Avoiding the British Question

Following the recent restoration of devolved government to Northern Ireland after two years of paralysis, Pauline Hadaway investigates the permanent crisis that is Northern Ireland’s politics, and asks why Britain is keeping the Union on life support.

Over 100 years after the Unionist Party elected James Craig as Northern Ireland’s first Prime Minister, Sinn Féin’s Michelle O’Neill has taken her place as First Minister in Northern Ireland’s power-sharing Executive, with the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) now relegated to nominating the deputy. The designations First and deputy First Minister are largely symbolic, but the reversal of fortunes between these two partners in government, one standing for Irish reunification and the other in defence of the Union, marks a significant symbolic moment in the history of a state whose founding purpose was to secure and maintain a Unionist and protestant majority in perpetuity. While some may have perceived the hand of history over Stormont earlier this month, the deal that finally restored power-sharing after a two-year hiatus is likely to become just one more in a long line of post-1998 initiatives that have tried – and ultimately failed – to build a modus vivendi between and within the political representatives of Northern Ireland’s unionist and nationalist blocs. 

The post-Good Friday Agreement power-sharing arrangements have ushered in a period of permanent crisis in Northern Ireland, during which Stormont has functioned for only 16 of its 26 years. The Executive collapses intermittently when one of the leading parties walks out of the mandatory coalition. Crisis management is, however, continuous, whether through horse trading between communal interests or simply finding ways for the parties to save face. The instability arises from the fundamental contradiction of the 1998 settlement, which promises to copper-fasten the Union while simultaneously recognising the legitimacy of nationalist aspirations for Irish unity, albeit deferred into an indeterminate future. The rhetoric of ‘working together for all the people of Northern Ireland’ projects the illusion of common political purpose that keeps the power-sharing show on the road.  Sinn Féin and the DUP observe a contract of silence in the Executive, while simultaneously promoting their conflicting constitutional ambitions among their electoral base. This encourages a performative politics fuelled by justifiable suspicions of bad faith and betrayal. In this instance, the DUP quit the Executive in opposition to the Northern Ireland Protocol, the post-Brexit trade restrictions between Northern Ireland and the rest of the UK. Two years on, having failed to rally a credible body of support, the party leadership was coming under pressure to return to government to address a whole raft of crises, ranging from public sector pay strikes to failing transport infrastructure and growing NHS waiting lists.  They were, however, beset by equally significant pressures from within the unionist population, including the perceived electoral threat posed by Traditional Unionist Voice (TUV), working with remnants of the old loyalist paramilitaries, who accused them of selling out the Union to resume their place with Sinn Féin at the Executive carve-up. The DUP needed a deal that would project its role as a staunch defender of the Union, still powerful enough to force concessions from London. As the largest unionist party, the DUP remains an indispensable partner in power sharing, so London threw the leadership a lifeline and got to work with its partners in Dublin and Brussels to come up with a deal.

Safeguarding the Union, the deal that reeled the DUP back into Stormont, shares many features with previous post-Agreement rescue packages: a tempting financial transfer for Northern Ireland’s decaying  public services and infrastructure, subsidies and tax incentives for the business community and additional resources for pet community, heritage and identity projects. The deal goes as far as it can, through guarantees and affirmatory declarations, to assert the integrity of Northern Ireland within the UK economy. As the co-guarantor of peace in Northern Ireland, Irish Taoiseach Leo Varadkar helpfully added to the deal’s credibility by reproving Britain for negativity towards the development of ‘an all-island economy’.  While the deal eases some of the pain of moving goods between Great Britain and Northern Ireland, it leaves intact the UK commitment to apply EU law under the NI Protocol. Nationalists have made much of the transformative potential of Sinn Féin’s new ascendency in Stormont and the promise it holds for future constitutional change in Ireland. While opinion polls still show a majority in the North for remaining in the UK, the DUP’s new secondary status in Stormont may well presage further unionist retreat. Far from looking forward to what Sinn Féin describes as a ‘decade of opportunity’, the DUP leadership remains on the defensive, confronting the strong possibility of further fragmentation of its electoral base. At the same time, outside the mandatory coalition at Stormont, others are positioning themselves as defenders of nationalist interests within the Good Friday Agreement by criticising Sinn Féin’s complicity with the red, white and blue deal cooked up between the British government and the DUP.  As Stormont gets back to business, the ground is already laid for the next power-sharing crisis. With this in mind, the British Prime Minister, performing his role as co-guarantor of peaceful power-sharing, has warned the DUP leadership  to keep its party membership on side and make sure that the devolved institutions continue to function.

It takes a moment to grasp the sheer effrontery of Sunak’s admonition to the DUP, not to put the Union at risk by collapsing the power-sharing government. While the British government succeeded in closing the deal that brought the DUP’s two-year boycott to an end, it is painfully clear that all the immediate issues threatening the Union and destabilising power-sharing flow from political decisions made in Britain, from the 2016 vote to leave the EU, up to and including the Johnson government’s decision to draw the EU trade border through the Irish Sea.  If preserving the Union between Great Britain and Northern Ireland has proven to be the most significant obstacle to Britain’s attempt to assert national sovereignty by leaving the EU,  the fiasco over the trade border in the Irish Sea lays bare the inherently irresponsible character of British rule in Northern Ireland and the unstable communalised politics which sustains it.  

The Northern Ireland Protocol is the result of Britain’s desire to leave the EU while preserving its 1998 Good Friday Agreement (GFA) with Dublin. Together the Protocol and the GFA are but the latest iterations of Britain’s semi-detached approach to governing in Northern Ireland. And this approach is a consequence rather than cause of the illegitimate nature of Britain’s  presence in Ireland. The sorry state of the Union of Great Britain and Northern Ireland is plain to see, but it is less clear why successive British governments have expended so much blood, treasure and subventions maintaining it.

Historically, British policy in Ireland was based on the pursuit of the selfish and above all strategic interests of an imperial power seeking to exercise control over a neighbouring country with  – so it feared – the potential to become both an economic competitor and a back door for foreign enemies. While Britain and Ireland’s contemporary place in the world are considerably altered, many of these fears and concomitant proprietorial instincts continue to shape British policy on Ireland. In addition to fuelling some of the more arrogant resentments of the Tory Brexiteers during the rows over the Irish backstop, some of these ancient dreads have resurfaced in a recent Policy Exchange report that poses all-Ireland integration as a ‘grave back–door security risk to the UK’. Alongside this fixation on exercising power over Ireland, a second, related strand in Britain’s strategy has been the endeavour to secure stability through building consent and cooperation. It is revealing that the origins of Northern Ireland lie in the contest within the British ruling class between these two strategies for dealing with ‘the Irish Question’.    

The 1800 Acts of Union brought the question of how Britain should rule in Ireland home to Westminster. By the 1880s, the many serious grievances of the Irish people, including demands for fundamental land reform and self-government, had manifested themselves as disruptive forces in Britain’s domestic politics.  In the early twentieth century, the permanence of the Union of Great Britain and Ireland within the British Empire was not in question, only the form that this would take.  The Liberals had adopted Home Rule (what we today call devolution) as a strategy for managing discontent, building consent within Ireland and removing the Irish Question from Westminster politics. The Conservatives, however, regarded calls for self-government in Ireland, even in this limited form, as evidence of a weakening of British power, verging on treason, at a moment of increasing great power rivalry and challenges from subaltern classes in the empire and at home.  The Liberals were determined to force their Home Rule bill through Parliament, while the Tories with their Ulster Unionist allies showed an even greater determination to prevent this, up to and including the use of revolutionary extra-parliamentary means.  Proclaiming that ‘there are things greater than parliamentary majorities’, Conservative leader Bonar Law, reassured the rebellious landlords and industrialists in Ireland’s north-eastern counties that he could ‘imagine no length of resistance to which Ulster can go, in which I should not be prepared to support them’.  

As the Home Rule bill slowly made its way through Parliament, the Ulster Unionists, with their Tory backers,  armed the 90,000 strong Ulster Volunteer Force and prepared to set up a provisional government in Belfast, poised to take power should Home Rule be implemented. The 1914 Curragh mutiny sent a powerful message that sections of the military elite were prepared to back the unionist rebels in defiance of the will of Parliament. The Liberal government passed Home Rule but yielded to the rebels and did not implement it. In doing so they robbed the state of the authority and the means to enforce Parliament’s legislative will. As George Dangerfield observed about this period, in words that resonate for our own times, ‘the government was helpless, so too was the Parliament…the destiny of Ireland, whether with the Union or with Home Rule or with some more extreme dispensation was now passing away from Westminster and Whitehall and into the control of Belfast and Dublin’. The tensions in Ireland would then explode as a result of the First World War. Without Home Rule, the explosion took the form of a full-blown independence struggle, in which, as Britain lost control of the south and west of Ireland, the armed Unionists were able to insist on partition so that they kept control of the six north-eastern counties. In this way, Northern Ireland emerged both as a manifestation of the fundamental crisis of authority that had faced the ruling class in pre-1914 Britain, and as a compromise solution for securing the stability of the British constitution. The Irish Question had become the Ulster Question and since Brexit, it has become the British Question.  

Irish nationalists long understood the existence of Northern Ireland as a negation of democratic self-determination for all the people of Ireland. It is important that British democrats learn the same lesson about our own state. We should not be surprised that in order to get the DUP back into Stormont, Safeguarding the Union promises that UK legislation will not reduce trade flows across the Irish Sea between Northern Ireland and the rest of the UK’s market. But that will force parliament to follow EU single market regulations, neutering the reassertion of its sovereignty promised by Brexit. From its founding moment until today, Northern Ireland has been a limit on  parliamentary sovereignty within what the British state still claims as its own territory. 

Political authority is generated through the exercise of power, conditioned by sufficient consent, arising from shared understandings about what is justifiable and congruent with commonly held beliefs, values and expectations. There have been intermittent periods when Britain has been forced to confront the problem of exercising power through winning consent across the whole of Northern Ireland’s divided population.  The civil rights movement of the late 1960s provoked a violent Loyalist reaction leading to a renewed armed struggle by republicans against the Unionist state. That  state collapsed in 1972, with London having to take over directly. Cabinet discussions in successive governments consistently returned to the problem of how to exercise authority within the ‘artificially constructed constitutional settlement’ designed for the sole purpose of securing a perpetual Unionist majority. If Northern Ireland was indeed an integral part of the UK, the crisis that had brought down the state would represent a temporary breakdown in law and order, necessitating standard policing responses and strategies for reform and winning back consent. Conversely, if Northern Ireland’s exceptional history set it apart from the rest of the UK, Britain could either rule through coercion and military might, or adopt a facilitating role, standing back as an ‘honest broker’, working with ‘men of good will’ across the community to rebuild the state.  Throughout twenty-five years of Direct Rule, Britain adopted each of these strategies – sometimes emphasising one over another, sometimes in combination – at different times, in different contexts shaped by different forces at home and abroad. However, the central premise of these ad hoc policy responses was the determination that the political grievances fueling Northern Ireland’s communal conflict should be managed at arms-length and that the Province could and should be returned to a reformed status quo ante. At no time was any serious consideration given to full political integration between Northern Ireland and ‘mainland Britain’.

Twenty-five years after the beginning of devolved power-sharing, British policy remains as self-serving and irresponsible as ever.  This is the reality behind the latest performance of consensus in Stormont.  Amidst all the reconciliatory talk of the two communities meeting half-way, the internal contradictions of the GFA helpfully fuel political tensions over the intractable constitutional questions that still provide the raison d’etre for Britain to prolong its presence in Ireland. The partition of Ireland was the outcome of a pragmatic alliance between economic and political interests in Britain and the six counties. These interests combined to pursue a joint strategy to defeat Irish self-determination and secure the interests of the markets and the Empire. Northern Ireland’s economic decline throughout the twentieth century changed the dynamics of this alliance, as the unionist government grew ever more dependent on fiscal transfers from the UK Treasury. This loveless marriage is held together by Britain’s inability to either win the consent of the nationalist population or coerce the Unionists into accepting an all-Ireland settlement.  What grew from an elite revolt against democracy in Ireland and Britain has now atrophied into a disoriented, technocratic process for ruling the void in Northern Ireland. Far from expressing a determination to get behind a unionist political project, Britain’s policy for Safeguarding the Union amounts to little more than a care plan for an ailing unionist identity that is on the way out. 

Sunak’s policy expresses the absence of political imagination, will or statecraft that characterises a British elite without authority, and adrift on the tides of history.  That history shows, and Brexit has proved, that the Union with Northern Ireland is not simply a barrier to peace and democracy in Ireland, but a fetter on British sovereignty. The British people therefore have a powerful self-interest in removing this relic of an old imperial past that continues to frustrate parliamentary sovereignty and therefore  our own national sovereignty and the possibility of the revitalisation of our democracy. The people of Northern Ireland objectively share the same interest in ending the Union, since Britain drew a trade border through the Irish Sea and gave concrete shape to the irresponsible and undemocratic nature of its rule there. It remains to be seen how long this latest restoration of power-sharing stays in place, but permanent crisis is baked into the system and will remain until a real politics of popular sovereignty  – British and Irish – emerges to answer the British Question, and end the fakery.