Category: Ireland
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Britain Against the Yookay: Nation Against Empire
Philip Cunliffe identifies the source of the increasing fragmentation of British politics and society in the imperial structures of the state, and its long experience of relying on devolved government and sectarianism to frustrate the national self-determination of the colonised. We live in the Yookay. Everyone instantly recognises their lives and surroundings in the social…
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Reconstituting the Nations: Britain and Ireland after Brexit
This is the text of a talk given by Peter Ramsay to the Desmond Greaves Summer School 2024 in Dublin. He argues that the reconstitution of a sovereign nation-state in Britain depends on the achievement of Irish national sovereignty, and that the relation of the two nations exemplifies the inherent internationalism of the politics of…
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Why the Nation Matters
With a General Election looming, Peter Ramsay spoke last week at the London School of Economics about why the survival of the British nation is in doubt and why the politics of culture war are an evasion of the problem rather than a solution. Here is an edited version of what he said. Benedict Anderson…
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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…
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Burying Brexit to Save Stormont
Peter Ramsay on how Sunak’s deal with the DUP neutralises Brexit and confirms what we have previously argued on The Northern Star: that Britain’s national sovereignty needs Ireland’s reunification. Jeffrey Donaldson’s announcement that the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) will end its two-year boycott of the devolved power-sharing executive that governs Northern Ireland is bad news…
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The Northern Star at Large
Northern Star writers have been at work elsewhere this summer. You can catch up with them here (some links paywalled). On the seventh anniversary of Brexit, Peter Ramsay wrote for Unherd about what Brexit has taught us about British politics. In June, Peter gave a talk to launch our book Taking Control at the Liverpool…
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The Graveyard of Euroscepticism
“There could hardly be a more fitting place for the graveyard of Euroscepticism than Northern Ireland…”
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Book Launch
‘This is the most important book to come out of the struggles over Britain’s membership of the EU, and it makes all other works on the subject look trivial.’
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Sinn Féin at the Crossroads
‘Sinn Féin’s strategy…seems to be moving closer to models of regional governance within the European Union and further away from the sovereign 32-county republic that inspired past generations’
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The Problem with the Protocol is the Union
“The way to end the anti-democratic and Brexit-strangling Protocol is for Britain to start engaging constructively in the discussion of how the reunification of Ireland could be achieved”
The Northern Star 