LITMIR.BIZ

Скачать книгу

conspiracy theory was being advocated as government policy.

      The influence of the conspiracist mentality was less obvious in the subsequent Cabinet discussions. Nevertheless, ministers were uniformly hostile towards the assumptions underlying the Labour memorandum. It was ‘generally agreed’ that it ‘would be wise’ to accept only those changes that ‘would have no marked political effect’. Consequently, the business vote would be ended, the university seats abolished, and an independent boundary commission for Stormont elections established. To avoid the appearance of being forced to make concessions, the Cabinet opted to announce these changes in Parliament rather than to the Labour delegation. The accusations of discrimination that had been made in the NILP/trade union paper were dismissed without debate. Addressing the question of the local government electoral franchise was postponed until the review of the entire system had been completed. Indeed, it was suggested that the eventual restructuring would probably strengthen the case for a property franchise. The issue of reforming the trade union laws was also deferred – in this case pending the report of a royal commission.179

      O’Neill looked upon political concessions as both risky and unnecessary. Given the vulnerability of his position as party leader, O’Neill could ill afford to have his critics accusing him of appeasement. Faulkner and Craig may have been compromised by their involvement with the modernisation strategy, but they still remained close to the traditionalist position in their attitude towards the minority. The problems that would be created within the party would not be offset, O’Neill calculated, by a rise in Catholic support. He assumed that civil rights only mattered to a small number of political activists and that the majority of Catholics were interested in houses, jobs, and public services. The Union’s ‘economic and social advantages’ would eventually convince the minority population to abandon Irish nationalism.180 While waiting for economic and social change to transform political allegiances, the O’Neill government offered Catholics increased funding for their community’s institutions and the PEP.181 Pressure from outside Northern Ireland, however, pushed him into at least giving the appearance of wanting to do more. From 1967 at the latest, O’Neill reluctantly found himself in danger of provoking another rebellion within the party.

      BUYING TIME FROM THE BRITISH

      Harold Wilson used to joke that more Irish Catholics cast their vote for him than for any Irish politician. But his once-removed Irish nationalism was not solely motivated by electoral calculation. Wilson’s spin doctor later recalled that his former boss ‘had the traditional attitude of the Left that Ireland should be united under Dublin’.182 During the 1964 general election campaign, Wilson promised to tackle discrimination in Northern Ireland. In a well-publicised reply to a letter from a Catholic pressure group, he stated that ‘a Labour Government would do everything in its power to see that the infringements of justice to which you are so rightly drawing attention are effectively dealt with’.183 Wilson failed to fulfil this promise when he came to office. Nevertheless, O’Neill still found himself under greater pressure than any of his predecessors to treat the minority fairly. Westminster had considered vetoing the 1922 Local Government Bill, but had backtracked after the Unionist Cabinet had threatened to resign and fight an election on the issue. The British government had no desire to provoke a constitutional crisis.184 By the 1960s, however, London could impose its will upon Belfast without testing the limits of the Government of Ireland Act. The post-war expansion of the state had been funded by the Treasury, which made Stormont susceptible to financial blackmail. O’Neill had to tread softly.

      Even before Wilson moved into Downing Street, O’Neill found himself struggling against separatist tendencies within his party. A constant theme of his premiership was that Northern Ireland and by extension – the Unionist regime were ‘utterly dependent’ upon continued British goodwill.185 ‘There can be no room in Unionist philosophy’, O’Neill warned a local association, ‘for a kind of loyalist Sinn Féin which would turn its back upon British opinion.’ He instead proposed to demonstrate to ‘the ordinary, decent Englishman, Welshman, or Scot’ ‘that behind all the talk about “discrimination” ’ was a ‘warm and genuine community spirit’. This strategy was designed to ensure that ‘the voices of criticism’ would ‘fall increasingly upon deaf ears’.186 At the 1967 annual meeting of Unionism’s governing body, O’Neill formalised this approach by launching the largely ineffective Campaign for Truth about Ulster.187 As part of this endeavour, the Prime Minister told the party conference that detractors should have ‘the humility to appreciate that we in Northern Ireland live in a complex social and historical setting and can best be left to work out our own social problems for ourselves’.188

      The British civil service was inclined to agree with O’Neill. Whitehall’s mandarins shrewdly recognised, however, that they had to indulge their political master’s Irish obsessions. When he came to power, Wilson received a letter from the Nationalists requesting that he intervene to stop discrimination in the allocation of public housing. The ‘Prime Minister’, according to the inter-departmental correspondence, ‘asked that the Home Secretary should advise him how to deal with it not simply as an isolated letter but in the context of the new relations with Northern Ireland.’189 In light of ‘the interest taken in this matter by the Prime Minister’, the higher reaches of the civil service decided that it was ‘undesirable merely to follow without any modification’ the previous practice of simply ‘defining the constitutional position’.190

      The rather limited research conducted by both the state and party bureaucracies emphasised the NILP’s reading of the situation.191 They studied a series of Guardian articles written by the party’s Charles Brett during early 1964. In these pieces, the NILP’s leading theoretician adopted a ‘plague on both your houses’ attitude. According to Brett, the allegations that both Unionist and Nationalist councils were allocating public housing to their respective supporters were ‘justified’. ‘In general,’ he concluded, ‘it appears that there is less deliberate discrimination on the part of the Unionist Government than the Nationalists allege; but in the sphere of local government, and in the private sphere, there is far more discrimination than the Unionists will admit.’ Brett detected that ‘Many Catholics and many Protestants are coming to regard the old deadlock with repugnance.’ However, the ‘Nationalists and Unionists are now under the control of their own extremists’.192 The implication was that there was an emerging moderate constituency – which would be increasingly drawn to the NILP’s centrist approach. With the party confident of advancing under the existing system, the leaders wanted their British counterparts to stay out of Northern Irish politics.193

      The civil service’s report on the constitutional relationship between Belfast and London was also against intervention. It was noted that ‘successive Governments have taken the view that … it would be quite wrong for the United Kingdom Government to interfere in matters for which responsibility has been delegated to the Northern Ireland Government’. As regards discrimination, the report recognised that the Nationalist accusations usually involved matters that had been transferred to Stormont. Indeed, the Home Office’s existing procedure for dealing with letters alleging discrimination was ‘to outline the Northern Ireland Government’s constitutional responsibilities and to decline to comment further’. Similarly, if ‘the subject is raised directly in the United Kingdom Parliament, it runs the risk of being ruled out of order’. The report concluded that it would be ‘difficult to see how any departure from this view could be reconciled with the existence of the Parliament and Government of Northern Ireland’.194

      Relatively early in this process, Home Secretary Sir Frank Soskice informed his civil servants that ‘the United Kingdom Parliament is still supreme and it may be the time has come to intervene in matters of this kind’.195 Less than two weeks later, however, the rudimentary analysis conducted within Whitehall had convinced Soskice that such a policy was impractical. In a letter to Wilson, he presented his ‘reluctant’ conclusion that ‘it would be constitutionally wrong, and most unwise in practice,’ for the government to ‘offer any comment upon or attempt directly to intervene in matters which clearly fall within the field of responsibility of the Government and Parliament of Northern Ireland’.196 Wilson dutifully dispatched to the Nationalists the reply that had been prepared by the Home Office civil servants: he stressed that the issue fell within the responsibility of the Stormont regime.197

      A

Скачать книгу