Why Benn's plan won't do

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administration announced the appointment of top union bureauerat Lane Kirkland, President of the AFL-CIO Ithe US equivalent of the TUC] to a post on the newly created 'bipartisan national carrier Eisenhower, steaming off the coast of Libya, the crew was reportedly on full by Frangois Mitterand's 'Socialist government to back up Habre's pliable regime the immediate imperialist power concerned is France and not the USA. TONY BENN has outlined a policy for ending the conflict in Northern Ireland in his Guardian column on July 18.

He wants to make the proposal for British withdrawal central to public debate in Britain. "For too lọng those who have so courageously advocated it have been denounced as if they supported terrorism' , he says.

Benn's solution is this:

1. Britain should set a date for withdrawal, not more than two or three years ahead.

2. The UN should be invited to send troops to replace those of Britain.

3. A tripartite agreement should be negotiated - 'including safeguarding of human rights" — between Britain, the Southern Irish state, and "a new Northern Ireland government"

4. There should be an amnesty for prisoners 'held under the emergency"

5. Financial aid should be given to the new Northern Ireland government, equal to what is now spent on 'security' and the present British subsidies to Northern Ireland, for a five year period.

This is, essentially, the 'independent Northern Ireland' policy long favoured by the Ulster Defence Association (UDA) and by one or two Catholic mavericks like former SDLP socialist Paddy Devlin. It begs questions that Benn does not even consider, let alone try to answer - and these are the decisive questions.

What would be the political system in an independent Northern Ireland? Majority rule such as the Protestant majority in the present Northern Ireland Assembly call for? Rule by the Protestant majority artificially built into the state?

The references to 'guarantees' suggests that Benn's trend of thought would lead him to answer yes. The Catholics have no reason to believe such guarantees, and would fight on indefinitely rather than accept it.

They would be right to do so, for majority rule would be sectarian rule, whatever the guarantees. For 11 years the British government, though it makes propaganda that the Six Counties are the democratic expression of the rights of the Protestant majority, has in practice refused to let them exercise their majority. Why? Because there is no way that 'majority rule' in N.Ireland could avoid being, or quickly becoming, Protestant sectarian rule. The British government knows it -and so do the Northern Ireland Catholics.

The 'independent Northern Ireland' policy is unviable because the Six Counties is not a stable entity - it would quickly dissolve into communal civi war. If the South could be kept out of it, all the UN could hope to do would be to freeze the conflict at a certain point, as in the The explosive communal eruption now occurring in Ceylon, with its mass movement of people to their own "safe' areas, shows us what would inevitably happen in an 'independent Northern Ireland'.

Benn hopes that such proposals and a British declaration that it was going "would force both communities in Northern Ireland to discuss how they could best cooperate to tackle the real (!) problems of the province. These are mass unemployment, bad housing, poverty, inequality and social deprivation, the solutions to which require reconciliation and political action, especially by the Labour movement, that could override the sectarian hostilities that have been deliberately encouraged to divert people from the main tasks that have to be faced"

Division

The ruling class in both Britain and Ireland encouraged and took advantage of the communal division: it is much deeper-rooted than that, though.

The 'real problems' include the problem that - in social and political fact - shapes and conditions all others: the problem of the right to national self-determination of the majority of the Irish people. That is what the Catholics fight for.

1o appeal to / bread and butter questions?' as 'the real issue' - though where possible working class unity should be built even on this minimal basis — is to repeat the error of the 'socialism-the-only-answer' activists who over a decade ago were outflanked in N.Ireland by the rising IRA. Militant is the heir of such politics for Ireland.

Another argument thrown in by Benn is that Britain sees a united Ireland as possibly posing a military threat. This is out of date by three decades and an epochal revolution in military technology (from battleships and World War 2 aircraft to Cruise missiles).

"In fact Benn's policy is an unjellable mix of the UDA, Militant and the Communist Party (Bill of Rights/'guarantees'). The UN presence would not jell it. Nothing could.

The solution is a united Ireland with, within it, as much autonomy for Ireland's natural minority (the Protestants) as is compatible with the rights of the majority.

Footnote: A by-product of Benn's article was a letter to the Guardian by Merlyn Rees, former Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, which claimed that the Labour Cabinet discussed British withdrawal from Northern Ireland in the mid-'70s after the Orange general strike brought down the power-sharing executive.

They didn't withdraw. They threw the full weight of the British state into beating down the Catholics, a policy continued now by the Tory government.