'Left' Tories?!

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At a public meeting in Oxford last week, a campaign was launched to save one of the city's middle schools from closure.

The Tory County Council with its axe-waving military leader Brigadier Streatfield is in the midst of an attempt to close down nurseries, first schools and middle schools.

The County Council bases its plans on the most appalling concoction of inadequate figures and predictions of numbers of children.

One of the first tasks of the campaign will be to challenge these figures and to carry out an enquiry into the real need in the area.

The strong feeling for this was strangely given more councillors in the meeting than by Labour councillor and Leyland steward, the Rev. Williamson JP.

He was more concerned to argue on the need for three form entry to get a viable middle school than to argue against the school ciosing.

Other Labourites attempted to divert the question into talking about getting buses to take children halfway across the city in the event of the school's closure.

This attitude coupled with the NUT's failure to take a position of opposition to school closures weakens the campaign within the labour movement.

An independent campaign must be built with the aim of putting pressure on the NUT and opening up the plans 3: the count count to mete

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relani ROOTS O CRISIS Part Seven: HE ORANGE Loyal Ulster was once the most rebellious of the Irish provinces, holding in 1607 with the defeat and flight of the Gaelic chiefs, the Earls of Tyrone and Tyrconell.

The land that the Catholic Irish had been driven from was planted with English and Scottish farmers. Unlike the English who let much of the land they had acquired to the native Irish, the Scottish landowners let their land to Scottish tenants, thus creating in Antrim and Down wnere they principally settlec a kind of extension of the Scottish lowlands.

In their struggle to hold on to what had been secured for them by force, the Scottish and English farmer forged a consciousness that saw every advance that the Catholic made or attempted to make as a threat to himself.

Closed door

The failure of the revolt of the United Irishmen of 1798, in which the Presbyterian and Catholic middle class attempted to lead the peasantry against English and landlord domination, closed the door upon a unified capitalist development of Ireland. Instead the Presbyterians were pulled away from their temporary alliance with the Catholics, the Irish Parliament was abolished and their representatives sent to Westminster.

Under the 'union' that the English government imposed, Ireland developed as two provinces of Britain. The South and the West developed chiefly as an agricultural province that provided Britain with cheap food and cheap labour while the NorthEast developed as an industrial province engaged in linen, engineering and shipbuilding, looking not to Ireland but to Britain and her Empire for her raw materials and her markets.

The rural depopulation and emigration that followed the Famine of the 1840's allowed a reorganisation of agriculture into larger units.

Various land acts led to a lessening of the grip of the landiords and stimulated the amarianta of a rural Catholic middle class whose growing control of the land was paralleled by the Church of Rome's growing control over education and social life in general.

This was the background against which the Liberal prime minister Gladsone advanced the neo-colonial strategy of Home Rule. Ireland would remain economically tied to Britain but it was hoped that by devolving government onto an Irish Parliament the social steam would be taken out of the nationalist movement.

In 1860 the Irish middle class had £20 million on deposit in Irish banks while having double that, £40 million, invested in British stock-a clear indicator. of their subordination to (hence suitability for representing) British imperial interests in The strength of Ulster resistance to Gladstone's strategy was slow in emerging and consequently allowed the Catholic nationalists and their Liberal imperialist sponsors the illusion of believing it was of no consequence and could be discounted. Gladstone's first move in elaboration of his neo-colonial strategy was the disestablishment of the Church of Ireland in 1869 Threat Correctly interpreting this as a threat to the Protestant ascendancy, the authoritative voice of that ascendancy, the Irish Times «Dissolve the declared tor nationalism! article of union between Church and State, " declared a protestant clergyman to the Daily Express in March of that year, "and you will see how few protestants will be loyal to the connection between England and Ireland."

Responding to the threat of a new 'union' being forged between the English government and the Catholic middle class, the Protestant ascendancy attempted to lead nationalist movement against England. The next year Isaac Butt, an Ulsterman, a Protestant and a Conservative, set up the Home Government Association, in which a Protestant leadership predominated.

But representing as they did only 10% of the country's nonulation. and with their : 045 .35 bourgeois and proletarian domination restricted to the North-East, the control of the Association passed to the Catholic middle class 'and clergy. So that in the 1874 elections, of 59 Home Rule candidates, only two apart from Butt himself were ex-Tories.

Divided landlords

Having failed to capture the nationalist movement the Protestant ascendancy set its face against Home Rule. Yet it required substantial nationalist successes in Ulster to propel the divided and disorganised landlords and capitalists to combine their forces into what became Ulster unionism.

In 1883 1Im healy unexpectedly won a by-election in Monaghan for the nationalists who rather prematurely declared "All Ulster is ours" Two years later in the general election of 1885, the Liberals lost all their seats while the nationalists increased theirs from three to seventeen, thus becoming the largest party in the Province. Seeing this seemingly irresistible nationalist tide, Gladstone openly at the end of the year came out for Home Rule and in 1886 introduced the first of the Home Rule bills, that was defeated only because a section of the Liberal Party defected to the Tories.

While the second Home Rule bill ot 1892 was defeated by the Lords after passing the Commons, the Ulster unionists knew that with the restriction that had been placed on the Lords in 1911, the defeat of the third Home Rule bill would uitimately depend upon their own efforts.

Orange To resist Home Rule an ex-Liberal, Colonel Saunderson, revived the Orange Order as "the only body capable of dealing with the condition of anarchy and rebellion which prevails in Ireland". He urged Orangemen to arm, drill and don uniforms to "drive popery and radicalism before us as we have done many a time before.

But the Orange Order proved incapable of railying the anti-nationalist forces of the province. Its working class character and its sectarian exuberance were feared to be the very means of driving the entire Catholic population of Ulster into the arms of nationalist agitators. More important, the Belfast bourgeoisie wanted an instrument that they and not the landlords controlled. This they worked for and finally got with the formation of the Ulster Unionist Council in 1904.

Only the bankruptcy of the. nationalist leadership enabled the Belfast capitalists and the Protestant landlords to hold onto their mass base which time and again was in revolt against its masters. In 1881 at the very moment that Protestant tenants were leaving the Orange Order to join the Land League, Parnell called off the agitation, signed the Kilmainham pact with the British government, renamed the League the "National League" and invited Catholic priests onto its committees.

An even bigger threat to Ulster unionism was posed by Edward Carson a Belfast shipyard worker Tom Sloan who broke with the Orange Order in 1903, formed his own Independent Orange Order which by 1905 had formed 71 lodges, and stood in alliance with the Belfast Trades Council and Joe Devlin's nationalists against official unionism in the elections of 1906.

Yet the enormous potential of this working class unity was squandered by Devlin within a year when he withdrew his support for the big Belfast strike of 1907 and denounced its leader, Jim Larkin. Larkin too was attacked by the more radical nationalist party Sinn Fein, whose journal in 1908 sneeringly referred to him as "that English strike organiser' who fermented strikes for the purpose of diverting trade away from Ireland and towards England!

It was Devlin who had formed the Catholic counterpart to the Orange Order, the Ancient Order of Hibernians. "This squalid confederacy o Catholic place-hunters," ai William O'Brien the national ist MP for Cork described it "rose up... to alienate tha powerful minority of ou countrymen by the estab lishment of a pseudo-Catholi ascendancy leading to alternative but the partition of Ireland."

O'Brien and his "All fo Ireland League" worked bot] to win the Protestants t! Home Rule and to curb th power of the Catholic Churc in the Home Rule movement a policy which subjecte them to abuse and physic: assault by gangs of Hibes nians.

The nationalists led b Redmond denied on the on hand that the unionists ha any support in Ulster and o the other banked upon th British government to coerc them into a united Ireland they did resist.

From the comfort of the masters {parliament at Wes minster), Redmond and h nationalists could afford t chuckle at Ulster Unioni leader, Edward Carson, an his "stage army" . Yet that man like Carson, a vicior enemy of labour and dem! cracy, was able to pose as champion of political and r ligious freedom, serves on to illustrate the bankrupts of the nationalist leadership.

Carson's army did n remain a stage army for lon On the night of April 241 1914, Fred Crawford guide the Clydevalley into Lar harbour with its cargo... 35,000 rifles and five millic rounds of ammunitio allowing Carson to repla the wooden guns in the han of the Ulster Volunteer For with mausers.

The Tories the unionists Rule and the ment, not served differe but because ready for a solution as posed. They concession had encourag to defy Hon Liberal gover because thi nt class interes they were n neo-colonial Gladstone pi feared that al national sentiment in Ireland would . infectious. They feared consequences in the rest the empire.

This preoccupation com through very clearly when listen to the Tory lead Bonar Law addressi 100.000 unionists in Belf:

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out the longest against the English invaders and only finally succumbing