We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people.
Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]
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“Justin Trudeau – not so much racist as slight and ineffectual”, writes Leah McLaren in an enjoyably caustic article. But good as it is, it misses the point.
When I was a kid there were a lot of cowboy movies on TV. I always rooted for the Red Indians, as the term then was. My brother had some books on the Old West and I was fascinated by such things as the Plains Sign Language and the custom of counting coup. Of course when the chance presented itself to dress up I grabbed it enthusiastically. I already had a kind of hippy top that looked vaguely appropriate. My mother and I sewed wool fringing down the sides of a pair of trousers. A headband, a feather, a tin of medium tan shoe polish, and I was all set up to enjoy the fancy dress party and be blackmailed forty-five years later had I been so foolish as to seek public office.
That is why I said Leah McLaren’s article missed the point. Justin Trudeau’s “mystifying youthful makeup choices” do not make him a racist. His only crime then was to be a year or two late to perceive that the party line had changed. His conduct as Prime Minister of Canada is less innocent. In all his many apologies has he ever apologised for using his bully pulpit to condemn others for equally trivial or unintended breaches of the ever-changing code?
I am sure the Samizdatistas and the Samizdata commentariat alike are familiar with Brendan O’Neill of Spiked Online, as well as the brilliant and rather naughty David Starkey. Starkey appears as a guest on O’Neill’s most recent podcast. Put aside an hour and listen to their conversation – you will be very glad you did. It contains enough SQOTDs to last a year.
Update: the Starkey interview may be in the process of going viral. When I first stumbled across it, it had clocked up a not-insubstantial 25,000 views or so. Fast forward a few hours to now and it’s almost at 40,000. Excellent, and may that number continue to rise sharply. It deserves wide dissemination.
Some time ago a striking article by Fiona Maddocks appeared in the London Evening Standard. The link that Google gives you to the Evening Standard’s own site is dead, but I found a working one on Questia. Here it is:
A Twist in the Tale; Margaret Atwood Is Dreading the UK Premiere of the Opera of Her Novel the Handmaid’s Tale – It Will Be a Shocking Theatrical Experience
THE question all readers of The Handmaid’s Tale want to ask its Canadian author, Margaret Atwood, is: “How did you know?” Her 1986 best seller, set in a futuristic totalitarian regime called the Republic of Gilead, formerly the United States, has chilling prescience: Christian fundamentalists have seized control and imposed repressive laws, brainwashing women and depriving them of all the rights they have spent the past 1,000 years securing – education, property, freedom to give birth when and via whom they choose.
(I commented at the time, “I don’t know why poor old Dubya does hold off from imprisoning all the women and depriving them of their names so that the top men’s personal concubines are called “ofdonald”, “ofjohn” and “ofdubya”, according to the system described in the book. That’s obviously what he wants, as proven by the fact that he sometimes goes to breakfast prayer meetings, and it’s not like he gets any credit for restraint.”)
The book, already translated into 35 languages and a regular A-level and university set text, was turned into a film starring Natasha Richardson, with a script by Harold Pinter. Tonight an operatic version of this dark fable, by the Danish composer Poul Ruders and British librettist Paul Bentley, receives its first UK performance at the Coliseum, having been premiered to rapturous reviews in Copenhagen three years ago.
[…]
To underline contemporary parallels, English National Opera’s publicity material shows a woman, naked and heavily pregnant, prone on an unfurled Stars and Stripes, observed by a helmeted soldier.
“There’s nothing new in The Handmaid’s Tale,” Atwood says. “One of my rules was that I couldn’t put anything into the novel that human beings hadn’t actually done. Stories exist within the world. They’re not on some other planet called literature or the moon.” Small, droll, benignly austere, Atwood hardly strikes you as a Cassandrine figure. Only her startling eyes, clear blue, slightly exotic and almond shaped, hint at some farseeing otherness.
[…]
The general critical response was ‘what a jolly good yarn’, and that was the end of the matter. You’d had Oliver Cromwell and religious war. You wouldn’t expect it to happen again. In Canada, instead, people asked, ‘Could it happen here?’
“Well, no, probably not, because of Canada’s history and its disparate elements. Only in America did people ask, in utter seriousness, ‘How long have we got?’ They realised that they were closest of all to the real thing, especially compared to Europe, which is now so much more secular a place than the States.
“How long did they have?” asks the narrator, in an epilogue written long after the events described. Since that article was dated April 3rd 2003 and the Gileadification of America is not yet upon us we can safely answer “a minimum of 16 years, 5 months and 8 days”. But do not be deceived. Gilead is coming. Real soon now.
“The Handmaid’s Tale increasingly rings true”, writes Alice Thomson in today’s Times.
They walked, heads bowed under their white bonnets, red capes trailing along Piccadilly, past men in Lycra ogling on their bikes and into Waterstones. “Don’t let the bastards grind you down,” women shouted at the fertile handmaids as they joined the midnight celebrations for the publication of Margaret Atwood’s The Testaments. There were green drinks and talks on how to embroider feminist wall hangings. Then the 79-year-old prophet spoke, warning that her characters had a new resonance in her dystopian sequel because of threats to women’s rights.
She wasn’t just talking about President Trump boasting of grabbing women “by the pussy” and curtailing their reproductive rights but about any country trying to force women back into the “unnaturally cramped spaces” from which they had so recently emerged.
[…]
We pretend that women’s rights are still progressing, with more jobs for the girls and in some areas more equal pay, but in many ways Britain feels increasingly like Atwood’s theocracy of Gilead where women are expected to know how to cook a quiche, the man is master and only the sisterhood saves them. #Silenced, which started trending yesterday, seems to be about so much more than the proroguing of parliament: it’s about vulnerable groups, women, gays and ethnic minorities once more feeling excluded from the hierarchy. “Are we to be silenced like little mice,” as the handmaid Offred says in Atwood’s novel.
The prime minister thinks nothing of using femininity as an insult, calling Jeremy Corbyn “a great big girl’s blouse”, associating masculinity with power. The journalist William Cash wrote an article this week about having a relationship with a former girlfriend of Boris Johnson as though she were some vassal, and volunteering to bring his illegitimate child up for him. David Cameron’s “calm down dear” now seems relatively benign.
Good, so you won’t mind if I say “Calm down dear” to you.
Leaping from link to link like a young gazelle – part of the appeal of the internet is that it is the only place where I get to do the gazella arabica thing nowadays – I came across an interesting article by Ernie Smith called “The Many Ways Planned Obsolescence Is Sabotaging How We Preserve Internet History”.
He writes,
The world of technology has a problem, and it’s not something that we’re talking about nearly enough. That problem? We keep making old stuff significantly less useful in the modern day, sometimes by force.
We cite problems such as security, maintenance, and a devotion to constant evolution as reasons for allowing this to happen.
But the net effect is that we are making it impossible to continue using otherwise useful things after even a medium amount of time. I’m not even exclusively talking about things that are decades old. Sometimes, just a few years does the trick.
A quick case in point: Google has a set date for every type of Chromebook architecture to fall into an “end of life” status, where it will no longer be developed or updated, despite the fact that it’s effectively the modern version of a dumb terminal.
And the timeframe is surprisingly short—just 6.5 years from the first use of the architecture, the machine will stop auto-updating, despite the fact an equivalent Windows machine will still be usable for years after that point.
Like many people, I find the whole phenomenon of planned obsolescence infuriating. Unlike many people, I do not believe that my feeling of fury should be assuaged by forcing other people – in this case software companies – to do my bidding. But I would still like it if planned obsolescence were less of a thing.
It’s Tom’s Diner for computers, and you are most welcome to discuss the political and ethical issues involved.
But if you did enough of that yesterday, just wallow in the computer nostalgia. Here’s a website: http://textfiles.com/. Not “https://textfiles.com”, just “http://textfiles.com”. It has stuff like Alien vs Predator. Wallow.
Stop return of measles by making MMR jab compulsory, say GPs.
The Guardian headline makes it sound as if all GPs (General Practitioners) have said this. In fact only four named doctors are quoted, and when one reads the article the “compulsory” of the headline is not fully justified, but I think most GPs would agree with the government moving from a “nudger” to a shover on this issue.
The MMR jab should be compulsory for children before they are allowed to start primary school to stop the resurgence of measles and mumps, leading GPs are demanding.
Schools should ask all parents to prove their four- or five-year-old has had their two recommended doses of the vaccine before they can attend, they say in a letter to ministers seen by the Guardian.
They want school entry procedures toughened so that the only exceptions made to the new rule would be for children whose parents have registered a conscientious objection to the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine or those whose health means they cannot have it.
The four London GPs, who include a former government adviser on health policy, have urged the health secretary, Matt Hancock, and the education secretary, Gavin Williamson, to embrace the proposed change in policy.
Many a libertarian shuffles their feet when questions of herd immunity come up. The ghost of Typhoid Mary laughs. What do you think?
About two hundred and forty years ago, the human species began to experience a wealth explosion. Poor people, who had been living and dying on the edge of starvation for millennia, began to get less poor, and slightly richer people started to become even richer, and much more numerous. Every graph measuring human comfort, wealth, progress, length of life, and so on, switched – historically, in the blink of an eye – from being a nearly horizontal line to being a nearly vertical line. This wealth explosion began in North West Europe, and quickly spread to other parts of Europe and to the USA. Now, poor people everywhere are getting less poor in unprecedentedly vast numbers. It’s a different world, and for just about everyone, a hugely better one.
What caused this wealth explosion? And why did it first erupt where it did, in Europe?
For some time now I have been getting to grips with a new book by Stephen Davies entitled The Wealth Explosion: The Nature and Origins of Modernity.
The central and most striking arguments in this book concern how Europe was – and just as significantly, was not – exceptional, as a potential detonator of this wealth explosion.
Clearly there was something exceptional about Europe, or the wealth explosion that we all now enjoy would not have started here. And equally clearly, all the positive ingredients needed for the explosion had to be present here for it to start happening. But the mere presence of all these positive ingredients, says Davies, is not what made Europe exceptional. Until Europe started exploding economically at the end of the eighteenth century, it had been, globally speaking, an economic and cultural backwater. All of these ingredients – demographic, economic, social, institutional, intellectual, spiritual – had been present, in greater strength and for far longer, in other parts of the world, most notably in China. The economic and cultural centre of the world, at least until the late eighteenth century, was not Europe but rather the lands around the Indian Ocean. So, why did the wealth explosion not happen there?
The answer that Davies supplies in The Wealth Explosion is that Europe was exceptional in being the only one of the world’s great civilisations that was not, at the historical moment when it mattered, politically unified. No European “hegemon” emerged in the centuries just before the wealth explosion got started, in the way that single imperial regimes had emerged to dominate Russia, the Middle East and India, and as had long been in successive imperial command in China.
This was the decisive negative ingredient that Europe possessed but which was lacking elsewhere, and this was what made the difference. The wealth explosion got seriously explosive in Europe because, when it started and from then on, nobody in Europe was powerful enough or motivated enough to stop it. On the contrary, the rulers of Europe never stopped competing with one another, and were therefore strongly incentivised to keep their wealth explosion going, despite all the upheaval that it caused. Economic stasis, and cultural stagnation of the sort that would have stopped the wealth explosion, was not, for the various contending rulers of Europe, an option. They needed guns, guns which had to keep on getting better. They needed money, to pay for the guns, and for the ever increasing numbers of people needed to develop, fire and later to carry the guns into battle. They needed the wealth explosion, no matter how much it was empowering new classes of citizen producers and citizen warriors. So, they let it happen. They even encouraged it. At which point the only way not to be beaten by the wealth explosion was to join it. And there we have it: the modern world.
The above is my best shot at summarising what I think is the most important line of argument in The Wealth Explosion. I had intended to write a single, quite long, mostly glowing review of this book. And I tried, I really tried. But the task defeated me (especially the “quite” long bit). Despite its small size for such a subject (only 248 pages) The Wealth Explosion contains so many interesting ideas besides those summarised above, so much pertinent historical detail, and so many judgements based on the voluminous writings and discoveries of other historians, that I found it impossible to say everything that I wanted to say about it in one blog posting, while remaining confident that anyone at all would want to wade through all that I had written. So, I abandoned the attempt to say everything, and instead decided to make a start by merely saying something. I now intend that there will be several more postings here about The Wealth Explosion (in the manner of these recent postings here by Patrick Crozier about Ulster).
That’s the plan anyway. I’ll end this first posting about The Wealth Explosion by saying that, although I don’t now want to elaborate on why I find the central argument of this book, as outlined above, to be so persuasive, I do find it to be very persuasive, and the book in general to be fascinating. And since the historical event in question is arguably the biggest single fact that there is about the world that we now live in, that makes this a very good book indeed. How do you write an excellent work of grand historical theory? You ask important questions and you supply convincing answers. You support these answers with many other interesting and closely related truths, and with reports of relevant debates among and with your fellow historians. This is what I think Stephen Davies has done.
Meanwhile, to learn more about The Wealth Explosion, read the review of it that Ananya Chowdhury did manage to write, for the Adam Smith Institute blog. Or, read what Stephen Davies himself wrote about his book and its conclusions, for CapX. Or, if you like it when people are good at talking to camera as well as good at writing (Stephen Davies is very good at both), listen to what Davies said to the Cato Institute about his book, as recorded in this video.
[My apologies for the large gap in installments. Holidays, ingrained sloth etc. Anyway, back to the grind, and this time we have a cracker…]
Civil Rights
The civil rights campaign was the single most important factor in shaping Ulster’s recent history. Its allegations [ugh] provided the pretext for IRA violence, the belief amongst many that Ulster is all about nice Catholics and nasty Protestants and the belief in government circles that in Ulster, at least, democracy does not work.
But were the allegations true? If they were, were they evidence of a corrupt state or merely the odd corrupt official?
Here are some of the more famous accusations of injustice:
Londonderry gerrymandering
This is one of the most oft-repeated Stormont scandals. The charge is that Stormont arranged Londonderry’s electoral boundaries in such a way as to ensure that a city with a Catholic majority returned a Unionist-dominated council. This assumes that Nationalists used to get more votes than Unionists. The truth is that we will never know as in the years between 1936 and 1968 there was not a single occasion when Nationalists and Unionists fought each other in a City Council election. There is a second assumption: that the boundaries were drawn up for the sole purpose of ensuring a Unionist majority. Once again we may never know the facts because the boundaries were drawn up in 1936, long before the Civil Rights Era. What we do know is that the Nationalists of the day did not propose an alternative. It is a peculiar variety of grave injustice that is not worth complaining about. Even when the boundaries were changed in 1973, nationalists still failed to get a majority of the votes.
Housing Policy
The charge is that Unionist councillors discriminated in favour of Protestant tenants when handing out council properties. This does not correspond with the facts. In the late sixties, according to surveys taken at the time, 40.9% of Catholic families lived in public sector housing, compared to 32.6% of Protestant families. Of course, this says nothing about the quality of the housing; it could just be that the Protestants had all the nicest houses, or about the proportions of the two communities who would have been eligible for public sector housing. As it happens, in Londonderry the Protestants did occupy slightly better houses, but their Catholic neighbours occupied considerably better properties than Protestants in Belfast, or for that matter Protestants living in the Fountain estate near the Bogside.
[For that matter, housing in the (unionist) Fountain estate is still clearly in a worse state than housing in the (nationalist) Creggan.]
Employment Statistics
Professor Richard Rose’s 1968 study Governing without Consensus found that there was “…a limited tendency for Protestants to have a higher occupational class than Catholics.” Much of this could be explained by reference to geography: the Catholics tended to live in the West [of the province] and the jobs tended to be in the East. After 24 years of direct rule from Westminster things have changed slightly, but even now Catholics are twice as likely to be unemployed as Protestants. There are two possibilities: either the British are as bad as Stormont, or Stormont was not half as bad as is claimed. In explaining differing rates of unemployment it is important to bear in mind the existence of other factors.
[It occurs to me that this is a rather bizarre argument. Why would people continue to live in a place where there is little work?]
Treatment of Catholics
Much is made of the recruitment, or lack of it, of Catholics into the Stormont government and other industries. That discrimination happened is undeniable and regrettable, but there are a number of mitigating factors and Catholics must take some of the blame for the fate that befell them.
[Regrettable. Really? Why employ people who are opposed to your very existence? Or might be.]
Catholic Attitudes
Much is made of the way the state treated Catholics, but just as important was the way Catholics treated the state. Throughout its existence the Catholic church and the Nationalist parties refused to accept the legitimacy of Stormont (or, for that matter, that Northern Ireland was a part of the United Kingdom). They discouraged Catholics from joining the police and civil service and for most of Stormont’s history the Nationalist party boycotted Stormont. Patrick Shea, a Catholic who did join the civil service, described how the Catholic community’s view of him and those like him was that “we had joined the enemy; we were lost souls.”
Education provides another example of how Catholics tended to distance themselves from the state. Initially, the Northern Ireland government had wanted to create a non-denominational school system. The Catholic church made it plain that it wanted Catholic children taught in Catholic Church schools and not state schools. This provided the Unionist government with two headaches. Firstly, under the Government of Ireland Act [1921] it was illegal for the government to “endow any religion”. Secondly, by funding Catholic schools it would be creating an anomalous situation where public funds would be being used to subsidise private assets ie. Catholic schools. Eventually, a compromise was reached where Catholic schools were funded, but at a lower rate. All said and done, lower funding did nothing to improve the educational prospects of Catholics.
A further self-inflicted disadvantage was the tendency for Catholics to have larger families than Protestants. This had two effects on employment. Firstly, unemployment tends to be highest amongst the young. If a group has a higher birth rate it will have more young people among its population and therefore higher unemployment. Secondly, mass surveys have shown that the more children there are in a family the poorer the educational attainment. None of this had anything to do with discrimination.
What people often forget about the situation prior to 1969 was that the system had safeguards. The Stormont government could not just do as it pleased. The safeguards were written into the Government of Ireland Act 1920 which included clauses outlawing discrimination by the government on the grounds of religion. These clauses were never used to launch a legal action against the Stormont government. One can only conclude that civil rights campaigners knew that their evidence was flimsy and that allegations of discrimination were used to promote a united Ireland rather than to right wrongs.
Even if the claims were correct and even if the system could never have been made to work this is hardly relevant now. Ulster has had direct rule from Westminster for a quarter of a century. Whatever, the vices of Ulster’s English governors may have been, sectarianism cannot be numbered among them. The period since 1972 has seen an enormous growth of laws, agencies and funds aimed at eliminating discrimination. Ulster has a Fair Employment Act and a Fair Employment Commission to ensure that employers do not discriminate on religious grounds. The Community Relations Council promotes cross-community understanding [Ha!]. Housing has been taken out of local government control and put in the hands of the Housing Executive. The Standing Commission on Human Rights monitors Ulster’s human rights record.
Part I
Part II
Part III
Part IV
Part V
Part VI
Part VII
Part VIII
Part IX
…America faked the first moon landing.
And I say: well done them. That can’t have been easy. What other country has faked a moon landing, eh? Take that Russia! And what about the Chinese? They can fake anything but not putting a man on the moon. Only America can do that. And not once either but, er, several times. Including one moonshot that “didn’t get there”. Now that’s attention to verisimilitude.
But seriously, consider what an impossibly complicated and expensive exercise faking the moon landing was. You need a big fucking rocket. And it’s got to go up. Quite a long way in fact. And in a straight line. And not blow up.
And then you’ve got to get people to talk about all the little details: command module, lunar module, re-entry, space suits.
Oh, and spare a thought for Hollywood’s contribution. People in space. People bouncing around on the “moon”. All done in an age before CGI. And making the Earth round just to keep the Spherical Earth lobby happy. And note how they got all the radio delays right. And they even mangled Armstrong’s “one small step” speech just so that 30 years later they could claim that transmissions were subject to “interference”.
But what’s really impressive is how they kept everybody quiet. 1969 America was a place where you couldn’t even drive off a bridge and kill your secretary without it being front page news. Home of the brave? Home of the blabbermouth more like. But they kept the faked moon landing hushed up. Neil Armstrong kept the secret to his grave. And the other astronauts, and the people at Mission Control, and the gazillions of engineers who “worked” on the rocket, the life-support systems, the navigation, the computers, the software. The material scientists. To buy all these people’s silence? Now, that must have cost a fortune.
Sometimes I think it would have been cheaper to have done it for real.  On a sound stage no one can hear you taking a dump
Self-determination
Ulster is British because that is what the majority of her citizens want. This has been shown time and time again in elections, referendums and opinion polls. [Although last time I looked it was getting pretty close in elections.]
In the most recent general election, in 1992, unionists of various descriptions won 13 of Ulster’s 17 seats and 64.7% of the vote. In 1973 the government held a referendum on Ulster’s future. 98.9% of those who voted voted for the continuance of the union. Much was made of the boycott of the poll by nationalists and the consequent low turnout of only 58.7%. As Morrison points out, the highest ever turnout in a Northern Ireland general election was 72%, so even if all those between 58.7% and 72% had voted for a united Ireland it would still have only represented about 14% of the total vote.
[That would be John Morrison who wrote “The Ulster Cover-up”.
I am not sure about the maths here.
There are all sorts of reasons to think that the turnout would be higher in a referendum where every vote counts. After all, there is less point in voting Conservative in a safe Labour seat than a marginal. Fortunately, we have the example of the 1998 Good Friday Agreement Referendum where the turnout was 81%.
So let us assume that without a boycott the Border poll would also have had an 81% turnout. Let us also assume that all the “extra” voters would have voted leave. Those who voted remain represent .989 x .587 or 58.1% of the electorate. 58.1% of 81% is 71.7%. So the maximum leave vote would have been 28.3%. I think.]
Commentators often look at the [changing] ratio of Catholics to Protestants and draw the conclusion that Catholics will eventually outnumber Protestants and that therefore they will vote Northern Ireland into a united Ireland. This ignores two essential points. Firstly, projecting the past into the future is a dangerous business. Secondly, an individual’s choice between being a unionist or a nationalist is not determined solely by his religion. The nationalist vote is soft. In 1964, for instance, after 40 years of peace, prosperity and progress, the Northern Ireland Labour Party, which supported the Union, succeeded in pushing nationalists into third place in the general election of that year.
[So the NILP got all its support from Nationalists, eh? Not true. By the way, that is the Northern Ireland Labour Party and not the Labour Party which refused and continues to refuse to organise in the province.]
Opinion polls also show little evidence of a desire for a united Ireland. In January 1996, in a survey carried out for the Belfast Telegraph only 17% of those interviewed chose a united Ireland as their preferred outcome.
[Very similar to recent polls I have seen although it does beg the question why nationalists get 40-45% of the vote in elections.]
A Unionist politician once had an illuminating discussion with a Catholic Unionist voter. The voter explained that most of his Catholic colleagues agreed that they did not want a united Ireland but that despite this they continued to vote for nationalist candidates. It seemed that they voted the way they did for reasons of communal solidarity.
[Question answered.]
→ Continue reading: Ulster for Beginners – Part V
“What has been will be again,” as it says in Ecclesiastes, “what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun.”
Yesterday – to my shame I did not spot it until today – the Times reprinted a letter to the editor that was a century old to the day. I wish I could say that it was merely of historical interest.
From The Times July 15, 1919
To the Editor of The Times
Sir, Will you permit an elderly man, who is not a politician nor a public character, but merely an individual among millions of honest, sober persons whose liberty is attacked by a moral tyranny, to state an opinion with regard to the crusade against moderate drinkers? It is not needed even in the cause of morality. When I was a child excess in drinking was patent in every class of society. Now, in my wide circle, I do not know of one man or woman who is ever seen “under the influence of liquor”. Why not leave the process of moderation, so marked within 60 years, to pursue its normal course? It is untrue to say that a reasonable use of alcohol is injurious to mind, body or morality. My father, whose life was one of intense intellectual application, and who died from an accident in his 79th year, was the most rigidly conscientious evangelical I have ever known. He would have been astonished to learn that his claret and water at his midday meal, and his glass of Constantia at bedtime, were either sinful in themselves or provocative to sin in others.
There is no blessing upon those who invent offences for the pleasure of giving pain and who lay burdens on the liberty of others. We have seen attempts by the fantastically righteous to condemn those who eat meat, who go to see plays, who take walks on Sundays. The campaign against the sober use of wine and beer is on a footing with these efforts, and should be treated as they have been. Already tobacco is being forbidden to the clergy! The fact that Americans are leading the campaign should be regarded with alarm. We do not express an opinion, much less organize propaganda, against “dryness” in the United States. It is not for us to interfere in their domestic business. If Englishmen went round America urging Americans to defy their own laws and revolt against their customs, we should be very properly indignant. Let crusading Americans be taught the same reticence.
The propagandist teetotaler is active and unscrupulous. He fights with all weapons, whether they are clean or no. We must resist, without fear of consequences, the cruel and ignorant fanaticism of these apostles.
I am, Sir, your obedient servant,
EDMUND GOSSE
A Brief History of Ulster (continued)
In the search for a replacement for Stormont the government came to the conclusion that any scheme had to be acceptable to the constitutional nationalists of the Social Democratic and Labour Party (SDLP) which had been formed in 1970. After negotiations held at Sunningdale in Berkshire, a power-sharing agreement was reached between the SDLP and the leadership of the Unionist Party which included a council of Ireland.
The Ulster Unionist Party split over the Council of Ireland. In the general election of February 1974 the agreement was decisively rejected at the polls. The government and the parties to the agreement ploughed on regardless. In May 1974, the Ulster Workers’ Council organised a general strike, aimed at bringing down the Council of Ireland. The strike was successful beyond its leaders’ wildest dreams, ending in the collapse of the power-sharing Executive.
[“wildest dreams”?]
In the absence of political stability the IRA campaign continued. Bombings and shootings became an every day event, added to by a new mainland bombing campaign. The government’s response was to pass the Prevention of Terrorism Act.
[Remember that? I don’t save that named persons could be banned from entering Great Britain but be perfectly free to walk around Ulster.
By the way, the timeline here is wrong. Shootings were an everyday event by 1971 and bombings by 1972. The mainland bombing campaign began in 1973.]
Between 1975-6 a constitutional convention was held which came close to agreement but failed. Internment was phased out and the government embarked upon a policy of treating terrorists as ordinary criminals. In 1975 the IRA murdered the British Ambassador to Ireland, Christopher Ewart-Biggs and in one day in 1979 murdered Lord Mountbatten while he was holidaying in the Republic of Ireland and 18 soldiers of the Parachute Regiment at Warrenpoint.
In 1981, Republican prisoners at the Maze jail demanded political status and began a dirty protest which grew into a hunger strike. Bobby Sands and 9 others died but the government stood firm.
[Hmm. IIRC that’s not quite true. They stood firm until the hunger strike was abandoned and then gave in.]
During the 1984 Conservative Conference, the IRA exploded a bomb in the main conference hotel where the Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher, and members of the Cabinet were staying. In November 1985, the British and Irish government signed the Anglo-Irish Agreement in which the Republic of Ireland was given a say in the affairs of Northern Ireland in return for promises of greater security co-operation. The agreement was condemned by Unionists who resigned their seats in protest.
The Anglo-Irish Agreement did little to suppress IRA terrorism. In 1987 they exploded a bomb at a Remembrance Day ceremony in Enniskillen, killing 11. In 1990 they murdered Ian Gow MP, Parliamentary Private Secretary to Margaret Thatcher. In 1992 and 1993 the IRA exploded two huge bombs in the City of London. The damage ran into billions.
On 31st August 1994 the IRA declared a ceasefire. On 9th February 1996 they ended it, exploding another huge bomb, this time at South Quay in London’s Docklands. Two men died.
Since 1969 the world has become familiar with the bombings, shootings, beatings, boycotts and expulsions.
[Actually, the world probably wasn’t too familiar with the last three.]
Part I
Part II
Part III
Part IV
Part V
Part VI
Part VII
Part VIII
Part IX
A Brief History of Ulster (continued)
During the 1960s a number of complaints were made about Northern Ireland’s government which had been dominated by the Ulster Unionist Party since its inception. The thrust of the allegations was that Unionists had used their power in such a way as to make Catholics second-class citizens. There were a number of specific charges: that local government boundaries had been gerrymandered to the benefit of Unionists, that the local government franchise had not been reformed (again to the advantage of Unionists) and that Unionist local authorities discriminated against Catholics in housing and jobs. Complaints were also levelled at the B-Specials who, it was alleged, were exclusively Protestant. These allegations were denied by Unionists.
In 1967, an organisation calling itself the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association was set up to campaign against the alleged abuses of power. It claimed to be a cross-community group: Unionists claimed that it was an IRA front. Whatever the case was the facts are clear enough. The NICRA organised marches which led to conflict with the police and Protestants. After a particularly violent encounter in Londonderry on 5 October 1968, riots became a regular event throughout the province. In August 1969, after the annual (Protestant and unionist) Apprentice Boys’s of Derry parade in Londonderry, there was a riot by Catholics in the Bogside area of the city. Shortly afterwards there was a similar riot in Belfast. The Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC – the police) lost control and the army was brought in to keep the peace. This was the beginning of the Troubles that continue to this day.
Shortly afterwards the B-Specials were stood down and the RUC were disarmed. The army prevented members of the RUC from patrolling in nationalist areas and allowed the creation of No-Go areas where the “Queen’s writ did not run”.
The IRA used the opportunity to organise. By June 1970 it was making attacks on the Army and in February 1971 it murdered its first soldier. Violence in all its forms appeared to be escalating out of control and, in August 1971, the Stormont government, under Prime Minister Bryan Faulkner, introduced internment or detention without trial. The backlash from the IRA was ferocious. In January 1972, at the end of an illegal march against internment in Londonderry, there was an exchange of gunfire between the army and others resulting in the deaths of 13 civilians.
[I grate at my use of the word “murder”. “Killed” would be better. And when I say “illegal”, “banned” would be better.
The army was absolutely sure it was being fired on. By this time, it was a standard IRA tactic to use rioters as human shields while firing on soldiers. Just as in the killing of Lyra McKee the other day.]
Whatever the facts of the matter, Her Majesty’s Government, moved to abolish Stormont (despite the fact that Stormont had nothing to do with the army action) and established Direct Rule with a Secretary of State for Northern Ireland.
The abolition of Stormont, seen by many unionists as the only institution they could trust, provoked an immediate and bloody reaction. Recruitment to the UVF (no relation to the UVF of 1912) increased and the Ulster Defence Association (UDA) was formed. These groups began a campaign of sectarian murder.
[Hmm there seems to be a bit missing here. I was told on good-ish authority that the formation of the UDA was in response to sectarian violence from republicans. Although after a while it is difficult to tell who is doing the titting and who the tatting.]
Part I
Part II
Part III
Part IV
Part V
Part VI
Part VII
Part VIII
Part IX
Update 10/7/19
Actually there really was a bit missing there – there being differences between the published and electronic versions. The published version says, “Protestant paramilitary groups began a campaign of sectarian murder which in one form or another continued until 1994 when most of them declared a cease-fire following that announced by the IRA. (By the early 1990s Protestant paramilitaries were responsible for more killings than the IRA.)”
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