As Britain woke up to a new political dawn last week, optimism was expressed that a prolonged, sour era of Anglo-Irish relations is over. It would be naive, however, to assume that the age of Starmer will herald complete transformation. While the talk is of resetting the relationship, one message that has resonated down through the years is the advice given to another Labour Party British prime minister, James Callaghan, when he was home secretary – to avoid “getting sucked in to the Irish bog”.
That bog might not be as perilous as it once was, but it still creates wariness in Britain. Historically, Irish nationalists learned that British Labour governments did not always turn out to be as sympathetic to their cause as they hoped. The Labour government 100 years ago, the first of its kind, had no desire to reopen or reset the Irish question; prime minister Ramsay MacDonald agreed with the Colonial Secretary JH Thomas that the Anglo-Treaty signed in December 1921 had to be “relied upon as the sheet anchor in all dealings with the Irish Free State”. One of the Cabinet secretaries at that time, Tom Jones, was wary of a scenario that would see “Ireland ... back again in our politics”.
As historian DG Boyce saw it, the Labour Party had “no Irish past to live down or to live up to”. That was perhaps too dismissive; there was certainly an Irish past to ponder in relation to the slogan “Justice for Ireland” favoured by some British radicals from the late eighteenth century onwards. The post-famine presence of the Irish in Victorian Britain peaked at 806,000 in 1861 and in subsequent decades Irish nationalist campaigns gathered momentum though sectarianism, resentment at immigrants and Fenian militancy complicated attitudes. Nonetheless, sympathy towards the cause of Irish home rule was often strong, and Irish involvement in the emerging trade unionism from the late nineteenth century was also significant.
Labour’s first parliamentary leader Keir Hardie was inspired by Irish agrarian radical Michael Davitt and visited Ireland in 1906, but also had to contend with Irish support for the British Liberal Party which, before the first World War, was the party working-class Irish voters preferred.
After the Liberal party disintegrated, as pointed out by historian Laurence Marley, “Labour supported home rule, but with ambitions of electoral success in Britain, its policy on Ireland was really one of detachment”. Indeed Ramsay MacDonald, who led the party from 1911, explicitly told the House of Commons in 1914 in relation to Ireland, “we will take the position of a detached party”. The party was also divided during the war on the merits of extending conscription to Ireland and wary of Sinn Féin.
The militancy of the Irish republicans’ War of Independence period left it cautious, and it wanted to see the confirmation of the border in 1925 after the boundary commission failed to deliver Irish unity, as a “real and final settlement”, while later, Irish neutrality during the second world war generated more Labour coolness towards Ireland. The Troubles prompted voices in Labour critical of the sectarian nature of Northern Ireland, but as Labour governments of the 1970s struggled with the scale of the Troubles – “no solution could be imposed from across the water” concluded prime minister Harold Wilson – the overriding concern for them was security, as it was for the Conservatives.
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The Troubles did cause some ideological tensions. Geoffrey Bell, a Labour Party member, wrote the book Troublesome Business (1982), suggesting “the issue of Ireland is one that the Labour Party must still confront if it is to fulfil its socialist promise”. There was little chance of that. The new Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, Hilary Benn’s father Tony, was told by his own father “that the partition of Ireland was a crime. My view on that has never altered”. He also called for British withdrawal from Northern Ireland. His son, of course, is no such firebrand, and while Starmer makes much of his “love” of Ireland, that is not about sympathy for nationalism; he has previously declared he is committed to the Union, and his language about Ireland has been respectful but deliberately circumspect.
When Tony Blair took up office in 1997, he was reportedly advised by his predecessor John Major that the “intrinsic importance of the Northern Ireland problem was such that it deserved fifty per cent of his time”. Blair, who proudly declared his lack of ideological baggage in relation to Ireland, was initially willing to put in the time given the potential for peace and accolades. The stakes are lower now, but there are still tricky questions around the Legacy Act and unity. Many will not want the Starmer project to be unduly complicated or undermined by those, making it doubtful he will be drawn too far in to the Irish bog.
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