The British Labour Party and twentieth-century Ireland: The cause of Ireland, the cause of Labour

The British Labour Party and twentieth-century Ireland

The British Labour Party and twentieth-century Ireland

The cause of Ireland, the cause of Labour

Edited by Laurence Marley

Manchester University Press

Copyright © Manchester University Press 2016

While copyright in the volume as a whole is vested in Manchester University Press, copyright in individual chapters belongs to their respective authors, and no chapter may be reproduced wholly or in part without the express permission in writing of both author and publisher.

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ISBN 978 07190 9601 3 hardback

First published 2016

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Contents

Notes on contributors

Acknowledgements

List of abbreviations

Note on terminology

Introduction

Laurence Marley

1 A tangled legacy: the Irish ‘inheritance’ of British Labour

Gearóid Ó Tuathaigh

2 Uneasy transitions: Irish nationalism, the rise of Labour and the Catholic Herald, 1888–1918

Joan Allen

3 British Labour, Belfast and home rule, 1900–14

Emmet O’Connor

4 Labour and Irish revolution: from investigation to deportation

Ivan Gibbons

5 British Labour and developments in Ireland in the immediate post-war years

Peter Collins

6 ‘Where the Tories rule’: Geoffrey Bing MP and partition

Bob Purdie

7 The British Labour Party and the tragedy of Northern Ireland Labour

Aaron Edwards

8 ‘That link must be preserved, but there are other problems’: the British Labour Party and Derry, 1942–62

Máirtín Ó Catháin

9 Reflections on aspects of Labour’s policy towards Northern Ireland, 1966–70: a personal narrative

Kevin McNamara

10 The Labour government and police primacy in Northern Ireland, 1974–79

Stuart C. Aveyard

11 Some intellectual origins of the Labour left’s thought about Ireland, c.1979–97

Stephen Howe

12 The Militant Tendency comes to Ireland, c.1969–89

John Cunningham

13 Anglo-Irish diplomatic relations and the British Labour Party, 1981–94

Melinda Sutton

14 Leaving the sound bites at home? Tony Blair, New Labour and Northern Ireland, 1993–2007

Kevin Bean

Index

Contributors

Joan Allen is Senior Lecturer in Modern British History at Newcastle University. Her most recent publications include Joseph Cowen and popular radicalism on Tyneside, 1819–1900 (Monmouth, 2007), and Joan Allen and Richard C. Allen (eds), Faith of our fathers: popular culture and belief in post-Reformation England, Ireland and Wales (Newcastle-Upon-Tyne, 2009). She has served as Secretary and Vice Chair of the Society for the Study of Labour History, and is a former editor of Labour History Review.

Stuart C. Aveyard is a Lecturer in Modern British History at Queen’s University Belfast (QUB). His research interests are in modern British and Irish history, particularly the Northern Ireland conflict and the governance of post-war Britain. In 2011 he completed a doctoral thesis at QUB, entitled ‘No Solution: British government policy in Northern Ireland under Labour, 1974–79’. He is currently converting this into a monograph.

Kevin Bean is a Lecturer in Irish Politics at the Institute of Irish Studies, University of Liverpool. His research interests include Northern Irish politics, developments in contemporary Irish republicanism, state counter-insurgency strategies and the development of nationalism as a political force in contemporary Europe. He is the author of The new politics of Sinn Féin (Liverpool, 2007). He is a member of the Council of the British Association for Irish Studies, the Board of the European Federation of Associations and Centres for Irish Studies, and the College of Assessors of the ESRC.

Peter Collins is Senior Lecturer in History at St Mary’s University College, Belfast. He teaches Irish and British history in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. His doctoral thesis was on the Belfast labour movement before partition. Among his publications are: (ed.), Nationalism and Unionism: conflict in Ireland, 1885–1921 (Belfast, 1994); ‘Remembering 1798’, in Eberhard Bort (ed.), Commemorating Ireland: history, politics, culture (Dublin, 2003); and, most recently, ‘1932: A case study in polarisation and conflict’, in Alan F. Parkinson and Éamon Phoenix (eds), Conflicts in the north of Ireland, 1900–2000 (Dublin, 2010).

John Cunningham is a Lecturer in History at the National University of Ireland, Galway. He has written extensively on Irish labour and social history. His publications including Labour in the west of Ireland: working life and struggle (Belfast, 1995); ‘A town tormented by the sea’: Galway, 1790–1914 (Dublin, 2004); and Unlikely radicals: Irish post-primary teachers and the ASTI, 1909–2009 (Cork, 2009). He is a founding member of the Irish Centre for the Histories of Labour and Class (ICHLC) at the Moore Institute, NUI Galway.

Aaron Edwards is a Senior Lecturer in Defence and International Affairs at the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst. He is author or editor of several books, including A history of the Northern Ireland Labour Party: democratic socialism and sectarianism (Manchester, 2009); The Northern Ireland troubles (Oxford, 2011); and Defending the realm? The politics of Britain’s small wars since 1945 (Manchester, 2012). A Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and Higher Education Academy, his most recent book is entitled Mad Mitch’s tribal law: Aden and the end of empire (Edinburgh, 2014).

Ivan Gibbons is Head of Irish Studies, St Mary’s University College, Twickenham, London. He has written extensively on modern Irish history and politics, and is a former editor of Irish Studies in Britain. He is the author of The British Labour Party and the Establishment of the Irish Free State, 1918–1924 (London, 2015).

Stephen Howe is Senior Research Fellow in History at the University of Bristol, and co-editor of The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History. Author of several books on both British and comparative imperial histories, his most recent published work is the edited collection, The new imperial histories reader (London, 2008). His The intellectual consequences of decolonization is forthcoming from Oxford University Press. On Irish history, his work Ireland and empire: colonial legacies in Irish history (Oxford, 2000) has been followed by numerous related essays and articles.

Kevin McNamara was elected to the House of Commons as a Labour MP in January 1966, for the key marginal seat of Hull North, which he retained until his retirement from the House in 2005. He held several key appointments during his political career, including that of Shadow Secretary of State for Northern Ireland. In 2007 he completed his PhD at the Institute of Irish Studies at Liverpool University, of which he is an Honorary Fellow. He is the author of The MacBride principles: Irish-American strikes back (Liverpool, 2009).

Laurence Marley is a Lecturer in Modern History at the National University of Ireland, Galway. He has written on aspects of Irish and British radicalism in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and is author of Michael Davitt: freelance radical and frondeur (Dublin, 2007). He is co-editor of Saothar: Journal of the Irish Labour History Society.

Máirtín Ó Catháin lectures in modern Irish and European History at the University of Central Lancashire. He is the author of Irish Republicanism in Scotland, 1858–1916 (Dublin, 2007) and has published on aspects of Derry labour history, including work on the Derry unemployed workers’ movement and protests in the city in the inter-war period.

Emmet O’Connor is a Senior Lecturer in History at the University of Ulster. He is an honorary president of the Irish Labour History Society and has published widely on labour history, including James Larkin (Cork, 2002), Reds in the green: Ireland, Russia and the Communist Internationals, 1919–43 (Dublin, 2004), and A labour history of Ireland, 1824–2000 (Dublin, 2011).

Gearóid Ó Tuathaigh, F.R.Hist.S., is Professor Emeritus in Modern History at the National University of Ireland, Galway. Educated at NUI Galway, and at Peterhouse, Cambridge, he has held visiting appointments at universities on both sides of the Atlantic. He has written extensively on nineteenth- and twentieth-century Irish and British history.

Bob Purdie was an Honorary Research Fellow in the Research Institute of Irish and Scottish Studies, University of Aberdeen. He studied at Ruskin College, Oxford, 1974–76, and later at the Universities of Warwick and Strathclyde. He subsequently taught at Ruskin College for twenty years. Between 1980 and 1987, he was Assistant National Secretary of the Irish Labour History Society. His PhD thesis on the Northern Ireland Civil Rights movement was published as Politics in the streets (Belfast, 1990). He died in November 2014.

Melinda Sutton was awarded her PhD in History from Newcastle University in 2014, for her dissertation on ‘The Parliamentary Labour Party and Northern Ireland, 1969–2007’. Her research interests are on the Northern Ireland peace process and the politics of reconciliation. She is the author of ‘Political reconciliation in Northern Ireland and the Bloody Sunday inquiry’, in Birgit Schwelling (ed.), Reconciliation, civil society and the politics of memory (Bielefeld, 2013).

Acknowledgements

This book emerged from a conference on the ‘British Labour Party and Ireland’ which was hosted at the National University of Ireland, Galway, in 2013. I would like to thanks all those who contributed to the event and to acknowledge the support given by the School of Humanities and the Moore Institute (NUIG), by the Irish Labour History Society, and by the Irish Department of Foreign Affairs Reconciliation Fund. I must extend a particular word of gratitude to my brother, Joe, and to a number of colleagues in the School of Humanities at NUIG: Caitríona Clear, John Cunningham, Muireann Ó Cinneide, Sean Ryder, and, as always, Gearóid Ó Tuathaigh. For their efficiency and patience, my thanks also to the staff at Manchester University Press.

Sadly, Bob Purdie, one of the contributors to this collection, died shortly before it was brought to print. Bob was a notable scholar who had a significant influence on many through his writings and his various contributions to debate over the course of many years. His attendance at the conference at NUIG in 2013 was one of his last such contributions, and he brought to it the intellectual rigour and openness for which he was widely known and respected.

Laurence Marley

Abbreviations

Note on terminology

The terms Unionist, Nationalist, Loyalist and Republican, as used in the text, are capitalised to indicate political parties or organisations of these names and their members; when used without capitals, they refer to supporters of these organisations or the wider community. The one exception to the rule is in Chapter 3, in which the author uses a capital ‘U’ throughout when referring to supporters of the Union in order to distinguish them from trade unionists.

Introduction

Laurence Marley

Shortly after the 1906 general election, the British Labour Party leader, Keir Hardie, set out on a week-long tour of Ireland. Accompanied by newly elected MP George Barnes, he started his tour in Belfast where he was met by William Walker, the labour leader in the city. Belfast, the main centre of industry in Ireland, had expanded rapidly over the previous two decades and its industrial and commercial success was reflected in the confident decision by the city’s leaders to commission the building of a city hall at the cost of £360,000.¹ Walker brought Hardie to view the new edifice, as it neared completion behind a grid of scaffolding. With the aid of a workman’s light, they made their way to the upper tier and peered out as dusk descended on Edwardian Belfast.² Walker himself had become Labour’s new light in the city; only weeks earlier, he had come very close to winning the Belfast North seat for the party. Yet there was a significant political disjunction between him and most of his Labour colleagues: he was a unionist in a party that was broadly supportive of Irish home rule, and most of the workers to whom he appealed in Belfast shared his attitude to the national question. This disjunction in itself highlighted some of the fundamental difficulties of the ‘Irish question’ for Labour, a party that had won twenty-nine seats in the general election of that year and which would, after the First World War, harbour realistic hopes of a place in government.

After moving on from Belfast, Hardie’s tour took him to Dublin where he met a number of prominent nationalists, including Michael Davitt, the veteran Land Leaguer and labour activist. Davitt was celebrated for having engineered the Irish Land War that secured Gladstone’s historic Land Act of 1881, and from which further peasant proprietary legislation would follow. Hardie saluted this transfer of land ownership from landlords to peasantry, the signs of which he witnessed in the following days when visiting various parts of provincial Ireland.³ What the Land League had ultimately brought about, though, was a settlement that served the interests of Ireland’s rural petite bourgeoisie, something quite different in fact from Labour’s proposed radical solution to the fin de siècle land question as it was being played out in politics in Britain.⁴

Labour’s elision of Ireland in the formulation of an agrarian policy did not, however, indicate a simple, binary approach to British and Irish issues on Hardie’s part. Of course, realpolitik was a factor: Walker was important to Labour’s electoral ambitions in Belfast, and Hardie would see the importance of expressing solidarity with him on that score in the first of a series of Labour Leader articles on the Irish tour;⁵ likewise, in his expression of solidarity with the largely nationalist Irish peasantry, he was mindful of the Hibernian vote in Britain, especially at that particular time when the Liberals had won a landslide victory in the general election. Nevertheless, Hardie did have a deeper understanding of the profoundly different historical contexts of Ireland and Britain, and in his dealings with unionists like Walker and nationalists like Davitt, he was juggling, in good faith, multiple affirmations of solidarity in an attempt to align these with a coherent ideological position. He understood that there were outstanding social justice issues in rural Ireland – housing, congestion and land hunger – but implicit in his celebration of the land settlement was an appreciation of the fact that land politics in Ireland could never be framed only in terms of class or land monopoly; land had become a metaphor for the nation, bound up with the popular memory of what Gearóid Ó Tuathaigh has called the ‘old, unexpiated wrongs’ associated with confiscation and dispossession.⁶ Davitt himself, a radical who had much in common with Hardie, had wanted to see land nationalisation rather than peasant proprietorship in Ireland; but he, too, celebrated the land settlement for having effected the demise of what he called the ‘landlord garrison’, that symbol of British rule in the country.⁷

In his concluding Labour Leader article, Hardie acknowledged that some of his Labour colleagues in Britain had grave misgivings about Irish home rule. But the fact remained that the majority of the party was favourably disposed towards such a settlement; and to those who did harbour concerns, Hardie suggested, somewhat flippantly it may be said, that an occasional stay in Ireland would eliminate ‘all fear of Home Rule’.⁸ The outlook of the nascent Labour Party was shaped by a modern British radical tradition, one that at various points, to varying degrees and for a range of reasons had sought to find common ground with Irish nationalism on a ‘justice’ agenda since the late eighteenth century. By the early years of the twentieth century, then, the party was, naturally enough, engaged in a ‘conversation’ with nationalist Ireland.

From the time of the Gladstonian land settlement, Davitt had been openly arguing for an alliance between the democratic masses of Britain and Ireland, though most of his nationalist contemporaries were not receptive to his espoused ‘internationalism’.⁹ Indeed, an Irish nationalist idiom of rural essentialism, which sharply contrasted Ireland with an inferior industrial England, gained currency and would remain a complicating factor in the British–Irish relationship during the first half of the twentieth century. The Irish radical, Francis Sheehy-Skeffington, encountered difficulties in distributing his internationalist paper, the National Democrat, when a prospective distributor in Britain, a nationalist who resided there, expressed some misgivings about a journal that, in asserting Ireland’s right to ‘Nationhood’, appealed ‘like a nation of beggars to the English Democracy for help’.¹⁰ Later, in 1913, the Irish nationalist and feminist, Rosamund Jacobs, who wrote disdainfully of what she witnessed of life in industrial England during her visits there, took serious issue with the position of labour leader, Jim Larkin, who argued that the British and Irish working classes shared a common interest; this implied, in her view, ‘a revolting unwholesome Englishness’.¹¹ But for Davitt at the turn of the century, the forging of a bond of solidarity between British democracy and Irish nationalism was crucial; and on the eve of the 1906 general election, he actually campaigned for Labour candidates in select constituencies in Britain. He addressed nineteen meetings in total, including in Merthyr Tydfil, Hardie’s constituency, where there was a sizeable Irish community.¹² It is noteworthy that following his death in the spring of 1906, Davitt was remembered and honoured in the opening address of the Labour Party’s annual conference in Belfast, in January 1907.¹³

In an obituary article in 1908, Hardie paid tribute to Davitt’s role in the electoral achievements of Labour in 1906. While recognising the latter’s commitment to the nationalist cause, he remembered him as having ‘desired above all else in British politics to see a strong Labour contingent in the House of Commons’.¹⁴ Davitt had certainly left a mark on the early Labour Party. Indeed, at the other end of the twentieth century, the Labour leader, Michael Foot, could stake a claim to having been named after him.¹⁵ It is interesting, however, that the father who bestowed that forename on Foot in 1913 was an admirer of Cromwell, and he imparted to his son the cult of the man he considered to have been the people’s tribune in the mid seventeenth century (he himself, it must be said, would not have viewed the choice of name for his son as being at odds with his own Cromwellian loyalties, for both Davitt and Cromwell could be accommodated in the British dissenting tradition with which he identified). The Victorian rehabilitation of Cromwell had peaked by the end of the nineteenth century,¹⁶ but Isaac Foot was associated with the Cromwell Association well into the following century. Michael Foot may have joined what Kenneth O. Morgan refers to as ‘a Labour Party of self-proclaimed Levellers’, but his inheritance of a Cromwellian creed from his father serves to illustrate the complexity of the historical narratives of Ireland and Britain.¹⁷

Davitt, for his part, viewed Cromwell in terms of those ‘unexpiated wrongs’ that gave rise to the ‘social tyranny’ of a ‘buttressed, feudal garrison’ in Ireland.¹⁸ The sense of historical injustice, with which the largely Catholic and nationalist majority of Irish farmers keenly identified, did not resonate, however, with the Protestant farmers of Ulster, precisely because the latter, despite their record of agitation – and despite Davitt’s best efforts to harness their agrarian discontent during the Land War years – identified with a different, British narrative.¹⁹ As a result, their conflict with landowners in Ulster could not be historicised in the same way. In her reflections on the canonical status of John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress – a text in which the pope is represented as one of the main obstacles to the salvation of the common man – Linda Colley makes a valuable point that can be related to narratives, and indeed to the question of relations between ‘these islands’: ‘the book inspired generations of British radicals’, she observes, ‘[but] it also contributed to a more conventional mass [British] patriotism.’²⁰

When Foot wrote in 1983 that he had been named after Davitt, he did so with pride. Yet, by that time, much water had passed under the bridge in relations between the Labour Party and Ireland. Some aspects of this important dimension of British–Irish relations in the last century have been treated in scholarly studies and publications, though much of the literature concentrates on the recent past and on Northern Ireland.²¹ The dynamics of that relationship, and the trajectory of the ‘conversation’ over the entirety of the century, have therefore been neglected. The aim of this collection is to examine the subject more closely and to identify longer-term dispositions in Labour mentalities towards Ireland (though more so those of policy-makers than of grass-roots Labour activists). This is a perspective that does, in fact, make for a better understanding of the more recent developments.

In his opening chapter below, Gearóid Ó Tuathaigh examines Labour’s relationship with Ireland in the context of the British radical tradition in the ‘long’ nineteenth century and the Labour Party’s arguable inheritance of what Eugenio Biagini has termed the Gladstonian ‘politics of humanitarianism’, a popular radical identification of the ‘Irish cause’ with ‘democracy, constitutional freedoms and the claims of humanity’.²² Ó Tuathaigh highlights the challenges for Labour in engaging a largely Catholic and nationalist immigrant community, and in maintaining Irish electoral support once the Liberals began to lose purchase on that constituency from 1914. These early challenges for Labour are also explored in Joan Allen’s chapter on the shifting political allegiances of Irish nationalists in Britain, as demonstrated in the career of Charles Diamond, the prominent newspaper magnate who supported the Liberals in the interest of the Irish nationalist cause but whose allegiance, and that of many of his readers, gravitated towards Labour after the First World War.

Labour supported home rule, but with ambitions of electoral success in Britain, its policy on Ireland was really one of detachment. Ramsay MacDonald, leader of the party from 1911, said as much in the House of Commons in March 1914: ‘We will take the position of a detached party, helping as we have done during the last two years [to have] Home Rule … inscribed on the statute book of this realm.’²³ The Easter Rising in Dublin in 1916 would, however, change the whole political landscape, and would do so within a fairly short period. Even so, Labour was slow to respond to the changing climate. The mood in nationalist Ireland shifted discernibly when the prime minister, Herbert Asquith, handed control of the country over to General Sir John Maxwell, a man with no understanding of Irish affairs. The Easter rebels were tried in quasi-legal tribunals, at which ‘slapdash’ evidence was presented,²⁴ and a number of them subsequently executed behind closed doors, thus precipitating the dramatic sea-change in opinion that would enable the rise of Sinn Féin.²⁵ Following the introduction of the Military Service bill in April 1918, the Parliamentary Labour Party was divided on the question of the extension of conscription to Ireland.²⁶ Generally, Labour continued to support the Irish Party, even after Sinn Féin had won a landslide victory in the 1918 general election at the end of that year.²⁷

According to Keith Harding, the British left, at that time, was moving towards ‘a fresh understanding of the meaning of anti-imperialism and self-determination in the light of events in Ireland and Russia and a closer reading of the writings of [James] Connolly’.²⁸ Nevertheless, he argues that the Labour Party, ‘reformist and parliamentarian, believing in Dominion Home Rule, found it difficult to deal with Republicanism’.²⁹ At a conference of the International in Berne in 1919, the British Labour delegation, led by MacDonald, reached an agreement with Irish delegates, Tom Johnson and Cathal O’Shannon, that Labour would adopt Irish self-determination as a policy, provided that the Irish did not attempt to secure recognition of the republic at the conference.³⁰

The complexity of the ‘Irish question’ and of Irish allegiances, implicit in Hardie’s written reflections on his Irish tour, and dealt with below in Emmet O’Connor’s chapter on Labour and politics in Edwardian Belfast, became all the more pressing as a political reality for the Labour Party, when out of the revolutionary period in Ireland, a political settlement took shape between 1918 and 1922. Anticipating a place in government, Labour was determined to appear strictly constitutional and law-abiding in this tumultuous period, and that was reflected in its response to the immediate and widely reported ‘Troubles’ during the Anglo-Irish War in 1919–21. As Gibbons shows in his chapter below on the period of conflict from 1919, Labour’s response to the unfolding developments was measured and cautious. A Labour Commission was established in 1920 to investigate the scale and nature of the violence in the Anglo-Irish War, and especially the conduct of the British Army and Auxiliary forces. The party made no bones about its commitment to Irish self-determination, but it was equally direct and unequivocal in distancing itself from any association with militant nationalism. It was concerned with the ‘degradation which the British people are now suffering in consequence of the [coalition government’s] policy of repression and coercion’ in Ireland.³¹ Later, in 1923, when Irish republicans were deported from Britain to the Free State during the Irish Civil War, Labour judiciously framed its opposition around the technical argument that the deportees were British citizens.

By that stage, Labour had eclipsed the Liberals as the official opposition, and it would go on to form minority governments in 1924 and 1929–31. Apart from the process of maturing as a mainstream political party, it is also significant that a generational change began to occur in the leadership from the 1930s. The pioneers of the party, born around 1860 and, as Alastair Reid and Henry Pelling put it, ‘influenced by the Gladstonian-Liberal settlement of the controversial domestic issues of the nineteenth century … and [by] the radical-liberal tradition’, were giving way to a new generation, born about 1880 and influenced more by the collectivist Liberalism of Lloyd George and war-time state intervention in the economy.³² There were changes, too, in the social background of the leadership: Clement Attlee, who replaced George Lansbury in 1935, was the first principal spokesman of the party who did not come from a working-class background.³³

In the 1930s there was also a more focused interest in foreign policy, particularly as a result of the rise of Hitler in Germany. Lansbury, who was a pacifist with a distrust of the League of Nations, had been increasingly at odds with those of his colleagues who were exercised by such wider developments.³⁴ When Britain subsequently went to war with Germany after Hitler’s invasion of Poland in September 1939, Labour was unwilling to join the government. But following the German penetration of the Low Countries and France in the spring of the following year, the party agreed to enter a coalition under Winston Churchill. Even before doing so, Labour made sure to send out a clear message that it could step up to the mark, and that the party had ‘never stood for pacifism and non-resistance’.³⁵ That soon became abundantly clear as senior Labour figures in the war cabinet gave support to aerial bombing campaigns against the Axis powers that resulted in the deaths of many civilians, most of whom were working class. When Dresden was bombed in February 1945, Attlee was actually chairing the cabinet.³⁶ On Labour’s record during this period, Martin Farr has remarked that:

The ‘national security’ perspective that had produced [the party’s] muscular position on armaments before the war … was intrinsic to [its] ambition of winning and wielding parliamentary power in the interests of its supporters. The bombing offensive was thus as much a part of Labour’s war as was the Beveridge report; indeed, the strategy could be seen as one that ultimately made implementing Beveridge possible. To that extent, it was less that patriotism had prevailed over class consciousness than Labour fighting the people’s war had reframed patriotism as class consciousness.³⁷

The Second World War certainly marked an important junction in relations between the Labour Party and Ireland, North and South. As discussed by Peter Collins and Bob Purdie below, Éire’s policy of neutrality during the period of the war, and indeed the subsequent reconstitution of the independent Irish state as a republic in 1949, created a deep rift between Labour and mainstream Irish nationalism. Set apart from the war and the war economy, and with labour controls ultimately in place,³⁸ the Irish state under Taoiseach Éamon de Valera, remained firmly committed to neutrality in principle, though in practice it did tend to favour the Allies.³⁹ In fact, the maintenance of a cross-border electricity link throughout the course of the war demonstrated a level of continued, pragmatic co-operation between North and South.⁴⁰ Nevertheless, the political implications of neutrality, and also the later constitutional changes, were huge. The situation made it very difficult, for example, for the post-war Friends of Ireland lobby group (which consisted of around thirty Labour MPs) to advance an Irish unity agenda and/or critique unionist hegemony in Northern Ireland.

The partition of Ireland, and the maintenance of the existing border (and therefore the unionist state), had been recognised and affirmed in the boundary agreement reached between the governments in London, Dublin and Belfast in December 1925, an arrangement effectively facilitated by the conduct of the first, short-lived Labour government of the previous year, and supported as a ‘real and final settlement’ by the Labour leadership in opposition.⁴¹ Yet, despite this security, the Unionist government was at pains in the 1930s to differentiate the six-county state from the rest of Ireland, both for economic and political reasons. As a corollary to that, Unionists deemed it extremely important to ensure that in the national consciousness in Britain, Northern Ireland’s place in the United Kingdom, and in the Empire-Commonwealth, was firmly established.⁴² A later publicity director of the Unionist government would actually remark:

I believe it was a great mistake ever to have included the word Ireland in the title of our new state when it was set up in 1921. It links us forever with the south and with a stage-Irish interpretation of our character of which we feel ashamed … If only it were practicable, one of the biggest steps we could take towards clearing up permanently this confusion … would be to change the title of our state to something that would exclude the word Ireland. This would enable us to propagate our own picture of the Ulster character and of our modern industrial state … ‘Ulster’ is such a title and is already widely known and used though, could it but be found, there would be many advantages in using a name that would imply a connection with Britain. I say this in part because it would emphasise our oneness with the mainland.⁴³

But, since partition, individual Labour MPs had criticised the sectarian nature of the Northern Ireland state and pointed to its separateness from the rest of the United Kingdom. More generally, the Labour Party, despite the role of the leadership in cementing the border, was very much at odds with the conservatism of Unionism. During the economic hardships of the inter-war years, when the party was agitating for the adoption of a more humane welfare regime throughout the United Kingdom, it challenged the Unionist government’s determination to retain the archaic poor law system in Northern Ireland.⁴⁴ As the tensions between European powers escalated in the late 1930s, the Unionist government was, moreover, not only attacked by sections of Labour for presiding over a regime underpinned by politically motivated discrimination, but also generally condemned by the left in Britain for using an IRA campaign, which was directed mainly against targets in British cities, as a pretext for interning republicans in the North. Following the incarceration of thirty-four men in January 1939, Fenner Brockway of the Independent Labour Party stated that ‘the sincere British anti-Fascist must not be content in condemning the crimes of Hitler and Mussolini. His first duty is to denounce and resist every expression of the Fascist spirit in the British Isles’.⁴⁵

Northern Ireland’s subsequent role in the British war effort was, however, its saving grace. In the earlier stages of the