The UK media spent last weekend discussing Jeremy Corbyn’s attitude towards the Northern Ireland peace process. The Labour leader made a number of contested claims about his role. However, it was a statement from his close colleague Diane Abbott, dug up from an article in 1984, that best revealed his circle’s philosophy at the time.
"Anyone who comes from a former colony knows the troops always have to come out ," Abbott wrote in Labour and Ireland, a journal to which Corbyn also regularly contributed.
Northern Ireland was “an enclave of white supremacist ideologies”, Abbott continued, mocking Labour’s support for the consent principle by asking: “Should we have waited to win the consent of the white supremacists in Zimbabwe?”
This anti-imperialist, anti-racist analysis is the bedrock of the British far-left’s worldview. Corbyn is often denounced for simply “hating the West” and automatically siding with all its enemies but as we live in a world the West made, it is straightforward to believe we made our enemies as well. This may even be one of the least contentious things Corbyn believes – perhaps its main flaw is that it is just too trite to be insightful.
The problem arises with applying this analysis inside the West, to Northern Ireland, where the peace process specifically rejected it.
Irish republicans shared the anti-imperialist and anti-racist analysis of Northern Ireland up to 1987, when Sinn Féin published Scenario for Peace – a policy it now cites as the founding document of the peace process.
The UN has never classified Northern Ireland as a colony – there is little international sympathy for the idea that imperialism is something white people can do to each other
The first draft of this document described the Troubles as “the British colonial conflict in Ireland” and called for “a process of decolonisation” under United Nations principles.
In the final version, however, all references to colonialism had disappeared.
The peace process recast Northern Ireland as a classic European sovereignty dispute – an Alsace-Lorraine or Schleswig-Holstein question
The UN has never classified Northern Ireland as a colony – there is little international sympathy for the idea that imperialism is something white people can do to each other. Confusingly, under the UN’s decolonisation principles, Ulster Protestants are sufficiently “planted” to claim their own right to self-determination.
European context
The reason Sinn Féin ditched anti-imperialism as soon as the peace process began is that every other participant recoiled in horror at the implications of "a process of decolonisation". In a European context, it would amount to ethnic cleansing. The first draft of Scenario for Peace proposed resettlement grants, for example, to encourage unionists to move to Britain. Reparations, property seizures and land redistribution are other expected means of dismantling colonies.
Instead of that recipe for disaster, the peace process recast Northern Ireland as a classic European sovereignty dispute – an Alsace-Lorraine or Schleswig-Holstein question, to be resolved through devolution, power-sharing and a Border poll. Although we are told this is a uniquely ingenious solution to our uniquely intractable problem, in fact it is the usual way our bog-standard dispute has been addressed around Europe in peacetime for the past 150 years.
Anti-imperial analysis of Northern Ireland remains widespread in academia, which may be perfectly legitimate but which still tends to skip over why practical politics abandoned it
The nature of politics means Sinn Féin was never going to say, “Sorry for that last line of reasoning - it was bonkers and we’ve ditched it.” Republicans just moved swiftly on, while everyone else diplomatically declined to needle them about it.
This had the unfortunate effect of leaving a key plank of the peace process unexplained. Confusion can still be observed as a result. In 2014, Alliance assembly member Anna Lo said she supported a united Ireland because she was “pro-agreement and anti-colonial”, apparently not realising one contradicts the other.
Anti-imperial analysis of Northern Ireland remains widespread in academia, which may be perfectly legitimate but which still tends to skip over why practical politics abandoned it.
Old-fashioned bigotry
All of this can give unwitting cover to old-fashioned bigotry. References to Northern Ireland as a colony segue easily into calling Protestants colonists, a trope of semi-educated sectarianism that has never gone away. Use of this language should always be challenged – its aim is to confuse Milosevic with Mandela.
As for Corbyn, Abbott and the rest of the Labour left, they are now publicly pro-agreement, yet like Sinn Féin they never renounced the anti-imperial view – a view they continue to apply to everywhere else.
Labour is still treating Northern Ireland as an outer territory, in contravention of the Belfast Agreement’s promises on citizenship and equality. A trade unionist had to sue the party before it would let people in the North become members and now those members are suing Labour again, for the right to stand in elections, having been stonewalled on the issue throughout Corbyn’s leadership.
Last Monday, a Labour member in Northern Ireland told BBC Radio Ulster, “The people in the Labour left made a bad decision back in the day. They interpreted Irish republicanism as some sort of struggle for national liberation, like Nicaragua or South Africa, and denied us an anti-sectarian Labour party to vote for.”
Rather than asking Corbyn to condemn the IRA, it would be more useful to ask him if he still thinks we are a relic of empire.