster more than within for much of the nineteenth century – that we may seek a record of more continuous sympathy with Ireland’s popular grievances and ultimately with the claims of Irish nationalism.⁴

British radical solidarity with the popular cause in Ireland may be traced to the great Atlantic reform wave of the late eighteenth century. It is easy to identify the main shared instincts and concerns that sustained it: the replacement of oligarchy, inherited privilege and the power-monopoly of the ancien régime with, in politics and government, a more legitimate system of representative government working for the commonweal. Its touchstone of legitimacy was the will of ‘the people’: but this universalist notion had to come to terms with another aggregate, ‘the nation’. This distinction, and the logic of political and social solidarity that would flow from it, would shape discourses of class and nation in the centuries that followed.

In the ‘age of revolution’, the solidarity between radicals in Ireland and Britain embraced, at its extremity, varieties of Jacobinism, with the United Irishmen finding ‘partners in revolution’ in various centres throughout the archipelago.⁵ The sharp success of counter-revolution in Ireland at the close of the eighteenth century ushered in the Union of Ireland and Britain as a single United Kingdom. The long period of the revolutionary and Napoleonic wars, though coinciding with the accelerating emergence of an industrial society in Britain, served to temporarily staunch radical demands for political change, while strengthening the common consciousness of ‘Britishness’ among the Protestant people at war.⁶ The incorporation of Ireland formally into the British state, with the Union of 1801, took place as rapid population growth, heavily concentrated at the base of the pyramid of Irish rural society, swelled the ranks of the Irish poor.

With the resumption of political radicalism in Britain post-Waterloo, the rise of Daniel O’Connell’s politics of mass mobilisation in Ireland in the 1820s brought centre-stage the prospect of a common platform of solidarity for radical reformers in both islands; but it also revealed the strains and fractures that might threaten such solidarity. Ending religious discrimination in political and civic life was, for most reformers, a logical plank in any broad reform agenda. But there was a strong anti-Catholic instinct in British national identity and politics that recoiled from any accommodation with ‘popery’. This antipathy went beyond the high Tory camp of reaction.⁷

Even solid reform advocates might baulk at the clericalist base to O’Connell’s popular organisation in Ireland. Moreover, if O’Connell’s threatening rhetoric frightened more cautious reformers, his views gave certain working-class radicals more substantial grounds for concern: notably his opposition to trades unions, his general social conservatism on land issues, and what seemed a strongly confessional bias in his reform priorities. Undoubtedly, O’Connell was a staunch advocate of most major causes of philosophical radicalism in the second quarter of the nineteenth century: a trenchant anti-slavery stance, support for full religious freedom and equality before the law. His witness to these mainstream radical causes was recognised and respected by most of the leading radicals in Britain. Again, his steadfast support for franchise reform was a vital and valued component of the movement that led to the great Reform Act of 1832, and he remained committed to the reform of local government in a progressive direction.⁸

However, what kept O’Connell and his popular politics at arm’s length from otherwise reform-committed sections of British public opinion was a settled ethno-religious prejudice against the Irish Catholic ‘character’ and its inherent incompatibility with the sturdy independent conscience of the Protestant Briton. This anti-Irish Catholic stereotype was a central issue in the relationship between majority Irish nationalist identity and politics and various strands of British radicalism – and within a wider British public opinion – throughout most of the Union era. While representations of chronic Irish lawlessness, endemic poverty and popish superstition in Ireland itself were undoubtedly influential in creating and embedding this prejudice, the crux of the matter was the Irish community of immigrants in Britain: it was here that most British people, of all classes, encountered the Irish most directly and most challengingly.

There had been population movement within the archipelago since time immemorial, and the Irish migrants had been identified as a distinctive group in Britain for centuries, before the economic transformation of early industrialisation propelled the massive influx of Irish into urbanising industrial Britain at an increasing rate from the later eighteenth century. By the 1841 census there were 415,000 Irish-born in Britain; by 1861 (with the massive influx of the Famine years) this figure peaked at 806,000; by 1901 it had fallen back to 632,000. However, when account is taken of those second and later generations of Irish who continued to cleave to the immigrant community, it is estimated that the effective Irish ‘community’ in late Victorian Britain probably numbered about one million, of which four-fifths were Catholic.⁹

Settling predominantly in urban centres of industry, by 1841 almost half of the Irish-born were to be found in the four major centres of Liverpool, Glasgow, Manchester and London. These would remain major centres of Irish settlement, but later decades would see wider dispersal among a large number of urban centres throughout Britain. Moreover, the Irish as a percentage of local populations would, in time, be proportionately higher in Scotland (6.7 per cent in 1861) than in England and Wales (3.1 per cent), with a still more elevated share in certain towns and cities (for example, Dundee).¹⁰ While there was a middle-class component to the Irish influx (one that generally integrated quickly and harmoniously), and a skilled labouring element that negotiated and adjusted its prospects in a changing labour market, the majority of the immigrant Catholic Irish were unskilled. It was these immigrants – notably the poorer among them – that bore the brunt of anti-Irish prejudice in Britain throughout the nineteenth century.

The extent, persistence and intensity of anti-Catholic/Irish sentiment in Britain – and its relevance to the British working-class radical response to the Irish question (and to the Irish living in Britain) – was marked by considerable variation, geographically and over time, as the burgeoning historiography on this topic in recent decades has richly documented.¹¹ The relevant variables included regional and local economic and social conditions (relating to the labour market, settlement and living conditions); the strength of indigenous Protestant militancy, fortified by...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Notes on contributors
• Acknowledgements
• List of abbreviations
• Note on terminology
• Introduction
• 1 A tangled legacy: the Irish ‘inheritance’ of British Labour
• 2 Uneasy transitions: Irish nationalism, the rise of Labour and the Catholic Herald, 1888–1918
• 3 British Labour, Belfast and home rule, 1900–14
• 4 Labour and Irish revolution: from investigation to deportation
• 5 British Labour and developments in Ireland in the immediate post-war years
• 6 ‘Where the Tories rule’
• 7 The British Labour Party and the tragedy of Northern Ireland Labour
• 8 ‘That link must be preserved, but there are other problems’1
• 9 Reflections on aspects of Labour’s policy towards Northern Ireland, 1966–70: a personal narrative1
• 10 The Labour government and police primacy in Northern Ireland, 1974–79
• 11 Some intellectual origins of the Labour left’s thought about Ireland, c.1979–97
• 12 The Militant Tendency comes to Ireland, c.1969–89
• 13 Anglo-Irish diplomatic relations and the British Labour Party, 1981–94
• 14 Leaving the sound bites at home?
• Index