SECTARIANISM: THE OPIUM OF THE WORKING CLASSES

The people Northern Catholics should be looking to for support are Northern Protestants. And the Protestant working class should ensure in their own interests that the Catholics don’t look to them in vain.

This old socialist thought shone out at me more brightly than ever from a discussion about the state of Unionist politics on UTV a couple of weeks back. Willie Ross of the Official Unionists, Nigel Dodds from Paisley’s DUP, and David Ervine of the Progressive Unionist Party, had been invited onto Counterpoint to ponder the imminent publication of the Framework Document and to react to the Times “leak” suggesting that the document would include “cross-border institutions with executive powers.”

I listened closely to Ervine. Like most sensible people I’ve long ago given up hopes of the Official or Democratic Unionists breaking the habits of all our lifetimes and saying anything interesting or requiring new thought. But Ervine, like (especially) his party colleague Billy Hutchinson, and Ulster Democratic Party spokesman Gary McMichael, has seemed different, and intriguing.

You hear it commonly said all over the place: these new working-class Loyalists, breath of fresh air, harbingers of hope.

There was a UDP candidate in a local government by-election in Newtownabbey on the first of this month, and I had the impression many Nationalists, North and South, were disappointed he didn’t do better than fourth out of five – although second, third and fourth near-enough dead-heated.

I’ve explained here before that, personally, I’m by no means convinced that these new parties do represent a real breakthrough. But I understand, too, why so many nervous hopes have come to repose in them.

What’s seemed different about them is that they’re talking with openness and ease about a deep sense of disillusion with traditional politics in Protestant inner-city areas and housing estates, and about the role of middle-class unionism down through the years in fermenting bigotry which made fools of those Protestants mired in poverty, and about their desire to be done with all that.

Ervine and Billy Hutchinson have spoken, accurately, of their own origins in two-up, two-down terrace streets and the way their sort of people were coaxed into hating Catholics by pin-striped chancers who’d come among them draped in Union Jacks.

Unlike the knee-jerk not-an-inchers of the major Unionist parties, they say they have no hang-ups about sitting down with Sinn Fein and have been relaxed about issues like State support for Irish-language schools. The fact that the two new parties have emerged from Loyalist paramilitary groups with ferocious records of anti-Catholic violence – the PUP from the Ulster Volunteer Force, the UDP from the Ulster Defence Association – far from undermining their claims to represent a new non-sectarianism has instead conferred a seeming authenticity upon them. These guys have been through it, known the reality first-hand, they’re not bullshitters like Trimble or Robinson.

The problem is that what Ervine said on Counterpoint about the Framework Document was exactly in line with what Ross and Dodds had to say. His party was adamantly hostile to all-Ireland institutions as the OUP or the DUP. Any contrary suggestion was a slander. If the Framework Document contained the sort of proposals suggested in the Times, “All hell will break loose.”

Gary McMichael, for the UDP, has taken the same tack since. The Loyalist paramilitaries called a ceasefire because they’d been assured “the union” was safe. If it turned out they’d been conned, if the British Government dared go down the road signposted in the Times . . .

The new Loyalist groups, then, for all their proletarian rhetoric and protestations of non-sectarian intent, will countenance no constitutional expression of the nationalist sense of identity – not even the set of inadequate institutions the Times has told us are envisaged. They threaten “all hell” if any such set-up is forced on them. And we know what “all hell” means in their context.

When it comes to the crunch, on the “national question”, it seems the new parties are as old as the oul’ Orange flute, and still can sing only ‘The Protestant Boys’.

What the PUP and UDP show here is that they are incapable of leading the Protestant section of the working class into a different better society. In refusing to support their Catholic neighbours’ right to have their nationalist identity acknowledged in the structures of the State, they are sustaining the North as a Protestant State. Far from breaking free of any fur-coat brigade which has used bigotry to blind working people to their genuine interests in the past, they are re-constructing just such an alliance.

They may genuinely wish to speak specifically for the mass of relatively poor Protestants. But their perspective takes the shape of the existing framework of Northern politics whereby people “naturally” identify themselves and their interests by reference to the religious community they “belong” to. The new parties implicitly urge their working class followers to continue to measure their position in society mainly against the position of the working class on “the other side”.

And so as not to be outflanked or wrong-footed by their longer-established Loyalist rivals with whom they’re in constant competition for influence and votes, they have to show they are as rock-solid as any when it comes to Defending the State.

Add it all up and it comes to nothing new.

Still, there’s something afoot. The Left-sounding, non-sectarian phrases may be mainly rhetoric, but it isn’t an accident that this rhetoric is playing middling well on Protestant estates. Tired of the war, appalled by atrocities carried out in their name, and ground down daily by bosses, dole officials, Child Support Agency snoops and the rest of them, people in Rathcoole, Nelson Drive, Taughmonagh as well as having worries about preserving their “ethos”, are brought face-to-face with the same class realities as confront people on the Falls, or Darndale, or Liverpool 8. The same anger against the class system rises up.

The point is that the PUP and UDP don’t direct this anger against the system and the State which exists essentially to perpetuate it. On the contrary, they daub themselves into garish murals as the only true defenders of the State. The effect of their activity is to ensure that this precious commodity, the class anger of the Protestant poor, goes largely to waste.

There’s a contradiction in this which people like Ervine and Billy Hutchinson are going to have to get to grips with if they are serious about moving on from the mess we are all in. People out for serious change on the Lower Shankill, for example, cannot detach themselves from the demented dorks of the DUP and OUP in order to fight for the economic regeneration of their area on terms acceptable to its people – and simultaneously stand four-square with the same dorks to deny the Catholics over the road the right to express themselves freely.

Support for the right of the Catholics to be what they are and to be represented as they are in the institutions of State is a sine qua non for any party seeking to act in the separate distinct interests of the Protestant working class.

The notion that the Shankill can live well and at ease with itself while the Falls simmers with unrest in an uncongenial State is just silly.

Of course this isn’t the pitch which Nationalists make, and that’s the other side of the problem.

No group or faction within Nationalism that I know of is directly challenging the Loyalist line and asking Protestant working people to back them in vindicating their nationalist identity, much less arguing that this would make sense from working-class Protestants’ own viewpoint. Not even the most “radical” nationalists seem to question any longer the tactic of cementing an alliance with Right-wing conservatives like John Bruton, sleaze-balls like Reynolds and re-treads and savages from the Washington Zoo. Not only do they prefer to link up with low-lifes of that sort rather than offer common cause to the Protestants from the next street, they have linked up with the low-lifes precisely to put pressure on the Protestants from the next street.

And yet, I don’t doubt that they’re genuine when some of them say that they’d hack off their right arms for an end to sectarian hatred. They’re genuine about it alright, but in an abstract sort of way. They don’t believe there’s anything practical can be done about sectarianism now.

Say what you choose, runs the argument, but Bruton, Ted Kennedy et al have clout in this world. Trim our ambitions so as not to outrage or alienate them and they’ll deliver for us, advance the Nationalists in relation to the Loyalists. They’ll deliver us something.

Against that background belief, the idea of looking to the Shankill for allies to advance with is sorta nice, but sorta wacky as well.

Most of all it’s sorta symmetrical, the same sort of people on each side mirror-imaging each other, self-conscious radicals searching for change but, objectively, operating to shore up the status quo by corralling within it any truculent elements who might be minded to make a once-and-for-all break.

The Framework Document matters less than the urgent necessity to break the existing framework of Northern politics. If Ervine, Hutchinson etc. want to make a real mark, if they have any sense that this could be a plot-point in history, they’ll have to say straight that the Catholics have a right to be what they are and to be represented as they are in the constitution of the State that they live in. That would require, at a minimum, all-Ireland institutions of a meaningful sort.

How’s about it, Billy? Or are we all maybe just drawing breath before battle begins, again?