Originally Posted by Jacobin
How much of a role do you think this middle-class consensus plays in propping up the peace process? Does the imposition of austerity on working-class communities have a potential to undermine it?
We now have two parties in government who are representing the middle classes and who benefit from the status quo, Sinn Féin and the Democratic Unionist Party. They are kept apart by the sectarian nature of the peace process and its institutions, which divides things between two communities.
Then we have a layer of people below who have been left out completely and are becoming disillusioned. But, because of the underlying sectarian logic, not just of the institutions but of the story told to put this all together, this feeling is pushing the Catholic and Protestant working class further apart, not closer. At the same time, the two parties in government tell their constituencies “we’ve won” while they cut corporate tax rate and introduce austerity measures.
Sinn Féin have moved further and further to accommodate this new reality and, in doing so, created a dynamic they largely don’t see. They are losing the trust and the support of the people who once voted for them, the Catholic working class.
Those people have been replaced by the Catholic middle class which most benefited from the peace process. These are former Social Democratic and Labour Party (SDLP) voters. They have a vested interest in stability and participation in the state, so they now support Sinn Féin.
But many who fought in the democratic and the armed struggle perceive themselves to be no better off. The economic and social system we have has consigned them to is continued welfare, poor education, and now austerity. Yet their opposition to this is described as “dissidence” and dismissed.
Meanwhile, I am seeing things come full circle. I have lived to see food banks in Dungannon, where I work. When we were young and angry enough to be marching here against poverty in the 1960s, there was nobody living on food banks. The social housing waiting list in this town is now greater than it was when the Dungannon Housing Action movement started.
And yet, at exactly the same time, the Catholic middle class has never been better off. They were brought in from the cold in the first years of the peace process when there was the security of state jobs. There weren’t jobs for the working class, in many cases, but there was welfare.
The situation has reached such a stage now, though, that even that is under attack. The Tories don’t feel that they need it. Why would they? People want peace and are willing to comply. The flip side of this is that for many people poverty will be written in as a condition of the peace.
The politicians have organized this year so that we will have our election first and the welfare reforms planned under the Tory Fresh Start agreement second. This is because everyone knows the depth of these reforms. We in the North are headed for a period of poverty that will scare people. I see it because of where I’m working.
Sinn Féin will be unable to mitigate against that when it hits the ground. They will be able to say the British government cheated us, but that won’t be enough.
What do you think led Sinn Féin to that point? Is there any chance they could take a leftward turn, bringing their Northern politics closer to the ones they espouse in the South?
I remember my last serious conversation with Gerry Adams on the peace process in the 1990s. I asked him then, “What is your Plan B if this doesn’t work?” He didn’t have one. It was clear that this was the only game in town. We are seeing the effects of that now because even if they wanted to stand up to austerity they couldn’t do it.
I missed a key point in that conversation. At the time, I thought, “This is a high-risk, short-term strategy.” In fact, it wasn’t that. It was a low-risk, long-term strategy. The two sides had fought to an impasse and that impasse was being set up as the new normal.
The British policy was to demilitarize but also to demobilize and demoralize the resistance to its government. Sinn Féin became the mechanism by which that could be done. The peace process, which was supposed to last four or five years, is now almost twenty years old and is not finished yet.
For Sinn Féin the problem is one faced by a lot of electoral parties. You organize a mass movement and you oppose the political system, but to create a space to advance the struggle at a certain point you go into elections. If you win, you become part of that political system and that imposes its own logic.
In order to advance the struggle you have to defend your position, but to defend this position you think you have to make sure a majority votes for you. The end result is that while you got into elections to say what needed to be said, you ended up saying what needed to be said to keep your elected position.
Today, many in Sinn Féin believe that if Martin McGuinness was first minister up here and Gerry Adams was part of a government in Dublin then they would be nine-tenths of the way to their goal. This way of thinking is focused on institutions. It is first and foremost nationalist, with republicanism and democracy far behind.
It will be difficult for Sinn Féin to continue to manage this contradiction in their party. At the same time that they are losing people in the North, workers in the South are turning to them. But Ireland is too small in the long term for one party to be able to be a middle-class party of respectable politics in the North and a working-class party of resistance in the South. There will come a time when that isn’t possible, and I don’t think it is far away.
The task of socialists is not to hammer Sinn Féin because of their positions in the North or to exclude them from progressive movements because their “hands aren’t clean” in the North. Instead we should try to hold them to the progressive positions they adopt against austerity and push that side of the contradiction.
How should we understand “loyalism”? What are its characteristics? What is it out to achieve in the twenty-first century?
Loyalism is clearly differentiated in the North from Unionism. Unionists are middle class; they believe that their interests are best served by maintaining the current situation, British control of this part of the island. They’re like Falkland Islanders, in that sense.
Loyalism’s hallmark is that it represents the poor. Loyalists are working class or unemployed. As the American system disgracefully refers to some of its poorest people as “white trash,” loyalists are perceived within British nationalism as an underclass.
Many from loyalist communities have internalized that themselves. When I work with people from that background I’m often surprised that they will set on the table first, “Okay, so, we know we are no good.” I have talked to young loyalists who say, “We know we are scum.”
I don’t understand any human being starting a conversation saying that they are not human. I ask them why they start that way. There is a clear lack of self-esteem and also a loss of confidence.
If you think about the “dissidence” in poor nationalist communities among people who gained nothing from the struggle despite giving so much, the sense in the loyalist community is that they actually lost. They lost to everybody despite unwavering loyalty to the regime, even to those who challenged it by force. The anger in loyalist communities is fueled by them still not having the price of a loaf and seeing Martin McGuinness up running the country.
Loyalists are acutely aware of the swaggering new rich on the Catholic side. You saw this during the recent flag protests here, where the first response was to mock the way loyalist people said the word “fleg.” The attitude among some was, “You can’t even spell it or say it right, but I am inside City Hall looking out at you.”
This is why I have always believed that this whole process is further sectarianizing the North. The infrastructure of the peace was sectarian itself and continues to reproduce the problem. The result of that is that, while there is some competition between Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump in the United States for poor whites, or between Jeremy Corbyn and the UK Independence Party in Britain, the loyalist community is stuck without such an avenue.
Loyalist politics is based on British nationalism and, for the same reason that Irish nationalism has aligned itself with progressive struggles, British nationalism is compelled to be reactionary. But that is only part of the history of Ulster Protestants. They have been denied other parts of their history, such as the radical struggles of the Presbyterians or the labor movement. Regaining that won’t happen in history class. It will only happen by fighting in your corner and discovering that someone else was here before you.