Hitherto philosophers have interpreted the world in various ways. The point however is to change it. Karl Marx
Economic & Philosophic Science Review
P&P Bulletin Publications, PO Box 50, London SW17 9NL] [Post Office Regd.]
No 775 Tuesday November,1 1994                                                                                                                      10p

Parliamentary capitalism in its entirety is one giant swamp of graft and corruption protected only by the class-collaborating stupidity of the 'reformist' and revisionist 'opposition' and by the anti-communist propaganda of the very 'free press' making the sordid revelations. But Ireland proves how imperialism, and all subjective-idealist revisionist confusion, is still losing badly.

As the British bourgeoisie squabbles its way ever deeper into conflict over sleaze-filled corruption and decadence, catching out Government ministers and the Cabinet Secretary in grotesque lie after lie and cover-up after cover-up, over freebies and influence-selling in Paris and everywhere else, it is only fake 'socialism' of every variety, from far right to ultra-'left', which keeps capitalism afloat.

The bristling 'liberal' conscience of the petty bourgeois Guardian posturers has got Major, Aitken, and Butler on toast over their farcical attempts to explain away the obvious free hotel accommodation at the Ritz gifted to the then Defence Minister, now Treasury Secretary, by his Arab arms-dealing business partners, clearly compromising Aitken’s public office with his private interests.

But the Labourites in Parliament(and local government) have always been every bit as big crooks as the Tories when it comes to expenses fiddling, freebie freeloading, and influence-peddling graft.

So who should be on hand to break the spell of self-righteous witch-hunting which sections of the middle-class media were working themselves up into, and to soften the hammer-blows of the repeated devastating revelations by the Guardian of one deception and distortion after another over the unpaid hotel bill, - than a couple of Labourites, Straw and Taylor, ludicrously agreeing with rightwing counter-attacks that Aitken's muddle was "no doubt perfectly innocent", and that the Guardian's supplying of a false Aitken letter so that the minister’s Ritz bill, which they already had a copy of, could be seen to have been given to them with out revealing their source of information in the management, - was some major scandal.

The thieving criminals running British capitalist politics should be called just that, - but the Lib-Labourite parliamentary 'opposition' has, of course, even more blood on its hands from past periods in office running the British imperialist state than the Tories have, - and just as many bribe-taking skeletons in its cupboard, - big crooks such as Maxwell, Poulson, Sproule, Smith, Wilson’s sleazy cronies, and thousands more who have not yet been caught.

It is not only just the fact that any party administering the capitalist system and British imperialist state at local government or national level is automatically guilty of monstrous colonial hegemonism, racist bullying, and class exploitation.
The parliamentarians of all parties have also always had their own personal little hands corruptly in the till too, in large and small ways, - as the petty-bourgeois capitalist press itself is beginning to admit more and more openly as the smell of corruption and decay around the system starts to make some of the less robust middle-class posturers feel guilty:

Others quickly find the easy way out. Commons dining rooms, tearooms and bars are open all the hours when the House is sitting. One member of the 1992 intake of MPs described her shock at being told by an old hand, as she hurried around trying to solve a constituent’s problem, that she was letting the side down.

Travelling abroad is one way of filling the time of underemployed legislators — but again there are traps of practice and custom.

Another MP described his first trip abroad, organised by the British-American Parliamentary Group, saying: ‘I received a cheque for £1,800, with an explanation that I was expected to use it to buy a business-class airline ticket and pay my hotel bill. I was a bit surprised to then find that I was the only person travelling in business class. All the others had bought ‘bucket’ tickets, and pocketed the difference.

‘When the 14-day visit officially ended, a lot of them stayed on and were joined by their wives, and had a free holiday paid for by what they had saved on the air fare.’

Another MP, on a visit to the Far East, was surprised when a Tory member of the same delegation failed to join them for the return trip. It emerged that he had made private arrangements with two separate airlines, allowing him to travel free to Hong Kong, stay over, then make a second free trip back to Britain.

One peril for MPs travelling abroad used to be that if they were recalled to Parliament unexpectedly — as they were when Iraq invaded Kuwait in August 1990, or when Britain left the Exchange Rate Mechanism two years later — they had to pay their return fares.

That changed in July, when the Commons agreed that such out-of-pocket travel expenses would be met by the taxpayer.

At the same sitting, MPs agreed on a 2.3 per cent increase in their allowances for office costs and for car journeys between Parliament and their constituencies.

MPs who travel by car can now claim nearly 70p a mile — around twice the AA mileage rate — which means that the price of a return trip to distant cities can exceed £200 — well above the cost of a first-class rail ticket.

Mileage claims are paid by cheque, whereas these who travel by train are given rail warrants. That gives MPs a financial incentive to make long car journeys when the railway would be safer, less tiring, and more environmentally sound.

All that is small beer. But anyone who has watched corruption knows that it starts small — and grows.

Faced with allegations of impropriety, Whitehall’s first law of defence is to demand the delivery of evidence. That bluff very often does the trick; in default of evidence, there can be no impropriety.

Unfortunately for the Prime Minister, the bluff was called at the end of September when Mohamed Fayed’s ‘evidence’ of alleged impropriety on the part of four Ministers was relayed, in confidence, to John Major by an informant widely believed to be Brian Hitchen, editor of the Sunday Express. Even more unfortunately, further particulars of the same allegations were publicly detonated by the Guardian on 20 October, under the headline, ‘Tory MPs were paid to plant questions says Harrods chief'.

Cornered by that report, Mr Major told the House that he had asked the Cabinet Secretary, Sir Robin Butler, ‘to undertake an independent and full investigation’. There had been nothing so silly since Margaret Thatcher asked her Cabinet Secretary, Sir Robert Armstrong, to undertake a full and independent investigation into the 1986 leak of a law officer’s letter, deliberately designed by No 10 to destroy Michael Heseltine, the then Defence Secretary, at the height of the Westland affair.

Although Neil Hamilton, the Corporate Affairs Minister, has strenuously denied the allegation that he took money to table Commons questions on behalf of the Harrods boss, Sir Robin’s lack of independence and thoroughness was abundantly illustrated when the Prime Minister’s office volunteered that the Cabinet Secretary had been told that Mr Hamilton’s non-declaration of a free stay at Mr Fayed’s Paris Ritz had already been investigated and cleared by the Commons Committee on Members’ Interests.

It took just one phone call to a senior MP to establish the nonsense of that assertion. There had been no formal complaint, the matter had never been investigated, and Mr Hamilton had not been ‘cleared’ at all. Where on earth had Sir Robin got that idea from?

As far as Home Secretary Michael Howard and Treasury Chief Secretary Jonathan Aitken were concerned, Sir Robin could not even bear to repeat their names in his report to Mr Major.

'There were other allegations passed on to you by your informant,’ he said. ‘I have looked into all these, so far as I am able, and the Chief Whip and I have put the allegations in detail to the Ministers concerned. In some of them there are patent inaccuracies, and all have been denied explicitly, unequivocally and in writing.'

Stripped of its polished Whitehall veneer, Sir Robin was telling Mr Major that he was not up to the task.

There is not a sensible adult in the country who could not tell instantly from the confusing Ritz Hotel saga that one thing was absolutely obvious: Aitken did not pay his own bill. It is only the dismal opportunist spivs from the Labour ranks who choose to seem incapable of getting this clear in their heads. Aitken is a very wealthy man. Why did he not just pay his own bill when he left the hotel? Who but willing accomplices, crooks, and imbeciles could fall for all the stupid contradictory 'explanations' since then with various excuses as to why it could never be demonstrated that Aitken had paid his own bill.

The Questions of Procedure for Ministers are a pedantic farce anyway under capitalism, — just a pretence that no member of the Government stands to gain personally from any Cabinet decision in order to conceal the much greater racket that the whole bourgeois establishment obviously uses the whole capitalist state machinery as the most important instrument of all for benefiting its entire class interests.

If the private enterprise social class altogether gains from capitalist government policies, then it is a distinction without a difference to pretend that specific members of that bourgeois class, who happen to be in government, have not personally received any advantage from particular Cabinet policies.

And the endless scandals about ministers past and present breaching the 'spirit of the regulations' by, for example, taking leading well-paid jobs once they have left office, in industries which they have had important influence over when running various government departments, - demonstrate how impossible it is in practice to separate specific capitalist class interests from general capitalist class interests.

And the supposed Register of MPs’ lobbying and other concerns is equally always in dispute for the same reason that there can be no end in reality to the connections between one bit of bourgeois profiteering at the expense of the working class and at the expense of foreign rivals, - and the next bit.

The free-market system cannot help but work to promote profiteering in general, regardless of any other consideration. But individual Tory MP sleazeballs are not even the half of it. Listen to this capitalist press review of a new bourgeois admission on the question of privatisation:

THE idea that public enterprises can be run at least as efficiently as private sector companies won’t come as a surprise to London Economics, one of the few independent organisations to have examined the successes and failures of UK privatisation.

The conclusions of its latest report (commissioned by the Post Office) will have gone down like a lead balloon in Downing Street. LE found that, whether measured by profit (before interest and tax) or return on capital employed, there was no major improvement for UK companies that had been privatised.

When they turned to efficiency (as measured by total factor productivity, which measures output against all inputs, including capital and labour), the authors found that the nationalised corporations compared very well with those that had been privatised. For both public and privatised utilities the main pressure for improvement came from increased competition rather than from change of ownership (as the electricity and water examples will confirm).

Interestingly, British Airways — generally held up as the most successful privatisation — achieved a far higher improvement in productivity (7.9 per cent a year) between 1970 and 1980, before privatisation was even mentioned, than during the 1980s (2.7 per cent).

The Post Office, after a relatively poor productivity performance (2.9 per cent a year) between 1983 and 1988, did much better between 1989 and 1994 when it achieved an annual improvement of 3.2 per cent a year. This was a faster rate than any privatised firm other than BT. The moral? The Government’s privatisation miracle should more accurately be described as a competition miracle.

The authors see no reason to change the conclusion they came to some years ago — the direction of causation was not from privatisation to increased efficiency, but from increased efficiency to privatisation. Whether anyone in government, or for that matter in the Labour Party, takes any notice is another question.

Last week several things happened. First, the damage caused by the Government’s disastrous scheme to privatise pensions (by setting the storm troopers of market forces loose to persuade us all to leave our company pension schemes and buy personal pensions) has now been assessed.

More than 850,000 people were conned by a mixture of smooth talk and duplicity to opt out of their employers’ schemes (or not to join one in the first place). The bill for compensation will be an amazing £2 billion.

So who will pay? Not the army of untrained spivs who did the deed. Nearly all of it will have to be paid for by existing policy-holders one way or another. And, while junior ministers have been falling like ninepins as a result of Sleazegate, how many politicians have resigned as a result of authorising this disgraceful rip-off? Not a single sighting.

Nor will any heads be rolling as a result of what happened in the electricity industry last week. The privatised electricity companies, like their counterparts in the water industry, have been faced with a serious problem. They have been making too much money. If this was due to increased efficiency they would be welcome to it, but it is not. It is largely because they were privatised with their monopoly status intact.

MAKING money then becomes a game between the utilities and their regulators. So far they are winning hands down. The problem is what to do with their monopoly profits before they become even more of a public embarrassment.

The water industry started to diversify by buying all sorts of companies. The result? They had to write off over half of the £1.2 billion as being dud investments. Some of the electricity companies followed with similarly bad results and have now hit on a new wheeze — giving the excess profits back to their shareholders before the taxpayer (or a future Labour government) starts to ask questions. Like why the regulation is so permissive and why they were privatised so cheaply in the first place.

Last week, East Midlands Electricity — which only six months ago had to write off £130 million of ill-advised diversifications — announced that it was giving a cool £187 million back to its shareholders. Others will doubtless follow later. This just goes to prove one of the key lessons of privatisation. Those corporations in fierce competition with other companies at home or abroad — like Rolls-Royce, British Aerospace and British Steel — have found the going hard.

To those that were privatised with their monopolies largely untouched — water, electricity and gas — it seems more like a licence to print money. Not for nothing are electricity shares worth around 3.5 times more on the stock market now than they were at privatisation.

Privatisation has been acclaimed a huge success all around the world. It is seen in many places almost as a magic wand transforming stodgily managed state assets into dynamically managed private sector ones. The argument has been won so convincingly that few have dared to question its premise, let alone suggest as an alternative policy that word from the sixties — only spoken in polite society in inverted commas — "nationalisation".

Except New York, where the state authorities have just launched a £1.6 billion bid for the privately-owned Long Island Lighting Company, whose charges are said to be the highest in the world. Under public ownership, prices (it is claimed) will eventually be cut by up to 25 per cent, financed partly by the fact the new company won’t have to pay dividends to shareholders or federal taxes and will be able to refinance its balance sheet with cheaper public sector debt. 

But even as the British capitalist state appears to be getting away with murder as far as its privatisation, sleaze, and other rackets are concerned, - in the longer historical view of broader real-world developments, the imperialist system is running into more and more difficulties in every corner of the globe, and the British imperialist bourgeoisie in particular continues to degenerate.

Yet even on Ireland, where the game is so plainly up as far as hanging on to the disgraceful colonial outrage called Northern Ireland is concerned, it is still the fake 'socialists' who do most to conceal the real picture of London's humiliation at the progressive hands of Irish national-liberation forces.

Despite having fought their way to a revolutionary triumph, arms in hand, against the monstrous imposed evil of Partition and the gerrymandered bastard sterile statelet of non-existent 'Northern Ireland', - an amazing success which should have all revolutionaries cheering everywhere just as previous bourgeois-nationalist triumphs over British colonialism in Ireland had Marx and Lenin cheering in earlier periods, - many ultra-'left' petty-bourgeois posturers have been incapable of any response but a sick sectarian bleat of misery and condemnation.

Listen to the Trotskyite Spartacists' analysis of the latest clever Sinn Féin/IRA peace strategy to wrongfoot the donkey-like British imperialists:

The current IRA cease-fire settles nothing in Northern Ireland. The "troubles" will not end short of a workers revolution which wrests power from the blood-drenched British bourgeoisie and its lackeys in Dublin and Belfast.

Britain is not about to put an end to Protestant ascendancy, nor is withdrawal of the British army—which continues to ride roughshod through the Catholic ghettos—an imminent possibility.

The British imperialists do not always see eye to eye with the fractious Loyalists, but for now they have no intention of abandoning their old allies.

Many working-class Catholic youth join the IRA because they mistakenly see it as the only force opposing the British army. Yet the IRA’s "armed struggle" was never really aimed at—or capable of—driving the massive British imperialist military presence out of Northern Ireland, but rather at pressuring Britain to the conference table.

It would be fatal for working people to have illusions in such "settlements." In South Africa the newly installed Mandela/De Klerk regime has already moved to break strikes of black workers and squelch the expectations of the impoverished black masses. The Palestinian PLO now has its own cops to keep down the Palestinian masses in Gaza and Jericho. And while conditions in Northern Ireland are not identical, Ruari O Bradaigh, the leader of the dissident nationalist group Republican Sinn Féin, has warned that behind Gerry Adams’ call for "new policing arrangements" is a veiled appeal for recruiting Republican militants to serve in a "police service to be run in parallel with the RUC" to do "England's dirty work in Ireland" (Irish News, 6 September).

"The declaration marks the latest stage in the quest by the IRA and its political wing, Sinn Féin, for a ‘negotiated settlement" with British imperialism, pursued through the "‘good offices" of the southern Irish clericalist state and underwritten by U.S. imperialist chief Bill Clinton.

Hoping to secure a place in the "New World Order" ordained by Washington following the destruction of the Soviet Union, the IRA/ Sinn Féin are predictably claiming a victory. Yet the oppressed Catholic minority in Northern Ireland have been offered nothing in exchange for the cease-fire. Sinn Féin does not even demand the withdrawal of British troops from the North."

The recent move was foreshadowed by the Anglo-Irish declaration between London and Dublin last December. As we warned then: "Any imperialist ‘deal’ will be bloody and brutal and will necessarily be at the expense of the oppressed Catholic minority. And it would not do any good for working-class Protestants either.

The Loyalist stranglehold over the Protestant workers will only be reinforced by liberal bourgeois "solutions" that promise to spread the endemic poverty more evenly. In a situation of increasing economic desperation, fighting over a shrinking slice of pie only stokes up the fires of sectarianism.

This grotesque ultra-leftism postures its 'revolutionariness' in the most irresponsible and childish way imaginable.

Past Bulletins and ILWP Books vol 8 have quoted endlessly from the works of Marx, Engels, and Lenin on the important strategic understanding to communists that bourgeois-nationalist and other defeats for the imperialist ruling class can frequently be of enormous help and significance for the subsequent success of proletarian-dictatorship revolution to get rid of capitalism altogether.

It is just numbskulled posturing to keep on pointing out that bourgeois-nationalist liberation is not necessarily a short step from communist revolution (although they proved inseparable in Vietnam and Cuba, for example). It is well-known that Sinn Féin are philistinely ignorant of Marxism-Leninism.

The crucial question, however, is whether or not this bourgeois-nationalist struggle can cause British imperialism an enormous setback.

To ask the question is to answer it. Why else has British imperialism been fighting all these years with more than half their main land infantry forces to 'defeat terrorism' in the Occupied Zone of Ireland (and beyond) if not to avoid a humiliating reversal with dire consequences for all the ruling class’s interests? The Spart slogan for proletarian-dictatorship revolution (although these opportunist sectarian cowards never spell this out scientifically) is not incorrect as an abstract theoretical statement but in practice is worse than useless, - a complete academic diversion.

To proclaim communist aims does not necessarily make it obligatory to rubbish national liberation aims. Just read Marx and Lenin on the subject.

And it is particularly stupid and reactionary sectarianism to denigrate a national-liberation struggle carried out in such a revolutionary manner, both politically and militarily, by Sinn Féin and the IRA, arms in hand. And especially so when that national-liberation movement turned out to be the only serious and effective anti-imperialist movement going, - and one with undoubted sensational success which has dramatically captured the world's imagination, commanded wide international sympathy, and confounded the entire British ruling class leaving it utterly tongue-tied and undermined.

Obviously, the Sinn Féin/IRA triumph is not yet a 'workers revolution', or even remotely any 'solution' to the immediate capitalist crisis afflicting Ireland (and everywhere else, of course), or even any guaranteed immediate satisfaction of Irish national aspirations and an end to the 'troubles'.

But it does represent a colossal retreat by British imperialism and reflects an enormous movement in international class forces which have felt obliged to force London to accept that it is potentially seriously damaging to the Western imperialist cause for naked British colonialism to keep on hopelessly brutally repressing a national-liberation fight which not only obviously will not be beaten but which could start to become an increasingly dangerous revolutionary beacon for the oppressed worldwide, as the international imperialist slump continues to deepen.

After their first academic and pointless paragraph above, the Sparts' diatribe then quickly has to descend into just plain untruths or distortions, or commit yet more historically strategic errors by way of false analogies, or just simply get things wrong.

The fight for Leninist parties of proletarian-dictatorship revolution must never cease to grow, as is obvious to all real Marxists (although of doubtful appeal in fact to these Trots who, as always, are terrified of having to call communist revolution by its crucial proletarian dictatorship name), and the pan-bourgeois-nationalist coalition taking shape for the reunification of Ireland will naturally become the then open enemy of further social progress.

But it is sectarian insanity to just sneer at the final completion of Ireland's war of independence against bitter British imperialist resistance as an event of not only no historical importance but as actually a reactionary development, (as these ridiculous Spart academics try to do), - no matter how unpleasant the sight of
'imperialist lackeys' in Dublin jumping once again onto the nationalist bandwagon.

And as proof of the ridiculousness of the point they are trying to make, these boring and dimwitted Trot ultra-'lefts' then have to be very economical with the truth to try to back up their daft stance.

The 'Protestant ascendancy' is not ended yet, nor is the British army withdrawn, clearly. But it is equally plain to all who would see it that the old outrageous colonial notion of a supposed country called 'Northern Ireland', - a tame stooge of blatant British imperialism on occupied Irish soil, - is nevertheless utterly doomed now, never to be resurrected.

Only complete sectarian fake-'left' fools can fail to see this, or fail to see what a huge revolutionary shift of historical forces this represents.

The Sparts are just wrong. Disregarding Trot silly canny wordplay, the 'Loyalists' certainly are being abandoned in the sense that the essence of the former British colonialist tradition, - i.e. 'Ulster is forever British' (meaning the gerrymandered ripped-out parts of six of the Irish province's nine counties), - is no more, - destroyed by a heroic revolutionary-guerrilla war from a wholly legitimate national-liberation movement.

It is just the depths of triviality for these Spart cretins to try to present the successful negotiations forced on infinitely stronger British imperialism by the tiny but unbeatable revolutionary war as proof that "the IRA’s 'armed struggle' (put in offensive commas in the original) was never really aimed at...driving the massive British imperialist military presence out of Northern Ireland (noticeably not put in quotes by these Sparts who presumably accept the British bastard colony's legitimacy).

What insane crap is this. One of the most dramatic and triumphant guerrilla wars of all time fought by tiny forces against a huge enemy which succeeded virtually in laying siege to that enemy's own capital city (the barriers are still up around London's Square Mile, so terrified is British monopoly capitalism of further crippling blows to its property and its prestige), - and these armchair socialists pretend that it was nothing, and no real intended challenge to British imperialism. What total mental bollocks.

Of course the guerrilla war's aims were limited, - to force British imperialist rule out of Ireland. No sane person doubts that it is now on its way out. And only the most pedantic dilettantes could be so childish as to try to make more sectarian points out of the obvious reality that the British Occupation would eventually be forced to effectively surrender via a covered-up negotiated 'peace settlement', - just as has always happened with 99% of West European colonial retreats from former empires.

The wild analogies with South Africa and the PLO are just silly and misleading, but are wrong anyway. Of course it was a necessary historical stage to go through for the ANC national-liberation struggle to form a bourgeois nationalist independence government before the correct unending struggle for a proletarian-dictatorship socialist revolution could hope to make further significant progress in southern Africa. It would have been sectarian gibberish, incomprehensible to the African masses, to have agitated for a Leninist revolutionary movement in South Africa in direct antagonistic opposition to success for the ANC's national-liberation war. The cause of proletarian dictatorship was obviously served, not hindered, by the prior defeat of apartheid-imperialist dictatorship by the national-liberation forces. And that is even true to some extent in Occupied Palestine in spite of the trivial extent to which the Zionist Occupation has been forced to retreat, and in spite of the suicidal ludicrousness of the pocket-handkerchief sized 'independent' areas which Arafat has accepted as Palestinian 'self-determination'. That truly bogus 'settlement' will be the death of Arafatism, which is to the good, but it will also be a further spur to a clearer understanding that it is imperialist economic domination of the region as a whole, spearheaded by the Zionist colonial presence, which must be defeated before genuine Arab national aspirations and self-determination can be achieved, - obviously only under proletarian-dictatorship revolution eventually.

Quoting O'Bradaigh's views as 'proof' that Sinn Féin and the IRA are only negotiating with London in order to "do England's dirty work in Ireland" for it, is just more sectarian unseriousness.

And it is just plain wrong, and shows disgraceful lightmindedness, to claim that neither nationalist or 'loyalist' workers have gained a thing from the brutal war being brought to an end by British military occupation's acceptance of the IRA's truce-for-talks initiative. These armchair socialists obviously have never even considered what an enormous national sacrifice has been put up by the Irish population of the Occupied Zone to sustain 25 years of unprecedented repression-terror by the British army, special assassination forces, secret police, and RUC shoot-to-kill squads, etc, plus concentration-camp internment without trial, the torture-barracks routine brutalisation of all nationalist suspects, and the nightly house-wrecking onslaughts on strongly republican areas, - not to mention the sinister murderous activities of the 'loyalist' fascist terror gangs.

The infamous irresponsibility for this casual Trot observation that the war might just as well go on for all the good that any 'peace settlement' might do, becomes more graspable when the Sparts' motives are further probed. They actually hate the Irish national-liberation movement, and want it slaughtered, virtually accusing it of genocidal fascist intent against British imperialism's 'loyalist' stooges, and joining in with British imperialist propaganda to denounce Sinn Féin as nothing but a movement of sectarian terror:

Any attempt to forcibly incorporate the large and relatively well-armed Protestants into the Irish clerical state could only precipitate a wholesale communal conflict. While Irish Republicans usually present their struggle as fundamentally directed against British imperialism, the more hardheaded IRA nationalists acknowledge that the Protestant Loyalists are the ultimate obstacle to their programme of reunification with the South. As one Belfast IRA commander told an American journalist: 

"This is not about peace. This is about getting the referees off the playing field, about finding a way for the British to leave with some semblance of dignity. The real war has always been between us and the Loyalists. That has not changed, and that's what we're getting ready for." —New York Times, 2 September

The bloody logic of this nationalist line is currently being played out in the former Yugoslavia.

However, a central component of the IRA’s nationalist strategy involved reprehensible indiscriminate terror against Northern Protestants, as well as against civilian targets in Britain, aimed at exacerbating the communal divide between Catholics and Protestants and at galvanising the oppressed Catholic minority behind the banner of Green nationalism.

We call for the formation of integrated workers militias to combat both imperialist/Loyalist rampage and sectarian terror from any quarter.

The Protestant majority are deeply hostile to—and a significant number of Northern Catholics are wary of—the nationalist project of reunifying the North with the even more poverty-stricken and virulently anti-woman southern clerical state, where divorce as well as abortion is illegal.

And this Trot-totalitarian intolerance of genuine Irish national aspirations, barmily regarding the 'loyalists' as equally-good Irish patriots (!), - has had the lifelong nerve to denounce the Soviet workers state for its 'undemocratic arbitrariness'. What a sick joke.

Time will tell what a monstrous misrepresentation the above comments are of the national-liberation movement's intentions towards the whole population of Ireland, - nothing remotely in common with the genocidal, repressive, sectarian reaction which these Spart ivory-tower loons ascribe to Sinn Féin and the IRA.

Already the Sparts' instant September predictions are looking not just silly, but looking like a clear provocation from these strange fake-"lefts":

Meanwhile, the viciously sectarian RUC and Royal Irish Regiment (RIR) are still in place, and the heavily armed fascistic Protestant Loyalist/Unionist paramilitaries, who have killed far more people than the IRA this year—mostly in random, indiscriminate attacks on the Catholic populace—have refused thus far to reciprocate the IRA’s cease-fire.

As a woman from Ardoyne—a Catholic area of north Belfast where unemployment runs 47 percent—put it:

"I want peace but nothing has changed around here. The Brits and the peelers (cops) are still on the streets, young lads are still being harassed. We’re terrified of a loyalist attack" (Irish Times, 8 September).

Only hours before the cease-fire went into effect, a Loyalist gang dragged Belfast Catholic Sean McDermott from his bed and executed him. Shortly after the IRA declaration, John O’Hanlon was shot in cold blood outside a friend’s house in Belfast. On 5 September the Protestant paramilitary Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF) set off a large car bomb outside Sinn Féin’s headquarters in Belfast, following up five days later with an assassination attempt against a Sinn Féin activist.

The actual historical developments are clearly different from these hopelessly wrong predictions revealing complete muddleheaded incomprehension of the first thing about the real class and national war situation in Ireland.

But exactly what the balance of forces between British imperialism and the national-liberation movement will exactly throw up at this stage is obviously not yet fully clear.

Yet the signs still accumulate, - from the capitalist press's own coverage of events, - that things are still well on course for completing the rout of the British imperialist colony on occupied Irish soil, and for the eventual reunification of Ireland under a bourgeois democratic republic, - the best conditions of capitalist dictatorship for proceeding with the struggle for a revolutionary workers state:

The symbolism carried more weight than what he said. Mr McGuinness, an executive member of Sinn Féin, told BBC TV’s On the Record he had received a private assurance from the Government that it was working towards a united Ireland, a claim first made in January by Sinn Féin when it published secret correspondence between the party and the Government.	

"In March of last year I did have a meeting with a representative of the British government who said the eventual outcome of all Britain was trying to do would be that the island would be as one," he said, but refused to identify whom he spoke to. "He was there on the authority of the British Prime Minister John Major and the Secretary of State for Northern, Ireland Patrick Mayhew. There is no doubt about that." 

Referring to Mr Major’s speech in Belfast on Friday, Mr McGuinness said the Government had already publicly accepted there could be no internal political settlement for Northern Ireland. Mr Major, he said, significantly adopted republican terminology, saying they were moving towards a "just and lasting peace."

"The British government are slowly but surely disengaging from Ireland," he said, but admitted he was sceptical of private assurances given by the Government. He derided suggestions by the Ulster Unionist leader James Molyneaux that there could be a new Northern Ireland assembly. "If he thinks the SDLP and the Dublin government and ourselves will support assembly elections at the beginning of next year, I think James Molyneaux is living in cloud-cuckoo-land."

Instead, the Government had accepted there could not be a settlement based on a new Northern Ireland assembly and it was moving closer to a position where it could act as a "persuader" for a united Ireland. "They have said there can be no internal settlement. The British government in recent times have used interesting terminology to talk about being "facilitators," about bringing people together. It is a short step, in my opinion, from the language which they are using to use the language of being a persuader."

He stressed Sinn Féin was committed to the peace process and he believed there was the best opportunity for 70 years to achieve a lasting solution. "Irish republicans have set the agenda. Everybody else is jumping to the Irish republicans’ tune."

His remarks, immediately condemned as mischief-making by Downing Street, came as the Irish prime minister, Albert Reynolds, speaking on the eve of his meeting with John Major at Chequers today, made his clearest call yet for the establishment of cross-border institutions in the framework document being negotiated by the two governments.

The differences threaten to delay further the so-called Joint Framework Document on new relationships between Britain and the two parts of Ireland. The document — which is seen as the essential next step in the political process — was originally scheduled to appear in July, but the two governments are deadlocked over issues of sovereignty and cross-border powers. The chances of publication in time for Thursday’s Commons debate on the peace initiative seem slim. Mr McGuinness’s claim is based on the private contacts between the IRA and government officials last year, of which accounts sharply differ.

Mr Reynolds said yesterday that cross-border bodies with executive powers were essential for establishing peace. Their remarks will require Mr Major to do even more to reassure Unionist opinion that he has not embarked on a step by step path to unification.

Mr McGuinness also clashed with Unionists by insisting that no devolved assembly in Northern Ireland could be established, until agreements had been reached on the whole future of North-South relations.

In his most remarkable claim Mr McGuinness said: "In March of last year, I did have a meeting with a representative of the British Government who said to us that the eventual outcome of all that Britain was trying to do would be that the island would be as one."

Mr Reynolds told a Fianna Fail rally in Co Kildare: "If nationalists [Northern Ireland’s catholics] are being asked at present to accept the reality and the consequences of the present majority wish of a continuation of the union between Northern Ireland and Britain, their desire for meaningful institutional links with executive functions must also be accommodated."

But he added: "It is wrong to see co-operative institutions, democratically mandated north and south, as in any way prejudicial to the constitutional status of Northern Ireland — either at present or in the future."

These institutions, which would deal with matters such as tourism and investment, were not to be confused with joint authority over Northern Ireland by the two governments. "The constitutional future will be decided democratically — as set out in the two governments’ joint declaration last December," he said.

Since the IRA called its ceasefire there has been a feeling that every move — by all sides — has been quietly but carefully choreographed. The wrangling over the permanence issue was a tactic for Mr Major to buy time and see if the IRA was serious, and to make room for loyalist paramilitaries to decide about the merit of pursuing a campaign of violence.

Mr Major knew why Sinn Féin could not call the IRA ceasefire permanent. Under the IRA’s rules, its seven-member army council can call a cessation, but it needs to be endorsed by an army convention — of up to 500 delegates — to make it permanent.

A convention must be called within 12 months of the council decision, leaving a lot of breathing space to carefully assess the developing situation. But yesterday’s announcement will do much to ease the pressure on Gerry Adams to show to his republican hardliners that the IRA initiative is paying tangible dividends.

The rescinding of all the remaining closure orders on border roads was a masterstroke by Mr Major, coming only a day after Sinn Féin produced a glossy map detailing the 100 roads closed by the British army in the last 25 years. 

The physical impact of the measure will add to the feelgood factor of the peacetime situation. Scenes of unhindered passage between communities cut off for so long will make it all the more difficult for those who may yet harbour thoughts of a resumption of the armed struggle.

This element is likely to make its voice heard once it becomes clear the opening of the border does not mean the end of partition. Only then, when republican fundamentalism is tested against Sinn Féin’s pragmatists — who are talking about British withdrawal in a timespan of 20 to 30 years — will we know if Northern Ireland is rid of political violence.

JOHN Major’s announcement that direct talks with Sinn Féin will begin soon marks the lifting of an official veil of secrecy over contacts which go back more than 20 years.

In the past 12 months, that veil has been torn away by press revelations which appear to give Sinn Fein’s version of events more credibility than the damage-limitation exercise launched by the Northern Ireland Secretary, Sir Patrick Mayhew, last November.

In a document dated March 23 last year, the Government representative is quoted as saying that Sir Patrick wanted to include Sinn Féin in a political settlement "not because he likes Sinn Féin but because it cannot work without them."

The representative goes on: "The final solution is union (of the North and South of Ireland). It is going to happen anyway. Unionists will have to change."

Sinn Féin alleged that the breakdown was caused by government forgeries and deception. But Ian Paisley’s Democratic Unionist Party claims contacts have continued throughout this year as the IRA ceasefire was awaited.

A basis for broad agreement was the aim. "Neither a purely internal solution nor a return to domination of one side by the other would achieve this," Mr Major said yesterday.

In 1985 Paisley was right — or, at least, more right than his rival James Molyneaux — when the Anglo-Irish Agreement gave Dublin for the first, time a say in the affairs of Northern Ireland. Last December he denounced the Downing Street Declaration even before he had read it. But this time its Molyneaux who is claiming Paisley’s misread it; Gerry Adams has been conned and the Union is safe.

Paisley is far from convinced. "It is more likely that James Molyneaux has been conned," he says. His problem is that the unionist people don’t appear to believe him. Or if they do, they show scant evidence of wanting to do anything about it. Maybe a weariness has set in from being harangued by the same voice so many times about betrayal.

Most damaging of all to hardline unionism is the acceptance by loyalist paramilitaries that Molyneaux is right. A unique coalition of minds has formed between the broad, conservative church of the Ulster Unionist Party and the radical-sounding grassroots loyalist parties who keep closely in touch with the gunmen.

It is difficult to sell "sell-out" when even the gunmen who profess to spill blood for the Union have called it a day. Paisley’s esteem is low on the Shankill— the symbolic heart of loyalism to the Crown. At a recent conference on protestant culture and identity his party was attacked for piously refusing to negotiate with people who once supported or were involved in violence while hinting at the use of the same dark forces when it suited them.

This charge is strongly denied by Paisley and his party, but the memories of his deputy, Peter Robinson, in a red beret and the late-night rallies of men brandishing firearms certificates haunt them all still. "He’s led us all up to the top of the hill only to march us back down again too often," is a common observation.

Paisley can be accused of playing the same old games. Only last week, after liberally peppering the "enemies of Ulster" — everybody but the DUP — with buckshot he warned: "The Union is not safe, the Union can be betrayed. We would repeat to John Major and the Dublin government the challenge of Lord Carson — interfere with us if you dare, because you cannot rule us without the consent of the majority."

Carson founded the original Ulster Volunteer Force, which was prepared to coerce the Government into giving Northern Ireland its own gerrymandered parliament and a place in the Union at the point of a gun. It was Carson’s UVF 80 years ago which introduced the gun to Northern Ireland’s politics. Carson is a heroic figure for Paisley. He doesn’t discourage: comparison. This spring he ran a series of Carson Trail-style rallies across the province. 

But it was a founder of the modern UVF, a group responsible for some of the worst atrocities of the last 25 years, who galvanised the public when he spoke of the loyalist paramilitaries’ "abject and true remorse" upon the announcement of their ceasefire.

Gusty Spence is this week in the United States as part of a loyalist delegation presenting their message to the same politicians that Gerry Adams has recently met. The "No" word has gone out of fashion. "Unionists have a legitimate political philosophy which they must go out and sell," says David Ervine, another spokesman for the Progressive Unionist Party and a broker of the loyalist paramilitary ceasefire.

It is a journey which Paisley has persistently refused to make. Further sidelined by John Major who, with the skills of the chief whip's office, threw the turbulent pastor out of Number 10 and pulled the rug from under his feet with the promise of a Northern Ireland referendum, it is tempting to ask who Paisley thinks he now It is scarcely comprehensible that Northern Ireland's most popular politician has been so marginalised in the peace process.

Paisley has a fundamentalist approach to the problems. Nationalism and Unionism are irreconcilable philosophies and one must defeat the other. There can be no compromise on that. It’s a message which sounds more appealing to the background sound of bombs and bullets, hence the claims — rubbished by British, Irish and American security sources — that the IRA is continuing to buy arms.

But he is right about one thing. The nationalists and the unionists are both claiming they have "won" in Northern Ireland. "They can’t both be right," he says. Paisley will continue to call "betrayal" from the margins, even if nobody appears to be listening.

Mr Powell said there was a "game plan" to detach Northern Ireland from the United Kingdom. "Give them self-government upon a scale that they cannot refuse and attach to it conditions which will bring them into a united Ireland."

The only protection lay in his slogan, "the union, the whole union, and nothing but the union".

Away from the conference floor, one delegate from the party’s progressive wing was heard to whisper in the bar: "Personally, I’m all for an all-Ireland tourist board, for instance." But his face clouded with worry when asked if this might be extended to agriculture — Ireland’s other big earner — and if so, then was not this simply the rocky road to Dublin? "That’s the problem, we just don’t know," he admitted. "The cross-border bodies are the crux now."

Mr Hume’s refusal to countenance another internal settlement for Northern Ireland is the block in the road for the Ulster Unionist game plan, and though his name was barely mentioned he was Banquo’s ghost at the weekend’s feast.

THE IRA will not be prepared to relinquish its armoury as the first stage in the process of reaching a political settlement.
 
Sinn Féin sources have already ruled out movement on the arms question without significant progress in other areas, including release of prisoners, withdrawal of troops, and replacement of the RUC, as well as new political structures.

Yesterday Mr Adams said there could be no preconditions to talks. "All the guns and explosives of all the armies need to be decommissioned. The issue is to get all the weapons taken out of Irish politics," he told Brian Walden on ITV.

"Any attempt to get a section of nationalists to disarm unilaterally, I would think, would be doomed to failure."

Pressed repeatedly on the matter, Mr Adams said it was Sinn Fein’s intention to remove the gun "permanently and irreversibly" from Irish politics.

THE Northern Ireland Secretary, Sir Patrick Mayhew, came under hardline Unionist pressure in the Commons yesterday not to open exploratory talks with Sinn Féin after Mitchel McLoughlin. the party's Northern Ireland chairman, said the IRA was unlikely to surrender its weapons before negotiations on a new constitutional settlement were near completion.

In the first Commons debate on Northern Ireland since the IRA and loyalist paramilitaries declared a ceasefire, Sir Patrick implied that he would not allow Sinn Féin to enter substantive talks on the future of Ireland until the IRA’s arms had been surrendered. But he appeared to accept that the IRA would retain them during exploratory talks.

Mr McLoughlin, speaking on BBC Radio yesterday morning, said: "There is a considerable, amount of distrust both in the British government’s track record on Ireland, and the failure of constitutional politics over the last 70 years, for it to be realistic to expect either the IRA or loyalists would hand over weapons before there is clear evidence that... there is consolidated prospect for agreement on political structures.

"To insist as a precondition to any side that they must surrender their weapons before people will talk to them is to invite this very fragile consensus to collapse."

In remarks bound to fuel Unionist suspicions, he added: "People will recognise the difference between a ceasefire and a permanent peace. Let’s hope we have a permanent peace. What we haven't got as yet, because we aren’t even in the necessary negotiations, is agreement on the political structures for the island of Ireland."

Peter Robinson, deputy leader of the Democratic Unionists, claimed Mr Major had reneged on a promise not to allow the IRA to enter talks until all the arms had been handed in.

Revisionism is the dying clammy hand of subjective bourgeois-idealist philosophy holding back workers from Marxist-Leninist science, - fake 'socialists' from right-wing Labourite 'reformist' class-collaborators to the sectarian Trot middle-class ultra-lefts at the other extreme. Build Leninism. Spread the ILWP Bulletin. Joe Harper

Hitherto philosophers have sought to explain the world in various ways. The point however is to change it. Karl Marx
South West Bulletin
P&P Bulletin Publications (Southwest), [PO BOX 50, London SVV17 9NL]
No. 93 Friday October 28 1994

The reek of degeneracy from the Windsors spreads right through Whitehall and Westminster too. It is the decay of imperialist rule which is stinking up all of modern society and needs burying, fast.

The sight of Major brawling in public, one-to-one, with Al Fayed, helps put the dizzying accumulation of ruling class sleaze into sharper perspective than ever.

The whole point of the vast and complex web of institutions that go to make up the parliamentary democratic form assumed by class dictatorship in Britain is for the exploitation class interests of the bourgeoisie to be looked after by a state which appears, to a degree, detached from the live agents of monopoly capital.

This was always a lie, of course: as Lenin pointed out, a thousand and one threads connect the interests of capital and the bourgeois state itself.

But through the '80s, although the Thatcher clan's close, partisan, and very lucrative involvement with specific sectors of monopoly capital (including Al Fayed himself) was scratched around dutifully by various journalists (to the extent that the outlines of the skulduggery around Cementation, Yamama etc. quite quickly became lukewarm semi-public knowledge), enough bourgeois confidence still rode on the fluke success against Argentine nationalism and the subsequent phony mini-boom to prevent any real head of public alarm building up over these very visible 'threads'.

As a capitalist commentator on the crisis in France (see below) notes: When you're efficient and corrupt, you can get away with it, but "when you’re inefficient and corrupt - that's dangerous".
Thatcher was never "efficient", but her 'decisive' bluster reflected just enough surviving bourgeois arrogance at least to make it look as if she were, through much of the '80s.

How, with Major's foot permanently in his mouth, the Tory party openly split, and the Labour ’alternative' too busy mimicking the Tories (this week creeping behind the mealy-mouthed Borrie commission to liquidate a few more welfare reformist illusions) to offer any credibly distinguishable second division for monopoly capitalism to field, the crass greedy undisciplined reality of all that "batting for Britain" is hitting bourgeois class rule like a ton of bricks.

Major may dimly calculate that Al Fayed can be scapegoated quickly into oblivion as a 'get-rich-quick foreigner'.

Even on the basis of short-term expediency, this could backfire badly. The sight of Al Fayed parading his alleged touching early faith in British institutions, fair play and justice, now horribly disabused by Greer, Hamilton, the legal system etc., may contain an element of playing to the gallery - no capitalist pirate, Establishment or maverick, gets to his position by being quite that gullible - but all the same is the most brilliant exposure of all the 'decent British values' bullshit, and punctures Major's 'honest John' bubble a treat.

But in any case, whatever the immediate outcome of the spat with Al Fayed, what will not go away is the imperialist crisis which is pushing all of this corrosive sleaze up through the middle of parliamentary democracy - constitutional monarchy and all.

Recent capitalist press comment has been obliged to note that the most telling difference between the present royal furore and the pre-war abdication crisis is in the failure of the establishment this time around to unite around any plausible damage limitation exercise to keep the monarchy afloat.

In the absence of any clear ruling class lead on how the bourgeoisie is to extricate itself from the hopelessly degenerate "constitutional monarchy" farce (for whose creation it bears sole historical responsibility), the only voices that emerge with any force are those screeching from each side of the royal divide, the splutter of a few fellow emotional cripples from the locked Empire Loyalist ward, and, with a sometimes startling degree of venom, the long pent-up whinge of capitalism's own tame press, who are reading the deafening silence from the serious bourgeoisie as tantamount to a declaration of open season on the entire institution:

Prince Philip is a wrong ’un of epic stature and persistence. A terror to his small son ("he kept hurrying me up all the time") and a tyrant of the mood-swing, he was exactly the sort of man of whom it could be predicted that, faced with a shy little boy whose ears were a burden to him. he would prescribe a Dickensian remedy. Off to the windswept penitentiary of Gordonstoun, where pointless Prussian values were instilled by the sort of men who volunteer to staff such places.

"Prince of darkness" doesn’t even begin to cover it. A cruel, boring, humourless, conceited sprig of one of Europe’s most discredited royal families — his favourite relative was the ghastly Queen Frederika, who joined the Hitler Youth before grimly trampling on the liberties of her luckless Greek subjects.

By what right does the bat-eared misery depicted in these pages "chivvy and harass government ministers," as Dimbleby phrases it in a passage which reveals unguessed-at moments of royal interference in politics? How dare the defenders of monarchy maintain that it stays above the political fray, when in the next breath they describe it as a force for "order" and "continuity’?

The republican case is made more complete by this book in the sense that things like order, dignity and continuity are now hideously compromised by their supposed guardians and emblems. And what we have learned cannot be unlearned. So we would be doing ourselves a favour if we decided to do without the pathetic exhibition of joyless, purse-mouthed repression on the one hand, and blubbing, bulimic, operatic self-indulgence on the other.

It seems clear that we would, in pulling the plug, also be doing a favour to a family that cannot stand the strain any more. It’s too late for them to grow up and too late for them to start again.

Certainly this kind of 'daring' talk might be seen by some to be doing the bourgeoisie a favour, helping then prepare to dispose of an unwanted and embarrassing medieval appendage which is 'no longer appropriate for the next millennium' etc. The problem with this, though, is that, for British capitalism as well, it is too late to grow up and too late to start again. Defending 'democratic' Westminster against unelected Windsor 'chivvying' rings a bit hollow in the midst of the biggest eruption of Westminster sleaze yet.

Keeping public opinion mesmerised around the relative merits of feudal influence or capitalist bribery and blackmail as the best way of running parliamentary democracy is likely to prove difficult. Would Charles have escaped 'democratic' censure had he queued up democratically behind Al Fayed outside Ian Greer Associates to pay hard cash for his political influence? And what would be the point of trying to influence ministers, anyway, were they not supposedly exercising their most significant executive powers by proxy for the Queen? And what is the point, anyway, of the whole rigmarole of Her Majesty's Government, Her Majesty’s Opposition, the Privy Council etc., if not to prosecute the monopoly-capitalist exploitation interests of the unelected property-owning capitalist class, who are alone responsible for keeping the whole barmy Windsor crew in a job?

When the stricken Macmillan government was killed off by scandal, the Western postwar capitalist boom was still under way, and a viable second-division reformist opposition was waiting in the wings.

The present public outbreak of sleaze coincides with, and reflects, a deepening crisis of imperialism worldwide which, at the same tine as making bourgeois class rule an increasingly intolerable burden for the proletariat to bear, has also killed off the reformist second-division alternatives by which the bourgeoisie traditionally got itself off the hook so that it could go on ruling in the old way.

If the crisis is international, so is the sleaze. What was first sneeringly presented as an 'Italian problem' is now recognized to be as much an 'American problem' and a 'French problem':

Within the past fortnight, Prime Minister Edouard Balladur has watched as his Industry Minister, Gerard Longuet, has resigned and his former Communications Minister, Alain Carignon, has been taken into custody. Last Tuesday Balladur called an extraordinary Cabinet meeting at which he told Ministers to keep calm despite the crisis.

But worse could follow. No fewer than five of the 28-member Cabinet are under judicial scrutiny and facing accusations of, among other things, accepting bribes, dodging taxes and making under-the-counter payments.

A few weeks ago, no commentators seriously suggested these scandals would take France down the path travelled by Italy, where the old regime was swept aside by a disenchanted electorate. Now the experts are less sure. 

Yves Mény, a leading authority on political corruption in Europe, believes the Republic will survive, largely because the two leading contenders for next year’s presidential election — Balladur and outgoing European Commission President, Jacques Delors — are above suspicion. But he is far
from categorical.

'When you’re efficient and corrupt, the voters can forgive you. But when you’re inefficient and corrupt — that’s dangerous,' he said. And with more than three million people unemployed, French politicians can hardly claim to be efficient.

And if old school tie loyalties and a tame press have till now helped keep the lid on the worst corruption of the British ruling class, this looks like changing.

If the collapse of social democracy and revisionism in Italy (long mired in class collaboration, and appropriately drowning with the rest of the 'old politics') means that the Italian bourgeoisie has had to patch together (from fascist and showbiz remnants) a hopeless Frankenstein's monster of a government to do the job of fooling workers instead, what monstrosity will the British bourgeoisie dream up to substitute for reformism?

And if Berlusconi's phony "war on corruption" has already backfired predictably on his own corrupt Fininvest racket, opening workers' eyes to the real class-war essence of his austerity policies, how well can Blairism (or Portillo-ism, or whatever other desperate post-reformist idiocy the bourgeoisie is obliged to float) be expected to do?

The 'constitutional monarchy' racket has historically helped the British bourgeoisie invest its hand-to-mouth predatory class-rule with some phony 'order and continuity', letting them enjoy a cheap sneer at the 'immaturity' of capitalism's unstable multiple-government rule in Rome.

But when that decadent attachment to monarchy starts to fester so badly that the stench from the Windsors, West-minster and Whitehall becomes indistinguishable, the disruptive consequences for the whole of bourgeois rule could even have London envying Rome's problems.
D.H.                                                        [Note by ed DH= Dominic Hull]