‘What is it about “fuck off” you don’t understand?’ The NILRC and politics of the Left in Northern Ireland

Unless otherwise indicated, all the URLs in this article were accessed on 17 July 2017.

Abstract

At the 2016 Northern Ireland Assembly Election, a somewhat peculiar political ‘party’ hastily filled in nomination papers at the 11th hour. This last-minute concoction was elaborately named ‘The Northern Ireland Labour Representation Committee’. This article seeks to explore the circumstances around the creation of the NILRC, thereby developing a synthesis of the present-day situation of the Labour Party in Northern Ireland (LPNI), the local Constituency Labour Party (CLP) of the UK Labour Party. In a backdrop in which UK Labour does not stand for elections in Northern Ireland, this article engages with the LPNI’s rationale and raison d’être, followed by a discussion of the NILRC experiment of 2016. The LPNI–NILRC case carries resonances and insights of interest to political groups of the left operating in deeply divided societies.

Keywords:

• UK Labour
• politics of the left
• Northern Ireland
• NILRC
• sectarianism

Notes

Unless otherwise indicated, all the URLs in this article were accessed on 17 July 2017.

1. In this article, the Labour Party of the United Kingdom, in its present form, is referred to as the ‘UK Labour Party’, or ‘UK Labour’. However, when referring to events in the period prior to the establishment of the Labour Party’s Constituency Labour Party in Northern Ireland in 2009, the term ‘British Labour Party’ or ‘British Labour’ will be used, as the Party operated only within Great Britain at the time.

2. ‘Labour in Northern Ireland’, Chairman’s address at the annual conference of the Northern Ireland Labour Party, 25 October 1941, by Alderman Harry Midgley J.P. W.M. Strain & Sons, Belfast.

3. Ibid.

4. Originally from an Irish Republican background Devlin was a lifelong socialist, and his disagreements with the NILP and subsequently with the SDLP provide revealing insights into the challenges of upholding a socialist political agenda in a society and polity deeply divided along ethnonational lines. For an analysis of Devlin’s complex political philosophy, See Parr (2012).

5. On Fitt’s contributions to the formation of the SDLP and that party’s early years, see Campbell (2015). On the SDLP, see McAllister (1977); Murray (1998); McLoughlin (2010).

6. In the aftermath of the creation of the SDLP, the RLP underwent a political nemesis, being wiped out at the 1973 Northern Ireland Assembly Election and at the 1973 local elections, and was subsequently disbanded. In 1971, a year prior to Westminster’s declaration of Direct Rule, the RLP leader Paddy Kennedy withdrew from Stormont, adopting a stronger republican stance. When Northern Ireland Secretary William Whitlaw MP invited the RLP for a cross-party conference, Kennedy laid down the condition that he would attend only if he could bring IRA members in his delegation.

7. They unsuccessfully fielded Mark Langhammer, a seasoned politician and long-standing councillor representing the Newtownabbey Labour Party, for the 1989 European Parliament elections.

8. CLRNI’s other leading members (apart from Clifford and Morrison) included Angela Clifford, Eamonn O ‘Kane (who later became General Secretary of the National Association of Schoolmasters/Union of Women Teachers (NAS/UWT), David Gordon (Editor the BBC Ulster’s Nolan Show and former public relations advisor to First Minister Arlene Foster and ex-Deputy First Minister Martin McGuinness); Cllr. Jeffrey Dudgeon (pioneering Gay Rights activist and current Belfast UUP Councillor); Mark Langhammer (Newtownabbey Labour Councillor 1993–2005; current Director Association of Teachers and Lecturers) and Dr. Boyd Black, a former lecturer at Queen’s University Belfast, who has held several mandates as LPNI Secretary (Gibson, 2017).

9. Gibson made this comment, explaining the reaction of his former CLRNI colleagues with regards to his continued campaigning for Labour representation in Northern Ireland, in a conversation with this writer, February 2017.

10. Gibson (2017) maintains that this still created a ‘second class’ membership for the province, as Northern Ireland-based members could not yet organize as a Constituency Labour Party (CLP) or stand at elections.

11. Labour Party to become official party in Northern Ireland. Belfast Telegraph, 17 February 2009: http://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/news/politics/labour-party-to-become-offical-party-in-northern-ireland-28498118.html

12. Black comes from a Unionist background and in politics, has had close links to unionism. In 1986, a unionist group fielded Black as the candidate at a candidate at a Westminster by-election in Fulham (West London), as a mark of protest against the Anglo-Irish Agreement of 1985. He stood under the banner of ‘Democratic Rights for Northern Ireland’, and the initiative was coordinated by John Taylor, the Official Unionist MP for Strangford.

13. NI Labour ‘not interested’ in Corbyn’s NI past’, The Belfast Newsletter, 28 September 2016: http://www.newsletter.co.uk/news/ni-labour-not-interested-in-corbyn-s-ni-past-1-7599698

14. John Manley, Labour’s Boyd Black optimistic of lifting party’s Northern Ireland election embargo. The Irish News, 10 March 2016.

15. In 1998 Curren stood as LPNI candidate in South Down and received 1% of the first preference votes, and his LPNI remained a one-man-show.

16. Video intervention by Baroness Blood. NILRC social media. Copyright Drs. Brigitte Anton and Chamindra Weerawardhana: https://www.facebook.com/NILRC8/ – link currently disabled for public access.

17. Manifesto of the NILRC. 2016 ©NIILRC.

18. Ibid.

19. In Northern Ireland, the only Independent candidates to succeed since the days of Partition have been people already active in larger parties and with high profiles. Anyone else standing as an independent is guaranteed defeat.

20. Source: Social media update published on the NILRC’s official social media on 18 April 2016. The link is no longer visible to the public, as the page has been set to ‘private’ since the end of the 2016 Northern Ireland Assembly Election: https://www.facebook.com/NILRC8/posts/1776499572568906 [Copyright: Drs. Brigitte Anton and Chamindra Weerawardhana]. For a media reference to this post, see, for example, Pope (2016).