IRISH UNITY AND THE BRITISH WORKING CLASS

The Brian Faulkners and William Craigs of today are the successors of Lord Carson, who first drilled the Ulster Volunteer Force to force the partition of Ireland.

Right-wing forces in Britain, directly connected with the Ulster Defence Association, the Loyalist Workers' Association and Vanguard are preparing to be the successors of the Black and Tans, who butchered into submission the workers and small farmers who fought for independence when the national bourgeoisie betrayed.

The British Tories will not fail to make use of the reactionary armed force being built up in Ireland against British workers as well as Irish, in addition to the troops being trained there for 'urban warfare' (i.e. the suppression of the working class).

Lord Carson, aided and abetted by leading British Tories like Bonar Law and F. E. Smith (later Lord Birkenhead), had built between 1912 and 1914 a volunteer army against the Home Rule Bill going through Westminster and had actually organized a mutiny of British army officers with the help of the Tory central office, after certain War Office officials had helped to arm his force.

The Tory Ministers of today who talk about the 'rule of law' in relation to trade unions and strikers, as well as Ulster, are the successors of Carson, Smith and Bonar Law. Where the law does not suit their class aims they will act outside the law.

When the Easter Rising failed in 1916, because of the isolation of Connolly's working-class force, the British War Cabinet decided on immediate execution of those who led it. They were summarily shot. Connolly, a foot amputated and unable to stand, was shot in a chair.

Who was in the Cabinet that perpetrated this atrocity? Lord Carson and Bonar Law! Oniy two years earlier they were conspiring against the state!

Carson took many Protestant workers along with him in his opposition to Home Rule and they would have clashed with British forces if necessary. World War I put off this clash.

Like the Protestant movements of today, Carson's was entirely reactionary. Except through unity with the Irish Catholic workers, there is no way forward for the Protestant workers.

Three months after the executions in May 1916, the Crown proceeded against Roger Casement and executed him for his part in the uprising. The Attorney-General prosecuting against Casement was none other than the Tory F. E. Smith, known as 'Carson's gailoper'.

Imperialism today, preparing for its greatest attacks on the working class, has not changed. Toryism has not changed. Nationalism, which keeps the working class tied to bourgeois politics, is not only impotent as in 1916-1921, but downright reactionary in its open collaboration with imperialism.

Whose 'law and order'?

The most important factor of all behind all political developments at the time of the 'Home Rule struggle up to World War I was the rise of the working class in great militant battles and defence of trade unionism in Britain. order', , the Tory government is providing all the conditions for counter-revolutionary armed preparations in Ulster against workers of Britain and Labourite Ramsay MacDonald, hearing of the Easter Rising in 1916, told his audience that it was 'militaristic' in just the same way as the imperialists it attacked. Such is the typical British reformist, 'unable to distinguish between the victim and the executioner' as Trotsky put it, and thereby always the craven supporter of British imperialism.

The struggle to break the British working class from reformism and build alternative revolutionary leadership can only be carried out by Marxists who fight for Irish national independence against the Tory government, and who struggle to build the same kind of leadership in Ireland itself.

MacDonald's treachery, Wilson's 100-per-cent support for Heath's Irish policy today, and the Stalinists' talk of a Tory 'Bill of Rights'-all these are the very opposite of the real needs of the British and Irish working class, which must connect up directly with the revolutionary tradition against imperialism in Ireland.

Padraig Peares, shot in May 1916, one of the revolutionary nationalists who came close It means that the Irish working class, north and south, must start from the fact that the struggle of British workers to make the Tory government resign is the most mportant element In their fight against imperialism.

It means a ceaseless struggle 1n the British Labour movement against all repression, like the sentence on MacStiofain, in Ireland north and south.

The involvement of rightwing Tories and of fascists in the training and arming antivorking class forces in Ulster must be exposed and answered by the strength of the working class. The direct responsibility of the Tory government itself, and of its Labour .collaborators, must be brought to the light of day and fought.

building can the movement This fight will hasten the which Cae bring down the Tory government.

rhere was a time when Marx said that until Irish independence had been won, the British workers could not go forward to socialism.

Today the struggles are more. advanced, they have more combined character. The more the British working class assists the Irish workers to make impossible the position of British imperialism, the weaker will be the Tory government at home; and the preparations of the extreme right wing will be given a severe setback.

December