Hesitant Comrades The Irish Revolution and the British Labour Movement
Geoffrey Bell
First published 2016 by Pluto Press 345 Archway Road, London N6 5AA www.plutobooks.com Copyright Š Geoffrey Bell 2016 The right of Geoffrey Bell to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN ISBN ISBN ISBN ISBN
978 0 7453 3665 7 978 0 7453 3660 2 978 1 7837 1740 8 978 1 7837 1742 2 978 1 7837 1741 5
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Contents Acknowledgements vii Abbreviations viii Prologue ix 1. Easter 1916
1
Guns in Dublin and Beyond 1 The British Left and Ireland, 1916 5 Reactions 10 Explanations 17
2. Interesting Times
23
3. The Labour Party
49
4. The Trades Union Congress
74
5. Alternatives
95
The Irish Front 23 The Home Front 35 The Great and the Good and the Irish 41
The Party Conference 50 The National Executive 55 The Parliamentary Party 64
Conference and Leadership 75 The Special Congress and its Aftermath 80 The Belfast Carpenters’ Dispute 85
The Independent Labour Party 95 The Communists 108 Fabians 116
6. Voices from Below
125
Guilty Workers 125 The ILP Membership 129 Councils of Action 135 Climax and Anti-climax 138 v
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7. Socialism and Nationalism
147
8. Ulster
174
9. The Treaty
195
10. Conclusions
214
Traditions 148 Ireland Matters 152 Missionaries 157 Doubts 162 The Natives: Sinn Féin 167 Comprehensions 170
1885–1916 174 Socialists and Ulster before 1916 178 Partition 182 Explanations 187
Negotiations and Terms 196 Reactions in Britain 199 Labour’s Welcome 201 The Others 206
Afterwards 214 Hesitant Comrades 215
Notes 226 Bibliography 255 Index 263
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Acknowledgements This book began life as a PhD thesis. Thanks to my supervisor Kevin Theakston for guiding me through this and to my external examiner David Howell for his comments. Before all of that, at Trinity College Dublin as an undergraduate, I was fortunate to have David Thornley as my tutor on two specialist courses, European Working Class Movements and Ireland 1913–39. As our tutor group sipped sherry, and occasionally something very Irish and much stronger, my interest in these subjects was nurtured and encouraged. My fellow students who were part of that included Brian Walker, Roger Cole, David Haire, John and Shelia Healy, and Shelia Deedy. This book is also a product of many conversations and discussions over many years, all of which added to my understanding of political ideas and their application. In Belfast, I would thank my parents, Herbert and Mary Bell, James McBeigh and Liam Barbour. In Derry, there was Eamonn McCann, Dermie McClenaghan and Kitty O’Kane. In Dublin there was Bill Moran, Greg Murphy, Mick and Katherine Ford and Breedge Docherty. In London, Mick Sullivan, Nadine Finch, Tariq Ali, Aly Renwick, Davy Jones, Steve Potter, Hilda Kean, Valerie Coultas and Piers Mostyn. Special thanks to the staff and librarians of the British Library, including the Newspaper Library at and after Colindale, the National Archive, the London School of Economics, the Labour Party Archive, the TUC Archive, the Marx Memorial Library and the National Library of Ireland. Thanks as well to all at Pluto Press for their professionalism and support. This book is for Mary Margaret McHugh, our daughters Lauren and Iona, and our son Sean. It is they who have taught me most.
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Abbreviations ASLEF BSP CPGB ILP ILPTUC
Associated Society of Locomotive Engineers and Firemen British Socialist Party Communist Party of Great Britain Independent Labour Party Irish Labour Party and Trades Union Congress [which succeeded the ITUCLP] IRA Irish Republican Army ISDL Irish Self-determination League ITGWU Irish Transport and General Workers Union ITUCLP Irish Trades Union Congress and Labour Party LRC Labour Representation Committee MP Member of Parliament NAC National Administrative Council, ILP NEC National Executive Committee, Labour Party NUR National Union of Railwaymen PLP Parliamentary Labour Party SLP Socialist Labour Party TUC Trades Union Congress UVF Ulster Volunteer Force WSF Workers’ Suffrage Federation (from 1918, the Workers’ Socialist Federation)
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Prologue Afterwards, it was called ‘Bloody Sunday’. The blood came from those protesting about British government policy in Ireland. Their march had been declared illegal. Their deaths were at the hands of the police and the British army. It is Sunday, 13 November 1887, Trafalgar Square, London. The demonstration had been organised by the Metropolitan Radical Federation, a socialist, anarchist and labour movement alliance, and the Irish National League, whose activities in Ireland were being increasingly targeted by the Conservative government’s Crimes Act. A particular focus of the protest was the ‘Mitchelstown Massacre’ of September 1887, when police had fired on a crowd of Irish demonstrators in Mitchelstown, County Cork, demanding land reform and fair rent. The police had killed three and wounded two. The outcome of the London demonstration was similar: two dead, 200 demonstrators hospitalised. Next day the Pall Mall Gazette, not the most subversive newspaper, gave its version of Bloody Sunday. AT THE POINT OF A BAYONET It was a strange grim sight that a hundred thousand Londoners witnessed yesterday ... The Government in the name of the QUEEN, decided to forbid a real, bona fide political meeting summoned long before to condemn of the incidents of their coercive policy in Ireland. Therefore London was delivered up to the terrorism of the soldiery and police ... Ruffians in uniform were despatched to ride down and bludgeon law-abiding citizens who were marching in procession towards the rendezvous. Savage scenes of brutality are reported from Westminster from Shaftsbury-avenue and from the Haymarket. The right to procession ... was rudely trampled underfoot ... It is a new experience for Englishmen to see peaceful citizens ridden down at the gallop by police cavalry ... Our Tory Government prefer to rely on the bludgeon, on the bayonet and on buckshot. As a result, Ireland has been brought to the verge of rebellion, and London, if it is persisted upon, will become ungovernable.1 ix
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It was nearly 30 years later before Ireland passed from the verge to actual rebellion, and London never did become ungovernable. Nevertheless, Trafalgar Square ’s Bloody Sunday has an historical relevance beyond the drama of the day itself. Those present were both reflecting and passing on a notable inheritance, the nature of which is suggested in some of those who marched that day. They included John Burns, to become a leader of the 1889 London Dock Strike; Eleanor Marx, a socialist and feminist militant and daughter of Karl; William Morris, artist and writer; (Henry) H. M. Hyndman, a leader of the left wing Social Democratic Federation; George Bernard Shaw, the Irish playwright who was already a pamphleteer for the influential left wing Fabian Society; and Ramsey MacDonald, to become the first Labour Prime Minister. They represented an impressive range of radical and socialist activism. They were also representing a legacy. Long before that particular Bloody Sunday, there is a significant history of British radicalism identifying with the cause of Ireland, whether that was self-rule, land reform, Catholic emancipation or opposition to coercion. Only the outlines need be sketched here, but this stretches back at least as far as the Levellers and other radicals of the seventeenth-century English revolution, who made public their objection to Cromwell’s military expeditions against the Irish.2 This tradition was carried on by some English Jacobins in the late eighteenth century, notably the London Corresponding Society, ‘the first political association in Britain which largely consisted of working class people’.3 In January 1798 the London Corresponding Society published the Address to the Irish Nation, which protested against British government coercion in Ireland. During the early nineteenth century radical individuals, organisations and newspapers who expressed sympathy with the Irish national cause included William Sherwin in his weekly Political Register (1817), Richard Carlile in Gauntlet (1833), the Cap of Liberty, (1819) and Henry Hunt in Address from the People of Great Britain to the People of Ireland (1820). There was also the National Union of the Working Class which, in 1832, fused with the London-based Irish Anti-Union Association and added repeal of the union between Britain and Ireland to its aim of radical parliamentary reform.4 This latter goal was most spectacularly pursued in the first half of the nineteenth century by the Chartists in whose ranks there developed the most sustained attempt to coalesce British radicalism with Irish nationalism. To the fore was Irish Member of Parliament (MP) x
prologue
Fergus O’Connor, one of the leaders of the Chartists, and he and those who thought like him were successful in securing repeal of the union in the second petition of the Chartists in 1842. There is an alternative tradition. As Irish immigration into Britain grew in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, there were frequent physical clashes between the Irish in Britain and the rural and industrial proletariat. The background to these events varied – native xenophobia, religious differences and the use of the Irish as cheap labour or strikebreakers – but they broke out often enough and in enough different areas to suggest that those who sought to establish an identity of interests between the native and Irish common peoples did not always do so in the most conducive of atmospheres. For example, there were anti-Irish riots in Liverpool in 1819 and 1835, Preston in 1837, Penrith in 1846, Stockport in 1852, London in 1858, Birmingham in 1867 and various towns in Lancashire in 1868.5 Whatever the social tensions or political affiliations, by the closing decades of the nineteenth century, the issue of Ireland had become difficult to ignore. The rise of the Irish Home Rule movement under the leadership of Charles Parnell and the accompanying land agitation thrust themselves to the centre of the British political stage. Indeed, British parliamentary politics and general elections were dominated on occasions by the politics of Ireland and in particular the Irish policies of Gladstone. There was also action on the streets. In the 1870s and 1880s there was agitation in England and Scotland in support of the Irish Land League, with a demonstration in London in 1879, protesting against the imprisonment of its leaders, attracting 100,000 people according to the Irish Times. Similarly, a Hyde Park protest against an Irish coercion bill in April 1887 was attended by between 100,000 and 150,000.6 These protests would have attracted Irish immigrants who, following the Great Hunger of 1846–47, had come to Britain as never before. According to census figures, Irish residents in Britain increased from 419,256 in 1841 to 806,000 in 1861, although that probably underestimated the real numbers. It seems safe to assume that some of these were bitter or angry enough about British government policies in Ireland to find their way to Hyde Park or Trafalgar Square to demonstrate against them. But even with that consideration, the tradition of English native involvement in protest against their government’s policies in Ireland remained very alive, at least until the end of the 1880s. In short, the Bloody Sunday protest xi
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was not an isolated example. Indeed when one of these demonstrators, Hyndman, founded the Democratic Federation in 1881, the forerunner of the Social Democratic Federation, one of its chief preoccupations was Ireland.7 Yet even Hyndman could, on occasion, acknowledge that it was not always the case of proletarian hands eagerly stretching across the Irish Sea. In February 1884 his newspaper Justice insisted that the ‘real allies’ of ‘English workers’ were the Irish, but admitted ‘little as they [the English workers] realise it.’8 The defeat of Gladstone’s Home Rule bills in 1886 and 1893, the fall of Parnell over a divorce scandal, splits in his party, his death and the attempt of a Conservative government to ‘kill Home Rule by kindness’ meant that from the early 1890s the Irish issue lost its prominence in British politics. It re-emerged after the 1910 election when a Liberal government became dependent on trying to secure a measure of Irish Home Rule for its own parliamentary survival. By then though, and certainly in the years leading up to the outbreak of the Great War, the nature of the ‘Irish Question’ was evolving and those who wished to try and answer the question needed to revise their understanding of it. Nevertheless, at least those on the left could look to their own history for guidance. Or, to put it another way, they had a tradition of solidarity to remember.
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