The Trouble with the Irish, by Leonard Wibberley

[p025] The Trouble with the Irish, by Leonard Wibberley (Frederic Muller, 16s.) The trouble really is that as regards treatment by Anglo- Normans, English and British, as the very first colony in the modern world, as the proto-oppressee of bourgeois civilization, as the very blueprint for fascist-type colonialism everywhere, Ireland has a completely unanswerable case which takes roughly half-a-million words to set down in outline. Mr Wibberley—originally Anglo-Irish, but writing American Standard English—has in about 80,000 words tossed off a series of entertaining if shallow pieces which demonstrate that his heart is of gold and in the right place too, even though his . brain reels quite as often as not and the flood-waters more than once turn him upside down. Oddly, his chronology grows chancier and more speculative the nearer he approaches to the present day, and the Troubles of the 1916-23 period become so snarled that at one point the Anglo-Irish War of 1918-20 appears as the result of the 192! Treaty. the Free State having suffered as it were a retrospective premature birth. Also, his devout refusal to let Britain bear the least jot of blame for the Famine of 1845-47, though it would have deeply gratified our dear Queen (Victoria is said to have donated £5 to famine relief, by the way), cannot be reconciled with any known facts. ‘God sent the blight but the English made the famine, say the Irish, and Mr Wibberley, since his book has a serious intent, ought to know it, and know why. It is nonsense—official. English nonsense, too—to say that the Irish parliament suppressed by the Act of Union was ‘a government for hire and better ended.” It needed reform, certainly: which was precisely what the United Irishmen demanded and would have achieved, had not Pitt and Castle- reagh (who, bless the Americans, was NOT an Earl) found it far more expedient to slaughter them and buy forty Commons votes and a score or so of Lords for an odd million or so. S.F.H.

[p026] POLITICS OF SOUTH BANK Teputation as a ‘Left’, was able to assist the union leaders to break a strike. The best commentary on Etheridge’s intervention was provided by the Daily Worker, which two days later reported to its readers that: ‘Shop stewards told the men who returned to work that the management had failed to honour an undertaking to discuss their claim for 6d. an hour increase.”3?, The Stalinist policies at South Bank were not simply mis- takes or errors confined to the Shell Mex strike alone but were the harbingers of a whole series of industrial betrayals all committed in the name of building ‘unity’. THE STRIKE ENDS By mid-November, it was obvious that McAlpines had been able to get enough labour on the job. The stewards had been stabbed in the back by a com- bination of employers, union officials and Stalinists, and they had been denied assistance from the Labour politicians ranging from the Right-wing to the so-called “Left’. The odds had proved too great to secure their reinstatement. A decision was taken to end the picketing. The committee decided to continue ths fight inside the unions. Although that fight has been carried on all through 1959, there still exists at South Bank today a black list which bars not only the former stewards but also other workers with records of con- sistent trade union activity. The end of the mass picket marked the opening of the season for the smart alecs and political wise men. These individuals had been absent from the picket lines, although in coffee bars at safe distances from Waterloo they had displayed moderate enthusiasm when victory seemed possible. Having done nothing themselves to help the South Bank men to win, they began to seek scapegoats for the set-back suffered by the strikers. Their most frequent accusation was that the men failed to utilize the official machinery and by their actions provoked the officials. This is completely dis- proved by facts. The men always campaigned inside their respective unions for support. In the South Bank Special and in their leaflets they urged trade unionists to move resolutions in their branches demanding that the strike be made official. The building trades group of the TGWU demanded the reinstatement of the men. The steel benders and fixers’ branches in London all officially declared the site ‘black’. Nevertheless the TGWU refused to move. Scabs were permitted by TGWU officials to work on the site while holding union membership cards, alongside non-union labour. A sustained campaign was run by the strikers throughout the branches of the AUBTW. This resulted in decisions of support from the London divisional council and the south-east London district committee. Representatives from the committee toured innumerable ASW and ETU branches obtaining support for their fight and invariably convincing the branches to demand official recognition of the strike by the union’s executive councils. The Liverpool solidarity committee, a particular target for criticism, not only ensured that Merseyside jobs and branches were canvassed for support and money, but lobbied the Merseyside National Federation of Building Trade Operatives, which then officially went on record in support of the men. 32 Daily Worker, September 5, 1959. Still the union leaders did not act. Presumably the men should then have called off the fight for their jobs? No one would have been provoked, and McAlpines could have carried out the sackings with the maximum of harmony and the minimum of friction. MARXIST LEADERSHIP AND THE STRIKE The active support given to the South Bank struggle by The Newsletter is another bogy raised by the side- line critics.33. They ignore—or never understood—the fact that for Marxists the task is not simply to write commentaries on, and make abstract analyses of the class struggle, but to actively engage in it. Only by actively intervening in the fight between worker and employer is it possible for revolutionaries to help workers to grasp the relationship between the everyday economic struggles and the fight for working-class power. It is not only the workers who gain when Marxists take part in their struggles. The Marxists’ own experience and understanding can develop in no other way. The Marxist movement fights consistently to win the leadership of the-working class. It is serious about the class struggle and about the need to prepare the work- ing class for power. It aims to construct the real alternative leadership to Right-wing reformism and Stalinism. It was Mr Kean in his radio interview who paid unwitting tribute to the part played by the Marxists at South Bank. When asked whether the dispute was a new experience for the industry, he replied: ‘Yes, I quite agree, it’s been rather unusual in its intensity, in its duration, and I think especially in the high degree of organization associated with it’ When pressed by his interviewer to say who he thought were the organizers, he said: ‘Well, honour where honour is due, it was organized by somebody. The pickets were far more numerous than usual, our information is that many of them had never worked on the job at all, they were supported by a paraphernalia of propaganda, such as loudspeakers, publications of papers and journals. All I can say is, Mr Shanks, that it was certainly not organized by the established trade unions.’ UNION LEADERS CHOSE DEFEAT The interviewer was not satisfied. ‘Yes, but then you still haven’t answered my question as to who you think in fact was organizing it,’ he said. “Who brought up those pickets, who produced those papers? Somebody must have done.’ ‘Some of the national newspapers have attributed this organization to a group of people who I think have been termed “Trotsky-ites” "34 answered Kean. The recognition given to The Newsletter by this employer’s representative and the statement of the strikers’ representative Hugh Cassidy when he spoke at 33 Typical of such criticisms was one that appeared in Socialist Review, Volume 8, No. 21, mid-November 1958 by an author using the pseudonym, Robert Emmett. Emmett wrote: ‘In a series of strikes in London we have witnessed this group [The Newsletter] attempt to gatecrash into the strike leadership with a degree of crudity and irresponsibility that is appalling.’ 34 Transcript from a Telediphone Recording of B.B.C. pro- gramme ‘At Home and Abroad’ October 28, 1958. See also Appendix to this article. 87

[p027] LABOUR REVIEW the National Industrial Rank-and-File Conference* both show that not only did the Marxists offer a pro- gramme and policy at South Bank but were also able to make a practical and telling intervention. Shell Mex was more than an isolated building strike. It showed that in a period when the employers are more and more going on to the offensive, strikes need the support and backing of other sections of workers if they are to succeed. Such support will only be forthcoming if there is in existence a strong rank-and-file movement. McAlpine could have been defeated, if only work had been stopped on his other sites. But the union leaders had no intention of fighting McAlIpines at South Bank, let alone extending it to their other sites. Extension of the cispute could only have taken place through a strong rank-and-file movement. In the recent print strike, as in the strike against the sacking of Ken Knight, works convener at Handley Page, and in the fight against sackings at Universal Patterns, Crawley, this lesson was brought to the fore again. In each of these disputes the issue was starkly presented—-either extend it or go down to defeat—in every case the official leaders calmly and constitutionally chose defeat. Now the miners are threatened with the closure of between 205 and 240 pits in the next five years. Already their leaders have capitulated without firing a single shot. ' The choice confronting the miners is that which also faced the men at South Bank; either go along with the union leaders and accept the sackings, or build a rank- and-file movement to fight back. Of course rank-and- file movements are no panacea or ‘cure-all’ for the problems of the working class. They do however offer a type of organization to the working class which permits them to break through the restrictive and sti- fling sectional barriers imposed upon them by the trade union bureaucracy. Pit closures, sackings in engineering or in the building trade, are not the particular problems of those industries alone. They arise out of the needs of the employing class to cheapen their production costs and to discipline their labour force. To fight success- fully against mass sackings, rank-and-file movements must draw on the support of workers in other industries. They must also develop a political strategy which can unite the entire working class in a struggle to remove the Tory government in order to replace it with one pledged to socialist policies. oo South Bank was the warning signal that the employers and their government meant business and would un- hesitatingly use their control of the state machine to crush strikes by police action and law courts. The attitude of the court towards the arrested South Bank pickets complemented the job the police had performed for McAlpine on the picket line. One member of the AUBTW who appeared at Tower 35 Cassidy told the Conference ‘that the decision ‘to accept the paper’s offer of space was taken by the 32 stewards on the site. We stated our case in The Newsletter. I stated my case. On South Bank we got a show of solidarity that had “not been seer for 20 years.” 88 October-November 1959 Bridge court on October 27 was reminded by Mr Maddocks, the presiding magistrate, that his union ‘did not approve of this business.’ Mr D. W. Williams asked one of the charged men ‘if the strike had anything to do with him.’37_ This worker,,. who worked on another site, had gone to South Bank in response to the appeal of the stewards’ committee. When Brian Behan was sentenced to six week’s. imprisonment on November 27 the magistrate told him: ‘I am satisfied you were there for the purpose of making trouble.”*8 McAlpine’s lawyer was present throughout Behan’s trial and quite openly gave advice to the prosecuting counsel. When Behan drew attention to this and made a protest the magistrate simply ignored him. Timid leaders, restricted by their opinion that police-. men are custodians of a justice that operates with equal fairness to boss and worker alike, are totally unfitted to organize any strike. The meek acceptance by the print unions’ leaders of the arbitrary police action against their picketing members illustrated the cowardice of the officials in face of the state machine. A quick and rapid extension of the print strike to H.M. Stationery Office—a measure once threatened by the: unions—would have been the answer to government interference on the picket lines. Leaders like Brigin- shaw, general secretary of NATSOPA, did not reply to police action by bringing their members out from the government departments; instead he made a slanderous attack on the Socialist Labour League and The News- letter.39 Briginshaw probably considered this more safe and respectable than fighting against the police. Like the union leaders at South Bank he provided more aid to the employers than he did to his own. members. The strike at South Bank revealed in a thousand and one ways the tremendous fighting capacity of the work- ing class. It showed how workers, providing they have- a correct programme and the necessary organization, can rise to their feet and hit back at the employer. The apparently monolithic and unbreakable strength of the trade union bureaucracy was revealed to have very shaky foundations indeed. South Bank showed that once workers move into action, determined to fight the employers, they can and will sweep into the historical rubbish bin this parasitism which has temporarily fastened itself on to the trade union movement. Finally, South Bank dramatically brought home the urgent need to construct here in Britain a Marxist leadership that can provide a policy and programme based on the interests of the working class. Many workers learned these lessons at South Bank, ensuring that in future struggles the employers will be confronted with a better prepared and even more com- bative working class. 36 Daily Telegraph, October 28, 1958. 37 Ibid. 38 Manchester Guardian, November 8, 1958. 39 During the print dispute, Briginshaw, the general secretary of NATSOPA, issued a circular to his members in which he described the Socialist Labour League and its weekly paper: The Newsletter as being ‘in the pay of the employers’.

[p028] POLITICS OF SOUTH BANK A reprint from the mimeographed record of a B.B.C: Home Service Broadcast. APPENDIX Transcribed from a Telediphone Recording