Why Socialists Should Support George Galloway’s Candidature in the Rochdale By-Election

There is one and only one issue – Labour’s Silence on Genocide in Gaza and the Attack on Rafah

Whatever else you can say about George Galloway he is not without controversy. Politically he has a long record of forming alliances and then falling out with his partners – whether it is the SWP in Respect or the Stalinist Communists Party of Great Britain - Marxist Leninist in his Workers Party.

I say ‘his’ because the Workers Party revolves around George. It is very much his baby and it is highly unlikely that the membership would overrule him on any major issue or indeed have the means to do so.

🚨Twitter deleted the post, so reposting to expose Israeli army crimes!

Last video of kids martyrs of Husouna family massacre
They fled from Gaza to Rafah in search of safety, escaping shelling
Israeli army killed them inside their tent along with all family members last night ! pic.twitter.com/hlW7qWqFJx

— Nour Naim| نور نعيم (@NourNaim88) February 13, 2024

This is what war criminals Keir Starmer & Peter Kyle Support

George is politically eclectic. He is a brilliant speaker, an old-fashioned orator in an age when the leader of the Labour Party freezes like a rabbit caught in a car’s headlights whenever anyone gets to challenge him as Audrey White did when Starmer ventured into Liverpool.

George is not someone that socialists find easy to support. He is anti-abortion for a start and dismissive of issues of sexual orientation and sexual oppression -  all of which he  puts into a basket called ‘wokery’. There is a distinct impression that he panders to some very basic prejudices such as homophobia and transphobia in the belief th at if you ignore these issues then you will get basic workers’ unity.

Likewise George’s attitude to race which is most evidenced in his failure to oppose the Tories scapegoating of asylum seekers. George disgracefully attacked the SNP for having supported demonstrators in Glasgow who freed two refugees who were seized by the Home Office’s Border Unit.

He was also vehemently pro-Brexit and was quite prepared to support a racist like Nigel Farage. Indeed he tried to become a candidate in the European elections for the Brexit Party.

He even formed an alliance in Scotland with Tories and that he even shared a platform with David Clews, a member of the Patriotic Alternative.

Deserted!

So what are his pluses?

George has been a consistent anti-imperialist and was expelled from the Labour Party as an MP for opposing the Iraq War. When summoned to Congress to address allegations regarding oil sanctions he turned in a fine and memorable performance.

On the issue of Palestine George also has a good record. There was a time when he supported the two-state solution. I know because I debated the issue with him at my old college St Mary’s in Strawberry Hill, Twickenham. But as he later admitted I was right and he was wrong on this.

So I understand why it is that many people refuse to support Galloway because of his de facto alliance with racists and reactionaries.

Letter in the Scottish National from anti-racist campaigner Mark Brown

However the by-election in Rochdale is not about Galloway but what he stands for on the one key issue in Britain and indeed the world.  US and British imperialism’s support for the genocide in Gaza. All other issues pale by comparison. The lives of thousands of Palestinians hang in the balance at this moment and Galloway’s disgraceful opportunism over refugees, Brexit and Farage are minor by comparison.

Galloway and only Galloway is able to win this election. If Galloway wins the election it won’t be his previous positions that are highlighted in Britain against the racist imperialists Sunak and Starmer but his position on an immediate ceasefire in Gaza.

This is the key dividing line in British politics. It is the most crucial issue that we face today. It would be utter sectarianism for anyone on the left to ignore this. We cannot choose who our representatives are sometimes. Galloway’s victory will be a victory for the Palestinians. What he thinks about Brexit or refugees is frankly irrelevant at this time.

A defeat for Starmer’s candidate, Azhar Ali is now certain now that the Labour Party has withdrawn its support for him, allegedly over his ‘anti-Semitic’ comments about Israel having been forewarned of the October attacks but in reality because of the realisation that he was going to lose.

We need Galloway’s victory to make it crystal clear to that apology for a human being, the robotic Keir Starmer that support for genocide is unacceptable.

GENOCIDE IN GAZA IS THE ONLY ISSUE IN THE ROCHDALE BY-ELECTION

Boris Johnson’s Pyrrhic Victory – But the Real Issue is Whether his Attack on the Right to Protest Survives a Change in Prime Minister

It is Doubtful Whether Johnson Will Survive to the End of June but Underlying the Vote Are Political Differences Such as Brexit

There is a word for taking delight in someone else’s misfortunes – Schadenfreude. It is difficult to think of a more detestable character than Boris Johnson. A bona fide racist, homophobe, anti-Semite, Zionist, arch imperialist and warmonger, anti-democratic, contemptuous of the poor, sexist. There aren’t enough adjectives to describe this sociopath.

Johnson's nearly 3-year stint as Prime Minister has been one unmitigated disaster. Brexit has resulted in political paralysis in Northern Ireland and a £20 billion drop in exports to Europe compared to 2018, some 12%.

But it is in the sustained attack on refugees and asylum seekers and democratic rights which marks this government out. The Police & Crime Sentencing Act, the ‘Spy Cops’  or Covert Human Intelligence Sources (Criminal Conduct) Bill, which allows government bodies to authorise law-breaking by undercover operatives in the UK. The other is the Overseas Operations Bill, which is gives state operatives a license to murder and torture. The new Public Order Bill continues the tradition.

The fact that Starmer’s Labour abstained on the first two demonstrates just how far to the right the Labour Party now is. The proposed Public Order Bill continues in the tradition of giving the Police yet more powers whilst whittling away at the right to protest and demonstrate such as for example locking on.

It even proposes banning people from taking part in demonstrations. The Serious Disruption Prevention Orders can either be made following a protester’s conviction or on application to a Magistrates’ Court from a Chief Constable of a local police force. You do not need to be convicted of an offence to be issued with one. Serious Disruption Prevention Orders encourage the expansion of police intelligence gathering on a range of social and political movements.

Jeremy Hunt, a leadership candidate stuck the knife in earlier today

So there are no regrets at Johnson’s imminent demise. However there is no reason to believe that his successors will be any more enlightened. It is the lack of any serious socialist challenge to the present ruling class consensus which is most worrying.

Underneath the present crisis are the continuing tremors from Brexit and Britain’s role in the world. Johnson was of course happy to throw in British imperialism’s lot with US imperialism whereas his opponents looked to Europe. Except that in the current crisis of a proxy war in Ukraine the European Union has itself subordinated its foreign policy to the United States.

We can however enjoy the scene of the wretched corrupt Johnson twisting in the wind as his opponents move in for the kill. Let us hope that he takes Pritti Patel with him!

Sturmer demonstrates he is unable to rise to the occasion

Keir Starmer of course has demonstrated how useless he is, even for a bourgeois politician. He is not only humourless and boring but he has no political antennae. The obvious reaction to 41% of Tory MPs voting against Johnson was to say he had lost the confidence of his own MPs (just 60 Tory backbenchers supported in addition to the payroll vote) and should resign.

What did Mogadon Man do?  He said that Tory MPs should be condemned for their vote of confidence in Johnson. A complete misreading of the situation as tomorrow’s newspaper headlines will remind him. Even The Telegraph, Johnson’s old paper nicknamed the Torygraph for its loyalty to the Tory Party has called the vote a ‘Hollow Victory’ and said that it ‘’tears the Tory party apart’ and that Johnson’s authority is ‘crushed’ with ‘rebels circling to finish him off’.

The tragedy is that the Labour Party doesn’t have a similarly ruthless way of finishing off the tailor’s dummy who is currently leading it. If by some mischance Starmer were to become Prime Minister then  his popularity and authority would decline at an even faster rate than Johnson’s as they share the same poisonous politics but Starmer lacks Johnson’s synthetic charisma. If Johnson’s aversion to the truth was seen as his major personal handicap we should remember that Starmer is no less the liar.

The 10 Pledges he used to win the Labour leadership election have been junked. Starmer also deliberately hid the fact that he was backed by an assortment of the mega rich including open Zionists and other racists. After all Starmer is a ‘Zionist without qualification’ and he has signed up Johnson’s agenda on NATO and Ukraine.

We should take the opportunity that Johnson’s imminent demise offers to strengthen our own opposition to the raft of Tory legislation in the offing.

Tony Greenstein

Which way forward for the Left? a mass Communist Party or a broad left socialist movement?

 Is it possible to salvage anything from the Corbyn Project or is the socialist left destined to talk to itself?

Register in advance for this webinar here or here

Tonight we had the launch meeting of the new Socialist Labour Network (LAW/LIEN) and 150 people attended. Ian Hodson, President of the Bakers Union was the guest speaker.

The process of forming a new organisation began at the end of November when All Members Meetings of Labour-in-Exile-Network and Labour Against the Witchhunt voted to merge into a single organisation. Both LAW and LIEN had been proscribed by Labour’s National Executive Committee last July 20^th.

Orgreave when the Police were used as Thatcher's cavalry to destroy the strike

The decision of the 2 organisations to merge was taken in the teeth of opposition from Labour Party Marxism which is the Communist Party of Great Britain in the Labour Party. 5 of the 6 members of LAW’s Steering Committee were also opposed to the merger and 4 of them explained their reasons in a statement Why we resigned.

This was accompanied by an article both in Weekly Worker and on the LPM website Something serious is needed: confronting Tony Greenstein and Merging into a cul-de-sac. I replied with Not a liquidation? and Self-declared heretic replies.

The fact that the CPGB and its leading theoretician Jack Conrad felt the need to personalise a political disagreement suggests that the CPGB is finding it difficult to mount a sustainable argument.

LPM insisted, contrary to all the evidence, that what was being proposed was not a merger but a liquidation and notwithstanding the evidence they have continued to insist that this is the case.

My article, for which I had provided a heading ‘Why the merger of LAW and LIEN is not a liquidation’ was retitled Not a liquidation? It was also accompanied by a subheadline ‘Abandoning any pretence of class politics, Tony Greenstein defends what he calls the ‘merger’ of LAW and LIEN and advocates yet another ‘transitional’ halfway-house broad front’

Despite Conrad admitting that ‘LAW has done very little, has been paralysed even’ my argument that LAW had not been liquidated was described as ‘clearly a pedantic attempt to pull wool over eyes.’ Conrad continues to argue that

‘while the words ‘liquidation’ and ‘closing down’ did not appear in motion 1, only someone who wants to cover up, to obfuscate, to hoodwink, would object to such an assessment.’

Such an unnecessary expenditure of verbs! To allege that your political opponents are, effectively, lying is not the way to conduct a comradely debate. And the evidence for such an assertion?  Zilch.

Black Lives Matter demonstration in Brighton

As far as the CPGB and other far-left groups are concerned the key task is to form a revolutionary socialist or communist party with which capitalism can be brought to an end. And suffice to say they have the key to the holy grail.

Many of us saw the Corbyn movement as a quite momentous political event. Hundreds of thousands of people joined the Labour Party. It made a profound effect politically and at the 2017 General Election, millions of people voted for a radical, not revolutionary, manifesto.  But for the sabotage of Labour’s right-wing, Corbyn could have won. As it is he obtained the largest swing since 1945 for Labour. One thing is for certain.  It put the frighteners on the British establishment. It also showed the potential for radicalism in Britain.

Elbit's factory in Oldham - they've had enough and are closing

But to the CPGB what happened under Corbyn Project was merely a diversion. An inevitable failure. Jack lays out his stall thus:

‘What needs to be understood is that socialist - ie, Marxist - parties, are built top-down, not bottom-up. What is primary is the programme: ie, theory. It is from there to the masses and in the process, of course, theory is enriched, concretised, taken to new heights. It should also be understood that Marxist parties do not require revolutionary conditions in order to grow. They can grow in peaceful, seemingly almost uneventful, conditions.’

The idea of even thinking about building a socialist movement outside the Labour Party is given short shrift. It is what they call a half way house, a Labour Party Mark II. What is needed in their eyes is to jump from a small revolutionary group to a mass revolutionary Communist  Party without even pausing for breath.

Labour needs be refounded as a united front of a special kind and politically armed with a Marxist programme and put under a tried and tested Marxist leadership.

BLM demo in Chichester, a town 30 miles from Brighton

What then of the Corbyn movement itself?  Jack doesn’t pull his punches.

what was notable about them - especially, sad to say, the younger generation - is that they were not politically determined, not politically educated and therefore did not fully engage. They voted Jeremy Corbyn against Owen Smith, but had not much of a clue when it came to national executive elections.

My own view is that we are not in revolutionary conditions or a pre-revolutionary period. On the contrary we are in a period of deep reaction, symbolised by Brexit, which was a project of the Right and far-Right.

Black Lives Matter demonstration in Brighton

We need to look to our strengths and weaknesses. Trade union strike action has been at an all time low. Unions today are half the size they were under Thatcher.  Yet at the same time we have seen the rise of social movements like Black Lives Matter, Extinction Rebellion and direct action groups like Palestine Action. The question for socialists is how we can relate to and generalise from the specific. We need to be able to make the connection between climate change and environmental destruction and the nature of capitalism and how it operates. In other words socialism needs to be made relevant.

Only this week we learnt that Palestine Action had chalked up its first victory, the closure of Elbit’s factory in Oldham. I have a personal investment in this campaign as I’m presently out on bail for taking part in an action. It demonstrates that direct action can work. It is no accident that Palestine Solidarity Campaign, which is controlled by the former Trotskyist Socialist Action denounced Palestine Action in the strongest terms.

Black Lives Matter demonstration in Brighton

Other issues include a theoretical assessment of the period we are in, the decline of trade union power, the conservatism of a working class that is supposed to be the agent of revolutionary change and asking questions such as whether revolution is even possible in the heart of the imperialist beast.

Come to the debate and take part!

Tony Greenstein

40 years ago Bobby Sands MP died on hunger strike for the crime of taking up arms against Britain’s occupation in Ireland

The recent Loyalist riots should remind us that the Good Friday Agreement was a palliative not a solution – only the end of Partition will achieve that

Yesterday was the anniversary of the death of Bobby Sands, MP for Fermanagh and South Tyrone. Sands died on hunger strike 40 years ago. Despite being elected to parliament he was allowed to die because Thatcher was determined not to concede to demands for political status for the IRA prisoners.

 In the end the demands of the hunger strikers were conceded because even the stupidest member of the British ruling class came to understand that their intransigence had simply resulted in massively increased support for the IRA and Sinn Fein. In 1983 Gerry Adams was elected as MP for West Belfast displacing Gerry Fitt ‘the Brit’.

Of course Bobby Sands was deemed a ‘terrorist’ as have all those who took up arms against the British in the colonies.  And Ireland was our oldest colony. If you are a British racist then the British army could do no wrong wherever it ventured whereas those who took up arms against it were always in the wrong.

Israel has the same policy today. Anyone who opposes Israel’s occupation army is considered a terrorist whereas Israel, despite its atrocities against children even is never considered a terrorist state.

However the days of Unionism are numbered. Britain no longer has a strategic interest in maintaining the union. British investment today is in the South not the North.  The shipyards and engineering factories of Belfast are gone. That is why successive governments from Harold Wilson onwards have refused to resurrect the Protestant Supremacist police statelet that existed between 1921 and 1969.

Brexit has produced some uncomfortable truths for the Unionists. Large sections of the Protestant farming community look towards the South and the European Union today, not the mainland. That is why Boris Johnson, despite promises to the contrary, reneged on his promises to the DUP and placed a tariff border down the Irish sea in order that Northern Ireland could stay in the customs union.

The days of the Unionist veto are long since gone. The Protestant community itself was split during the 2016 referendum over Europe. The DUP, being a stupid party, never thought that Brexit would hasten the end of Unionism.

There is probably a majority for Irish unity today in the north of Ireland. I would expect that if such a referendum were held and Boris Johnson will resist one to the end, that a chunk of the Protestant community would also vote to unite.

History is against the Loyalists of Ulster. They are an anachronism of the Empire. The days of the Curragh Mutiny are long since gone. Of course the Protestant paramilitaries would promise civil war and violence should a referendum be held on the border.

When I visited Northern Ireland in the 1980s as part of a Labour Party delegation from Brighton we visited the headquarters of the UDA, a Protestant terrorist group who were legal at the time, because some forms of terrorism were acceptable to the British army.

Speaking to Andy Tyrie, the commander and John MacMichael, who was later assassinated by the IRA, was like being taken back in time. They looked to the golden days of Empire. They told us of the days in Liverpool when there was a sectarian Protestant party on the Council which allied with the Tories never asking themselves why working class people should vote Tory. In Liverpool that party disappeared but not in Northern Ireland.

The Protestant working class voted against its own interests and for Unionist parties allied to the Tories since 1922. That is the effect of settler colonialism. It creates an alliance between the settler working class and ruling class even if, as in the case of Northern Ireland the privileges that the Protestant working class gained over their Catholic neighbours were minimal.

The Good Friday agreement which ended the struggle of the IRA and led to a power sharing agreement in the Northern Ireland Assembly was in essence a palliative. The British ruling class was under immense pressure from the American ruling class  to resolve the crisis, which Blair did. However the situation in the North has not been resolved as the latest riots demonstrated.

Beneath the surface the old antagonisms remain. The Protestant working class is embittered that they have been ‘sold out’ as if the British ruling class every owed any loyalty to those who pledged fealty to them.

At the heart of the problem is the border, Partition. Of course today it is a notional border without customs posts. It is a border without any natural geographical features such as rivers.  Its basis for existing was the need to produce an artificial majority for the Protestants in the North.

As James Connolly, the revolutionary socialist who was executed for his part in the Easter Rising said, Partition would create ‘a carnival of reaction on both sides of the border’. He was of right in his prediction Not only in Ireland but India, Cyprus and Palestine. Partition and communalism were the favourite divide and rule tactics of the British in their efforts to maintain neo-colonial rule.

The British working class has never been distinguished by its support for the struggle of Irish people or the IRA but during the miners’ strike, when there were massive confrontations with the British state, the Police and reputedly the army in civilian uniforms, this began to break down,

I worked closely with miners from Kent coalfield and visited and stayed with strikers in Yorkshire. I heard repeatedly the same sentiment after the failed IRA attack on the Grand Hotel in Brighton in 1984: ‘Pity they didn’t get her.’ Indeed to my surprise, as I was volunteering in an old peoples’ home at the time (when Councils ran such things) one of the cooks in the kitchen expressed her disappointment that Thatcher had survived.

During the bitterest episode of class struggle in the last century, elements of the British working class began to see that the struggle of colonial peoples against the British ruling class was also their struggle.

Below is  the article I wrote last year and beneath that Peter Bolton’s article in the Canary.

Tony Greenstein

The Stupidity of Thatcher and the British Government in Refusing Political Status for Republican Prisoners led to the growth of Sinn Fein North and South

Bobby Sands wasn’t the first Irish hunger striker nor was he the last to die. Terence MacSwiney, the elected Sinn Fein Mayor of Cork, died in Brixton prison in October 1920 after 74 days on hunger strike. He had been arrested by the British government on a charge of sedition, a clearly political ‘crime’. 10 hunger strikers died in 1981.

Roy Mason, Labour's Northern Ireland Secretary, behaved like a typical British Colonial Secretary

Their demands were for the  return of political status which had been removed on March 1 1976 by Merlyn Rees, Labour’s Northern Ireland Minister. He was succeeded by the hated Roy Mason who was worse than any Tory imperialist ruler.

At first the reaction to the removal of political status was the blanket and dirty protest where faeces were spread on the walls.  Eventually that led to the hunger strikes. The behaviour of Roy Mason in provoking what became the hunger strikes led to the defeat of the Labour government when Frank MacGuire, the Independent Republican MP for Fermanagh and South Tyrone abstained in person.

Of course there are racists and imperialist dupes who chime up that the IRA were ‘men of violence’ and ‘terrorists’. The same people have no problem in supporting the ‘men of violence’ when it comes to the invasion of Iraq, the bombing of Libya, Israel’s war against the Palestinian people and any other imperial adventures. But when people fight back against colonialism and imperialism it is terrorism.  The same is true in Palestine.  The only ‘terrorists’ are the Palestinians, never the Israeli state.

The 10 Hunger Strikers Who Died

During the 16^th and 17^th centuries Ireland and in particular Ulster was subject to the Plantation, the colonisation of Ireland by thousands of settlers from Britain, Scotland in particular. This was enabled through the confiscation, i.e. theft of land from the indigenous population. This Protestant population was then used as a foil by the British state in order to undermine and subvert Irish unity.

The same happened in Palestine with the settlement of Jews from Europe and it is what the Indian government today is intending to do in Kashmir.

Bobby Sands funeral cortege accompanied by 6 IRA men

I was a member of the Troops Out Movement and I arrived on a fact finding/solidarity tour on 8^th August 1981 as the 9^th hunger striker, Thomas McElwee died.  I’ll never forget the scene on the Falls Road, the main road through the Catholic ghetto of West Belfast, with hundreds of women banging dustbin lids on the road to announce the death.

Here was a working class community basically in insurrection. I had never seen anything like this and wasn’t to see anything like it until I stayed during the miners’ strike in the South Yorkshire village of Armthorpe in December 1984.  Armthorpe had been subject to a siege by the corrupt and murderous South Yorkshire Police.

Although he died, it was Bobby Sands who won out against Thatcher

The British strategy in Northern Ireland was criminalisation. According to this fiction the IRA and INLA were merely common criminals like any bank robber. This has always been the reaction of the British to colonial uprisings. Whether it was the Indian Mutiny or the Mau Mau Uprising in Kenya the only reason that people rebelled against British rule was for base criminal reasons. There was nothing political about it. This was the self-deception that the British comforted themselves with. It was an illusion and a lie.

The 5 Demands

The fact is that the Catholic population of Northern Ireland had never accepted the constitutional set up.  In 1918 Sinn Fein won the all-Ireland general election winning 73 out of 105 seats. The Liberal government under Asquith had refused to implement the Home Rule Act of 1914 as a consequence of the Curragh Mutiny by army officers. After the Easter Rising in 1917 and Sinn Fein's election victory, which the British refused to accept, there began the war of independence.

There was a civil war in the Free State in Southern Ireland between 1922 and 1923. The British had threatened war and destruction unless the Irish accepted Partition. Partition, the favourite solution of imperialism to its divide and rule tactics in settler colonies, was imposed on the Irish people. The nationalist population of the north of Ireland had never accepted Partition and the IRA was the consequence.

Some of the thousands of mourners at Bobby Sands funeral

Partition has had disastrous consequences wherever it has been imposed in the world, be it Cyprus or India or indeed Palestine. As James Connolly predicted, Partition

would mean a carnival of reaction both North and South, would set back the wheels of progress, would destroy the oncoming unity of the Irish Labour movement and paralyse all advanced movements whilst it endured.

The Northern Ireland police statelet was created in 1921 and until 1972, when direct rule was imposed, there was what was called a Protestant state for a Protestant people with gerrymandering widespread. For example in Derry, there was a perpetual Unionist council even though Catholics formed the majority of the population by the simple device of making Catholic wards larger.

 

There grew up a civil rights movement in northern Ireland. In 1967 the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association was formed. It was a completely peaceful movement but it was met with state and unionist violence.

On 4 January 1969 a People's Democracy march from Belfast to Derry was violently attacked at Burntollet Bridge. This was the beginning of the Troubles in Northern Ireland.

 

The march had been called in defiance of an appeal by Northern Ireland Prime Minister Terence O'Neill for an end to protest. The Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association and some Derry nationalists had advised against it. Supporters of Ian Paisley, led by Major Ronald Bunting , denounced the march and mounted counter-demonstrations along the route.

At Burntollet an Ulster loyalist crowd numbering in the region of 300, including 100 off-duty members of the Ulster Special Constabulary (USC), attacked the civil rights marchers with stones as well as iron bars and sticks spiked with nails. Nearby members of the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC) did nothing to prevent the violence.

In the Battle of the Bogside, from 12-14 August the B-Specials, an all-Protestant paramilitary force and Unionists tried to invade what became Free Derry. It was repelled by a civil insurrection and barricades were thrown up. It was a colonial rebellion by the Catholics of the north. It was euphemistically called ‘The Troubles’. 

At that time there was no IRA.  The IRA was reformed and split into the Officials ‘stickies’ and Provisionals.  The former claimed to be Marxist but ended up as the right-wing Workers Party in Southern Ireland. In 1969 the IRA stood for ‘I Ran Away’.

In 1981 the Hunger Strike began on March 1^st with Bobby Sands, the officer commanding the IRA in Long Kesh refusing his breakfast. On March 5^th the sitting nationalist MP Frank MacGuire died.  Bobby Sands was nominated in the by-election that followed and he defeated the sole Unionist candidate, Harry West by some 1,400 votes. Sands never took his seat.  He died 26 days later.

This was the context in which the hunger strikes took place and the sacrifice of Bobby Sands and the other 9 men.  Eventually the relatives of the hunger strikers insisted that the strike was called off but the demands were effectively won by then. In any event the British government had lost politically and northern Ireland would never be the same again. 

The hunger strike led to the rise of Sinn Fein and in 1983 Gerry Adams was elected as the MP for West Belfast defeating the sitting MP, Gerry ‘the Brit’ Fitt. The continual accusation by supporters of Britain’s occupation was that the IRA didn’t have the support of the Catholic population. The election of Bobby Sands by the voters of Fermanagh and South Tyrone and then the victory of Gerry Adams proved once and for all that the IRA had the passive, if not active, support of the working class Catholic population of Northern Ireland.

In the succeeding years the right-wing Social Democratic and Labour Party, the ‘moderate’ nationalist party, was eclipsed and Sinn Fein became the majority party of the Catholic population.

British colonialism has always been led by stupid and arrogant imperialists and none was more stupid than Thatcher who believed that her attempts to criminalise the Republican struggle would somehow stop the march of history.

With the Good Friday Agreement under Blair in 1998 the violence in Northern Ireland stopped, at least for the time being but as long as Ireland is partitioned, there will never be peace.

Below is an excellent article from Canary.

Tony Greenstein

We should never forget Bobby Sands, nor the brutality of the Thatcher government in Ireland

Today marks the 40^th anniversary of the death of Bobby Sands inside the H-blocks of Long Kesh internment camp. On 5 May 1981, Sands laid down his life for his and his comrades’ right for recognition as political prisoners. On this day, we should remember the sacrifice he made for the cause of Irish freedom. But his struggle does not just provide an example that all anti-imperialists should follow. It also serves as an important reminder of the ruthless brutality of the British government in Ireland under the leadership of then-prime minister Margaret Thatcher. And that is equally something that we should never forget.

‘Criminalisation’ leads to ‘blanket protest’

On 1 March, 1976, the British government announced an end to ‘Special Category’ status for members of paramilitary organisations imprisoned for offences related to the conflict in Ireland. This formed part of a multi-pronged propaganda strategy to falsely portray the republican insurrection against British rule as some kind of aggravated crime wave.

In response, republican prisoners began a series of protests to regain the lost privileges, as well as the symbolic importance of prisoner of war status. This included the right to wear one’s own clothes, free association and exemption from prison work. IRA volunteer Kieran Nugent began the ‘blanket protest’ when he refused to wear a prison uniform. Thrown into his cell naked, he draped himself in the only thing available – a grey, prison-issue blanket.

The ‘dirty protest’ and the 1980 hunger strike

After suffering beatings from prison officers on their way to the shower areas, republican prisoners began the ‘no wash protest’, in which they refused to bathe, cut their hair or shave. When prison officers refused to empty their chamber pots, republican prisoners were forced to smear their own excrement on the walls, which marked the beginning of the ‘dirty protest’.

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In 1979, their prospects became even bleaker with the election of the right-wing government of Margaret Thatcher in Britain. When it became clear that Thatcher wouldn’t grant even the most modest of concessions, republican prisoners began a hunger strike in 1980. It ended without any deaths when her government appeared to concede some of the strikers’ demands. But the document containing the terms of the agreement turned out to be vague and open to interpretation, and the prison regime was quickly returned to a situation little better than how it was before.

A second hunger strike, and this time to the death

Determined not to be double-crossed again, the new Officer Commanding (OC) of the republican prisoners, 27-year-old Bobby Sands, launched a second hunger strike with a crucial difference from the last. The strikers would stagger their joining of the fast one-by-one and two weeks apart so that each would near death one at a time. As OC, Sands volunteered to go first, making him the most likely to die. On 1 March, 1981, Sands refused his prison food, beginning the second hunger strike in Long Kesh just over two months after the end of the first.

On 5 March, less than a week into Sands’ fast, Frank Maguire, the independent nationalist member of parliament for Fermanagh and South Tyrone, died suddenly and unexpectedly, leaving his seat in Westminster vacant. The republican leadership on the outside hatched a plan. They were forever getting dismissed by political opponents for not having a mandate, but if they stood Sands as a candidate in the resultant by-election and won, they could demonstrate to the British government and the wider world that the hunger strikers’ demands had popular support in the community.

A bittersweet victory

On 9 April 1981, Bobby Sands won the election with over 30,000 votes – almost 10,000 more than Thatcher had won in her home constituency of Finchley in the 1979 UK general election. The victory provided the republican movement with a powerful morale boost and demolished the British government’s argument that they had no support.

But in spite of Sands’ victory, along with international pressure from the Irish diaspora abroad and others around the world, Thatcher refused to budge. On May 5, 1981, Bobby Sands died of starvation 66 days into his fast at 27 years of age. Over 100,000 mourners lined his cortege in one of the largest political funerals in Irish history.

International outcry

Sands’ death led to international outcry at the treatment of the prisoners and Thatcher’s intransigence in meeting their demands. Critics pointed out that as members of a guerrilla army operating in contested territory, republican prisoners were entitled under the Geneva Convention to be recognised as prisoners of war. One letter, sent from one Bernard Sanders (then-mayor of Burlington, Vermont in the US), stated:

We are deeply disturbed by your government’s unwillingness to stop the abuse, humiliation and degrading treatment of the Irish prisoners now on strike in Northern Ireland…

We ask you to end your intransigent policy towards the prisoners before the reputation of the English people for fair play and simple decency is further damaged in the eyes of the people of Vermont and the United States.

In October 1981, the British government eventually conceded most of the prisoners’ demands; but not before nine more republican hunger strikers had followed Sands to the grave.

This episode perhaps shows more than any other the utter depravity, brutality, ruthlessness and lack of humanity that lurked within the twisted soul of Margaret Thatcher. All but one of the men were under 30 years old and left behind grieving mothers, fathers, brothers, sisters and, in some cases, children – all for the ‘crime’ of fighting back against foreign oppression and discrimination in their own country.