Splintered Sunrise

If you live in Dún Laoghaire, you will in all probability be familiar with this character here. In fact, there isn’t a black-and-white poster goes up in Dún Laoghaire that doesn’t feature Richard Boyd Barrett in some capacity. Richie Boy has of course been a fixture of Irish left politics for quite some time now, longer than you would think from his Peter Pan-like countenance. But I’ve only just discovered his own dedicated website.

And a quite attractively presented website it is too. We, the visiting proletariat, are given a brief biography of Richie Boy and an overview of the divers “Down with this sort of thing” campaigns he heads up. There is the Irish Anti-War Movement, of which our boy is the main spokesman and which is undoubtedly his major claim to fame. There is the People Before Profit Alliance, for which he is the Dún Laoghaire candidate in the upcoming general election. There is the anti-developer campaign Save Our Seafront, which leads me to ponder whether the Kingstown seafront might actually benefit from a little redevelopment.

What you will not find, and eagle-eyed observers of the Irish left will be not at all surprised by this, is an introduction to the Socialist Workers Party. I may be wrong, but I’ve looked over the whole website and can’t say I have seen a single mention of the SWP anywhere. This is despite the fact that Richie Boy has been a member of said organisation for something like 18 years, has spent most of that time on its leading committee as long-suffering sidekick to Swiss Kieran, writes regularly for the Socialist Worker (usually under the rubric of “voices from the movement”, the same device that allows Kevin Wingfield to appear every issue as a spokesman for Ballymun Against Issue of the Week), was a headline speaker at Marxism little more than a week ago and, the last time I spoke to him – which admittedly wasn’t yesterday – was a full-time operative of the SWP.

Before the more excitable Indymedia types start screaming about Cointelpro, I hasten to add that this isn’t some unwarranted exposure. Just about everyone who knows Richard knows he is a high-up member of the SWP. Indeed, he owes his celebrity to the SWP. Richard, you see, is a most pleasant and outgoing chap who makes friends easily. This perfectly complements Swiss Kieran, who is a powerful thinker and impressive speaker, but who is, let’s face it, a little dour and abrasive. This also makes Richard a perfect frontman, a role he has played with aplomb for a good long while now.

The SWP have a somewhat aggravating organisational tic when setting up one of their “united fronts”. The comrades don’t do coalitions; they hold a public meeting and invite people to “join the movement”. They don’t like structures, but on occasion will simulate inclusivity by appointing themselves and two or three non-party figureheads to be a leading committee. Thus it was that, after 9/11, Richard found himself appearing all over the media as spokesman for the fortuitously named “Irish Anti-War Movement”. What the anti-war punters thought about being spoken for by the SWP is an interesting question, but a moot one. Like most of the SWP’s fronts, the IAWM is largely bluff, but a bluff is only a bluff if somebody calls it.

What is striking, for somebody whose whole political CV is based around his leading role in the SWP, is the coyness in mentioning that organisation. Possibly the rationale for this, as with the SWP’s double fronts in the Stormont election, lies deep in the tangled prose of the organisation’s perspectives on a “New Left”, to which I will return anon. But a certain amount of the coyness probably stems from a pragmatic recognition that the SWP name is box-office poison. So, instead of trying to reflect on why that might be so and how the problem could be rectified, we are presented with an elaborate series of fronts, reminiscent of the bad old days when Militant pretended not to exist and held its events under a motley array of cover names. It certainly doesn’t bespeak much confidence in the prospects of “Ireland’s Bolshevik Party”.

Whereat we cast a beady eye on the dissident republicans and go under the SEA with Captain Eamo

In this final post on the Stormont election results, I want to take a look at the two forces aspiring to offer an alternative – the republicans and the left – and assess the likelihood of them being able to do so. I should state in advance that my conclusions will not be terribly optimistic. But to begin with, I should point out that there are two constituencies, which are distinct even though they overlap to some extent. This is the traditional republican constituency, which is mostly rural though with some urban support, and what might be termed a left republican, republican socialist or Connollyite constituency, which is almost exclusively urban. The election results partially illuminate these audiences.

The actual votes for dissidence are not all that much out of line with what I was expecting. They might have surprised outside observers relying on press reports (and, despite the effective media blackout on RSF, there was a remarkable boosting of mad Catholic reactionary Gerry McGeough by journalists who you wouldn’t expect to be sympathetic). Indeed, although disgruntlement with the Provos will be obvious to anyone even slightly acquainted with the republican base, there are good reasons why the dissidents were never going to do very well. Firstly, the Provo cadre – and this is where disillusionment is keenest – was never held together by ideology, but by military discipline. This explains why demoralisation and abstention are a more common reaction than dissidence. Bear in mind too that, as far as the majority of Northern Catholics are concerned, the details of the peace process are of little interest. What is important is that the war is over and, thanks to Gordon Brown’s voodoo economics, there is more or less full employment. Combined with the Provos’ massive apparatus, this gives some context for PSF’s continuing popularity and the lack of a large audience for critiques of the GFA process.

Then you have to consider the subjective factor. The dissidents had no organisation, no resources, no really attractive or well-known candidates and no record of doing the work on the ground that pays such dividends for the Provos. (Davy Hyland, who is personally very popular in Newry and whose appetite for hard work is legendary, is the exception here.) Lots of potential supporters weren’t on the register, having taken themselves off to avoid being impersonated. There was also the question of what political alternative the dissidents were putting forward. RSF stand for traditional republicanism, and traditional republicanism wasn’t all that brilliant that we would want to rerun the tape. Gerry McGeough stands for traditional republicanism, plus fascism and the Virgin Mary. As for Hyland, Paul McGlinchey and Martin Cunningham, it’s not terribly clear what they stand for. So you had candidacies that could only really appeal to people who were already fairly hardline republicans, and even among hardline republicans RSF, in particular, are far from being universally popular.

So the results for independent republicanism then become explicable. RSF’s six candidates polled a remarkably uniform 400 or so, as did McGlinchey in North Antrim and Cunningham in South Down; 800 deluded souls in Fermanagh voted for Catholic Reaction; Hyland got a little over 2000 in Newry/Armagh and Peggy O’Hara a little under 2000 in Derry. Mrs O’Hara’s campaign had some peculiar features that I’ll come back to presently. I hasten to point out that I’m not making excuses for poor results, simply setting them in context. So, taken together with the Hearts and Minds poll last November, we might say that the dissident vote this time out represents a baseline rather than a maximum, but it does shine a light on the sort of audience that is out there. And we can have some kind of feel for the audience that might be available to a more attractive project than actually existing dissidence.

The Hyland vote is easily explicable in parish pump terms. The vote for Mrs O’Hara, who is not to my knowledge in the IRSP but is certainly identified with them, is interesting in that it was the nearest thing we had to a left republican campaign (although trad republicans in Derry also supported her) and because of what it says about political developments up there. Basically, there is a relatively big audience for dissidence in Derry because Derry has had nationalist government for decades and had a peace process ten years before the rest of us. Things have been maturing slightly quicker there. That’s why so many of the names on the Letter of 500 came from Derry. But the sentiment of opposition is also quite confused. We could see that in the policing debate, where the dissidents organised a big rally in Derry, and then invited Eamonn McCann and Tony McIntyre to do the speaking. Predictably, neither of these balloons had much to say, though, predictably, that didn’t stop them talking at length. The hope would have to be that some people in Derry do some thinking and draw some conclusions.

I have a faint hope that some opposition might arise from disgruntled republicans. I have no such hope in the far left, but it’s worth glancing at their performances anyway. It’s disappointing to note that the Workers Party seem to have slowed their inexorable decline. To be honest, the Sticks don’t serve any socialist purpose any more and their disappearance would at least clear away some undergrowth.

From the Sticks we turn to the most morose people in Irish politics, the Socialist Party of Northern Ireland (Kautskyism-Taaffeism-Peter Hadden Thought). They will be slightly cheered up by their vote having finally broken through the 200 mark, with Jim Barbour in South Belfast going up from 167 to 248 and Tommy Black in East Belfast rising from 176 to 225. These gains of 81 and 49 respectively are a clear vindication of SP strategy – not! This is despite flogging water charges into the ground over the past three or four years, with Peter Hadden having recently declared that the proletariat were being electrified by the We Won’t Pay Campaign (a mass movement of the SP in coalition with itself). Yet again bread and butter fail to deliver the goods. It’s true that water charges were much discussed during the election, but most of the punters seem to believe that Big Ian will abolish them.

Joking aside, the main problem with the SP’s perspective is their weird belief that you can build a base for socialism in places like the Beersbridge Road, if only you disavow anti-imperialism and strip out from your programme anything that might scare the Prods. The SP have been doing this for decades – so much so that their last manifesto only had one item on it. And they still can’t get votes in these areas! It would be interesting to see which boxes the tiny SP vote actually did come from – I suspect much of it actually comes from the Markets and Short Strand, and is an offshoot of the once substantial WP vote in those areas. The thing is that, for well over 30 years, the only places in the North where socialism could find any audience have been working-class Catholic areas, where there has been some radical and anti-imperialist consciousness. That means West Belfast and Derry, to a lesser extent North Belfast and Newry, and some small pockets elsewhere. In other words, the left republican constituency mentioned above. The SP’s schematic dogmatism doesn’t allow them to consider this; the SWP are dimly aware of it on some pragmatic level, although it contradicts their formal politics.

The SWP, as anyone who attended their Marxism event at the weekend will testify, are cock-a-hoop at the votes for Captain Eamo in Derry and the wee lad in West Belfast, running under their two different fronts. How their treasurer feels about having shelled out something like five grand for less than 3000 votes is undisclosed, but on the evidence of Marxism it would seem that Yo politics are alive and well. Actually, although Eamo’s vote has held up remarkably well – Mrs O’Hara’s intervention only slightly dented it – I am more and more convinced that this is an essentially personal vote and not evidence that 2000 people in Derry believe the Soviet Union was state capitalist. Rather, I suspect much of it comes from luvvie elements, of whom there are many in Derry. After all, if fellow journo Brian Rowan can score 1200 first preferences in North Down on a platform of anti-politics, it surely isn’t surprising that TV celebrity McCann, one of the best-known faces in the North, could get 2000 votes for a platform of right-on clichés.

Somewhat more to the point is the vote for the wee lad, who scored nearly 800 in West Belfast. This clearly wasn’t a personal vote, as nobody had ever heard of the candidate. (The Provos had a number of candidates I’ve never heard of, but then they have a machine.) It wasn’t a vote for SWP politics, as it wasn’t an SWP campaign. It surely to God wasn’t a popular endorsement of young Seán’s Ali G manifesto. The only explanation I can put forward is that he managed to get some votes from the left republican constituency, on the grounds that he looked a bit lefty and a bit anti-imperialist (only in Iraq, true, but in West Belfast that would be taken as a dig at the Brits). These are the same sort of people who would vote for an IRSP or Socialist Democracy candidate – indeed, the Irps or SD might have done better, as they would have run an explicitly anti-Stormont campaign.

I can’t see the SWP getting anything out of this in the long term. The Irps or SD, having acquired this audience, would go out and try to organise an opposition. The SWP can’t, not only because they don’t have the organisation, but, more importantly, because they don’t have the politics. What could they do with these people – sell them tickets to Marxism? The only consolation for the SWP is that they don’t think in the long term anyway. A short morale boost will suit them fine.

The republican opposition, for all their enormous faults, are at least serious people, while the left as usual give the impression of being totally unserious about anything except short-term sectarian advantage. Even so, for the critic of the Grizzlyite peace strategy, there is little here to take comfort from. The most that can be said is, perhaps the ferment in Derry will throw up something worthwhile.

Just a few haphazard thoughts on the election, and on last weekend’s PSF Ard Fheis. Firstly, and I’ll get onto the southern situation in due course, was the Ard Fheis pledge on coalition – which may or may not be academic according to the Leinster House arithmetic. There are of course a lot of yahoos running around the Irish left screaming “No Coalition” as if these magic words will cover up a dearth of ideas, but Grizzly faces a bit of a problem here. The PSF leadership would dearly love to be in government in both states, but much of the southern cadre suffers an allergic reaction to the very concept of coalition with Fianna Fáil. Thusly the Ard Fheis pronounced itself against the idea of coalition with… the Desocrats! As if!

I am also slightly bemused by the euro. Not the currency per se, but if I recall correctly the Provos opposed the Free State’s adoption of the euro, on the quite sensible grounds that the Maastricht convergence criteria would rule out radical economic policies. Yet now we hear the call for an all-Ireland currency, as if the punt still existed. Is this a radical policy of the same ilk as the call for an all-Ireland 12% corporation tax, or an all-Ireland police force – made radical by placing the formula “all-Ireland” before it?

Now, the Stormont election. The counts on tomorrow and Friday will give us some idea of how things will pan out, so I won’t even hazard a prediction. But I do want to have a brief look at the two groups posing as an alternative, the republicans and the left.

The letter from 500 ex-prisoners that appeared in yesterday’s Irish News calling for a vote for independent republican candidates had a couple of interesting features. I noticed that the largest lot of signatories came from Derry, with significant numbers from Armagh and Tyrone but not many from Belfast. Besides, most of the Belfast people I recognised on the list were not Provos but Irps, who you wouldn’t expect to be onside anyway. Another weakness was that the unity of the letter was achieved purely on the basis of opposing the RUC/PSNI, with no signs of a positive alternative. Nonetheless, and although the instigators seem to have been the usual suspects, I draw some comfort from the scale, showing that there are a relatively significant number of republicans who believe we need a republican movement and that the Provos aren’t it. Given the almost total lack of support for a return to armed struggle, there is obviously some kind of an audience for political alternatives.

But, as it happens, I didn’t vote republican and didn’t argue with anybody else to do so. The republican candidates, of course, fall into three categories. There is Gerry McGeough, whose brand of Maria Duce politics is a bit rich for my taste. There are folks like Davy Hyland and Paul McGlinchey, who have only been out of the Provos five minutes and, whatever lines in the sand they may have drawn over policing, haven’t yet shown much sign of being a real opposition. Then you have RSF, who actually are an opposition and have a positive programme of their own. The trouble with RSF is that, despite being good principled republicans, they are also rigid doctrinaires (though Ruairí is much more flexible than he’s given credit for) and a tactical sensibility that I would describe as erratic and a less charitable soul as bonkers.

Nonetheless, although I don’t expect the republican opposition to get many votes, it might not be a bad thing if they did. If they started to look like a credible opposition, then there would be some pressure on them to behave like one.

This does not apply to the far left. I have little confidence in the ability of the left to recognise the real world, never mind reflect and draw serious conclusions. Any votes for these bozos will only encourage them. It is likely, for instance, that the Socialist Party’s campaigning around water charges will bring them some extra votes (their tiny vote base couldn’t possibly shrink further). So, if Tommy Black can raise his vote from 130 to something like 300, which is entirely possible, although that doesn’t amount to a hill of beans the SP will claim it as a vindication of their politics and a sign that things are moving in their direction. And the least said about the SWP’s Ali G politics, the better.

This past wee while has been extraordinarily boring as far as the Norn Iron election is concerned, but as polling day is only two days off I feel it is incumbent on the Sunrise to return to the story. I won’t be making any predictions – that’s a mug’s game. Although many of the results are indeed predictable at this point, there are a few constituencies up in the air – South Belfast for one, and North Down is of course a law unto itself. So it makes more sense to wait for the results of the PR count and do an analysis of the small print.

So we shall take a run through the manifestos. I have in front of me most of the election addresses dropped in West Belfast. I am missing the DUP and the South Down and Londonderry Party, which is no great loss – those interested can find the Big Doc’s detailed manifesto here [pdf] and the Stoops’ printed Mogadon here [pdf]. And for some psychedelic fun, check out Rainbow George’s Make Politicians History site.

But on to the literature at hand. One of the things one notices is that “delivery” is the big word amongst the parties. The SDLP want to “deliver real progress”; the Provos claim “others promise, we deliver”. So the Provos’ leaflet – which, by the way, features no less than four pictures of Grizzly (the other candidates, Fra McCann, Paul Maskey, Jennifer McCann and Shell Dockley, are clustered around him like Santa’s little helpers) – is divid up into three sections. Under “Delivering in the Peace Process”, we have bullet points about a “strategy for Irish Unity and Independence” (by administering Stormont), a “new beginning to policing” (well, we’ll see about that) and northern representation in the Free State Assembly, which Bertie has talked about but can hardly be claimed as an accomplishment just yet. Under “Delivering in the Executive”, we do not have any reference to Provo ministers’ addiction to PFI. What we have is their one genuine achievement – Marty’s abolition of the 11+ – alongside claims to bear the entire credit for the peace dividend and various stances the Provos have taken – anti-racism and opposition to water charges – that hardly relate to anything their ministers did. The third part, “Delivering Locally”, is strictly West Belfast parish pump stuff – again, there are worthy causes there, but the actual Provo strategy of “Gissa Grant” would not be apparent to the casual reader.

We turn now to Dan McGuinness of the Alliance Party. Although I am pleased to see Dan going to the trouble of directing messages in Polish and Chinese to the electorate, this is unlikely to help his chances. Aside from introducing the candidate, the substance of the leaflet is given over to the usual Alliance encomia about “partnership” and “sharing” and other apple-pie virtues that Alliance stands for. Dan promises to offer an alternative to tribal politics, although he’s not the only one.

Also claiming to be that alternative is the eternally optimistic John Lowry of the Workers Party. John also witters on about tribal politics, and argues the working class should really stop living in a fool’s paradise and focus on the really important issues of water charges, PFI and the house price bubble. I fully agree with him that these are important issues, though John seems to forget that the sole point of the election is to restore Stormont. Actually he doesn’t – he does call at the end of his address for the restoration of the Assembly and Executive, but how the Assembly is supposed to do all these wonderful progressive things is left unclear. The WP also make a big deal, somewhat incongruously, of opposing imperialism – in Iraq!

Ah dear, what can we say about young Seán Mitchell of the SWP – sorry, People Before Profit? Don’t pay water charges; No to imperialism (in Iraq); Don’t diss the yoof… as usual with the SWP, a liberal sprinkling of exclamation marks and Yos would more accurately capture the tone. Most striking is Seán’s contribution to the policing debate which goes under the rubric of “Poverty is the Issue Not Policing”. The debate around whether or not to endorse the New RUC is hereby reduced to a question of insufficient community development. Bread and youth clubs, one might say. I would love to vote for this, if it wasn’t totally disconnected from what the issues are for the working class, as opposed to what the far left would like the working class to be concerned with.

Next we turn to the address from Geraldine Taylor of Republican Sinn Féin. I am disappointed to see that Geraldine is running on the identikit RSF manifesto adopted by all six of their candidates – as a disciplined party, that is only to be expected, but they could have made some concession to the peculiarities of West Belfast. It appears that RSF are only interested in appealing to people who are already hardline republicans – and even in that constituency, a manifesto based on appeals to the 1916 Proclamation and Éire Nua is only going to have limited purchase. RSF, in many ways the most substantial of the “dissident” formations, seem to have serious trouble behaving as anything other than an introverted sect. I might have expected different from Geraldine, based on the work she has been doing on the issue of anti-social behaviour around Poleglass for many years. To put it bluntly, her appeal would be greatly enhanced if the entirely necessary slogan of “Smash Stormont” was coupled with “Smash the Hoods”.

Finally, for the student of political exotica we have Louis West. Louis is the Official Unionist candidate for West Belfast, in comparison to which Steve McClaren looks like he was born under a lucky star. Strangely, Louis also seems to be rather down on tribal politics, enjoining us to vote for a moderate Assembly on the grounds that “Normal politics will be better than a constant them-and-us battle over ancient squabbles”. If you think this is a rather odd appeal from the representative of Official Unionism, you have hit the target, rung the bell and may collect a cigar or cocoa-nut according to taste. Louis proclaims that the key issues for him are the rates revaluation, water charges and affordable social housing. One is surely entitled to ask, what then divides the OUP from the Stickies and People Before Profit? Or, to put it another way, how are the representatives of the left more radical than those of Trimble Unionism?

The other night I was flicking channels and happened to come across the party election broadcast by the Workers Party. I will say this for the WP, after the almost unbearable paddywhackery of the Sinn Féin Nua broadcast, theirs was pleasingly low-key. Mostly it consisted of the WP’s most prominent Northern honcho, John Lowry of Twinbrook, speaking direct to camera about various issues of the day.

What Lowry actually said was an unexceptionable run through of various worthy positions the WP has taken. There was nothing there to frighten the horses (especially since Lowry isn’t what you would call a riveting speaker in the Eoghan Harris mould) and the message might even have been attractive to some naïve person who doesn’t know much about the kind of organisation the WP is. There was some stuff about non-payment of water charges, opposition to privatisation and building an anti-sectarian socialist alternative. Which would all be fair enough, if one had any faith in capacity of the Workers Party to build such an alternative.

Rather jarringly, Lowry dropped into the middle of his oration a call for the restoration of the Assembly and Executive, and pledged the Sticks to building the anti-sectarian left alternative within Stormont, in the vanishingly unlikely event of them getting elected. How they proposed to use the structures of Stormont to do this was opaque to say the least.

And yet – this may have been pie-in-the-sky stuff, but Lowry the unreconstructed Stickie has a slightly firmer grasp of reality than the main representatives of Trotskyism in the North. The SWP’s standard-bearer in West Belfast, Andytown teenager Seán Mitchell, has two posters up. One says, “Vote for me and stop water charges! Yo!” while the other says “Vote for me and stop the Bush/Blair agenda! Yo!” (Of course I’m paraphrasing here, but I have got the essential gist. As always with the SWP, the exclamation marks and Yo should be taken as implicit.) This I suppose is the minimum/maximum programme in action.

Such ambition is not for the SWP’s deadly enemies in the Socialist Party of Northern Ireland, who not only eschew Yo politics but keep their maximum programme strictly for internal consumption and polemics with others on the far left. The SPNI’s literature concentrates on the water issue to the exclusion of virtually all else. SPNI proprietor Peter Hadden, the Oblomov of Northern politics, has divined in water charges the magical talisman that will finally slay the sectarian dragon and unite the proletariat behind the SPNI, and Peter’s trusty serfs have been beavering away in accordance with this perspective.

There is something missing here. The Sticks at least mention it, even if they don’t understand it. The Trots ignore it. I refer of course to the restoration of Stormont.

To a superficial thinker, of whom there are many on the far left, this will not appear as a problem. “Oho,” says our superficial thinker, “but the bourgeois sectarian politicians are trying to mislead the workers by making this election a sectarian headcount. We’re trying to bring working-class issues to the fore.” If the superficial thinker is a pretentious wanker, he might even say this is counter-hegemonic.

It’s a seductive argument on the face of it, and the fact that the left lacks the forces to impose its agenda is no reason for not trying. But our superficial thinker misses the point. The point of the election is to restore Stormont, and ideally to cobble together a Paisleyite-Provo coalition government. That is its function. The fact that the election will be a sectarian headcount is not the fault of Machiavellian politicians – it’s built into the process.

Our scientific materialists might do well to take note of empirical reality once in a while. That is, unless their thinking is, as I suspect, not materialist at all but a deviated spawn of mediaeval scholastic thought. And that might explain a thing or two about the economist mindset.

Just a brief stopgap post today, flagging up things that should be in my pending tray but are having to wait behind the flurry of local news. I may or may not get back to them later, but here are some useful links in the meantime.

Courtesy of the estimable Louis Proyect, we have a critique of the Euston Manifesto by Paul Flewers of New Interventions. Obviously there is a huge amount that could be said about the Decent Left, but Paul deals with Euston much more calmly and concisely than I could manage.

Like I suspect most of its readers, I read the Weekly Worker for the gossip, not the political analysis. When they try to write for themselves, the Conrad Party of Great Britain can often be a bit ropy – this steaming pile of Matgamnite horseshit is a case in point. But I was impressed by this very good piece by Anne McShane, on Ariel Levy’s Female Chauvinist Pigs and how the SWP have taken it up as an excuse for their retreat into rightist puritanism.

Finally, this argument on the British left blogs about whether socialists should be in the Labour Party. The latest round can be found here, here, here, here, here and here. And probably a few other places that I haven’t happened across.

Still on the theme of the candidate lists for Stormont, there is a tale almost as odd as that of Bob McCartney’s ability to be in six places at once. (Eat your heart out, Padre Pio!) That is the intervention of the Socialist Workers Party. Readers with even a fleeting experience of the SWP will be aware of their addiction to setting up front groups, so much so that it’s a bit of a surprise these days when they do anything under their own name. But this time around, in deploying two fronts simultaneously, they are really spoiling us.

Since Eamonn McCann has been polling respectable if not earth-shattering results in the city-state of Derry, it was inevitable that he would run this time in Foyle. Eamonn’s candidacy is in the name of his established vehicle, the Socialist Environmental Alliance. One might, then, have expected that any other candidates would run as SEA, as with the SWP’s unsuccessful foray into the Belfast Corporation elections a few years back.

But no! Let me introduce you to 19-year-old Seán Mitchell, who is standing for election in West Belfast. Seán, a most articulate and likeable young fellow, is an active member of the SWP. He is not however a candidate of the Socialist Environmental Alliance. He is the candidate of the People Before Profit Alliance.

Huh?

The PBPA (or PB4P for the Indymedia trendies) is of course the electoral front being mobilised by the 26-county majority of the SWP for the upcoming elections to the Free State Assembly. Why then is it being extended to the North, when the SWP already has a perfectly serviceable 6-county electoral front? I spent quite a long time in the old SWM, and consider myself reasonably well-versed in the Zen of Kieranism, but this has even me scratching my head. Maybe there was a plan to extend People Before Profit across the North, but Derry parochialism vetoed the move. Or maybe it’s simply another example of the unthinking left. Just when you think these bozos can’t get any dafter, they prove you wrong.

It takes me back to the early 90s, when the Socialist Party bore mid snow and ice the banner with the strange device Militant Labour. There was quite a grand launch in Belfast for Militant Labour, which had been formed, so we were told, from the fusion of Militant, the Labour & Trade Union Group, the Young Socialists and Youth Against Sectarianism. In other words, a group that had spent 20 years pretending not to exist and three of its fronts. The proletariat, who I assume were supposed to be impressed by this blatant sock puppetry, greeted the historic fusion with an enormous yawn.

Such, I fear, is likely to be the fate of People Before Profit on its first electoral outing. Eamonn will probably do all right, but young Seán is almost certain to make no impact at all. The most he can hope for is to get more votes than John Lowry, but that isn’t exactly the same as striking a chord with the masses.

One of the debates running through the Irish left in recent years has been on the question of “democratic centralism”, which is alleged to be a system of organisation derived from the writings of VI Lenin. Actually I think Lenin’s approach to the matter is very poorly understood, but let’s run with this a while.

There are on the Irish far left several organisations claiming to be Leninist and adhering to democratic centralism. Most leftists who aren’t in these groups are deeply anti-Leninist, not usually because they have a worked-out critique of Lenin’s political thought but rather because they don’t think much of the organisations that claim to adhere to it. A good example is the vociferously “anti-Leninist” Irish Socialist Network. Most of the ISN’s members have a background in the Workers Party, and they have a few younger activists who come from the SWP. Well might one protest that those groups are not democratic centralist but simply centralist – the experience of ISN members leads them, quite understandably, to react against loud proclamations on the virtues of “democratic centralism”.

I have my doubts about the ISN – especially about their great claims to having no leadership – but there’s something to their position. Groups like the SWP and the Socialist Party do have a tendency to treat “democratic centralism” as a magical fetish, and anyone who has been on the rough end of those groups’ regimes will know how much democracy is involved. My view is that if you strip down democratic centralism to its essential elements – you take a decision democratically, the majority rules, you carry out the decision in a unified way and minorities are given room to loyally collaborate – it has a lot going for it. Certainly there is nothing intrinsically evil about it. And you’ll notice that the form of organisation doesn’t necessarily correspond to a revolutionary Marxist party – you could just as easily run a cricket club on the basis of democratic centralism.

Nor, and this is important, does the idea contain any intrinsic political virtue. This may come as a shock to, say, SWP members who are immensely proud of their “Leninist” regime and believe that it guards them against political sin. But Fianna Fáil is organised on the basis of democratic centralism, and it has no fixed political principles at all. What’s more, despite a pronounced cult of the Infallible Leader, FF is a good deal more democratic than the SWP.

Consider this. If you want to be on the FF National Executive, all you need to do is get some party body to nominate you, and then do the rounds of the cumainn and comhairlí ceanntair trying to drum up some votes. It isn’t easy to get elected, but it’s easy enough to get nominated, and once nominated, you have as fair a crack of the whip as anyone.

By way of contrast, how does the SWP elect its Political Committee? What happens is that at the annual conference – usually right at the end of proceedings – the outgoing PC will nominate a “slate” of 10 or 12 names to be the new PC. Most of those names don’t change from year to year, but there are normally a couple of new faces to give the impression of fresh blood.

It’s important to realise that the slate, once proposed, can’t be amended. If you, the conference delegate, would like to remove Kevin Wingfield and substitute Paul O’Brien, you can’t propose that. You have to vote for or against the slate as a whole. Or else you can put forward an alternative slate, meaning you have to twist people’s arms to see if they’ll put themselves forward against the existing leadership. Given the SWP’s absurdly draconian restrictions on members associating with each other, which make it impossible to organise opposition outside the conference, actually getting an opposition together over the 48 hours of the conference itself is beyond any but the most energetic factionalist, and almost certainly more trouble than it’s worth. Not to mention that any member suspected of being an oppositionist will quickly find herself an ex-member.

This anti-democratic procedure explains how a group of “leaders” with scarce any experience in leading anything but their own small sect get to hold seats on the PC on a more or less permanent basis, sometimes for decades on end. There is no fresh blood except for a select few promoted by the permanent leadership, who invariably become clones. There is no fresh thinking except that coming from the papal curia in London, which itself is “elected” on the same basis, and with the same results. I know most of the Irish SWP leadership reasonably well, and while there is undoubtedly talent there, there is nothing that justifies anyone holding a leadership position for 25 or 30 years unbroken. In a proper political party, many if not most of these people would have been out on their ear years ago.

SWP members who are interested in the health of their organisation – and they do exist – might be well advised to ponder whether the slate system, which is also used for such purposes as electing conference and NC delegates, is really all it’s cracked up to be. They might also consider the question of term limits or compulsory rotation for leading members. A spell at the grassroots might do some people good, especially Kieran.

I’m extremely gratified that my old friend Splinter has chosen to broaden out the Sunrise by inviting in guest contributors. At least, he says it’s a broadening and an attempt to bring in different perspectives – I suspect there may be some slacking going on. Anyway, I’m indebted for the platform and will endeavour to live up to the high standards of this blog.

I am an occasional reader of the Socialist Democracy website, having found that, despite a rather dour style, the Grumpy Old Men of Irish Trotskyism do produce consistently useful material. One thing that caught my eye recently was this article by Andrew Johnson on the Moriarty Report into Charlie Haughey’s corruption. It’s actually not a bad article, giving a decent recap of the essential points and trying to put the whole corruption issue in some sort of historical context. This makes a welcome change from the history-by-character-assassination practiced by yahoos like Stephen Collins, who would have you believe Charlie was the root of all evil in Irish politics.

The article, however, and this is what I don’t like about the left press, is marred by quite a bit of schematic dogmatism. This seems to be the SD house style – they don’t make many concessions to the reader who isn’t immaculately versed in their politics, and there is a tendency to conclude with their entire programme. What I would particularly take issue with is Johnson’s historical account of “the rise of corruption”, which is written in a telegraphic manner that fails to take into account some of the nuances of 26-county politics. Perhaps that can be forgiven in somebody writing from the vantage point of Belfast, but for the southern reader it’s a little jarring.

For instance, Johnson makes big play of the “de-republicanising” of Fianna Fáil in response to the explosion in the North in 1969. But FF didn’t simply ditch the First Aim of its Córú and proceed in a political vacuum. Rather, the old policy, laid down in the New Departure of 1926 which established FF as the constitutional republican party, was replaced by a new policy, enunciated by Jack Lynch in 1970 and endorsed at the 1971 Ard Fheis. This new policy, which Lynch passed off in typically opportunistic fashion as the old policy retooled for new conditions, was in fact the old Cumann na nGaedheal policy from the 1920s.

Johnson is also more than a little hazy on the divisions within Fianna Fáil in those years. It is true that, in the 1960s popular imagination, Charlie was the exemplar of Homo Mohairicus, but things were more complicated and much more interesting than that. Neil Blaney was often characterised in those days as a Mohair Suit Man, but Neil may have been, along with my mentor Kevin Boland, one of the last honest men in Fianna Fáil and a good traditional republican. Conversely, if there was one man in the FF leadership who took the lead in ditching the party’s time-honoured ideology, it was the ostentatiously old-fashioned George Colley. The events surrounding the Arms Non-Crisis are usually and correctly held to be a precursor to the 1985 split (and it was no coincidence that the “retired” Jack Lynch became the Desocrats’ éminence grise), so a more in-depth analysis would not go amiss. The politics of Ireland in recent decades has been ill served by radical historiography, and may provide more fertile grounds for research than yet another paper on 1798 in Roscommon.

I have genuinely mixed feelings about Charlie. Of course he was a shocking old reprobate and I wouldn’t want to defend his crookery for a second. But there was no doubting his extraordinary ability and I’m in no doubt that the tofu-eating South Dublin neo-democrats (© Splinter) hated him not for his failings but for his better points, most notably his populism and his residual (in fact largely rhetorical) republicanism. This I think is why so much of the spiteful commentary on his decline and fall leaves a bad taste. Charlie probably deserved a spell behind bars, but he didn’t deserve to have his epitaph written by those who never did the nation any service at all.

Today’s topic was determined on the flip of a coin, either Jean Baudrillard or a trip down Leftist Memory Lane. So any readers hoping for some French philosophy of a Monday have my sincerest apologies – instead, we’re going to put the Scorpions on the stereo, dig out the Rubik’s Cube and the old copies of Power Man & Iron Fist, and party like it’s 1982.

Nearly 25 years ago a major ideological shift took place in the Socialist Workers Movement, one that virtually nobody in today’s SWP will be aware of. This was of course the “neo-colony” debate, although debate may be putting things a little too strongly. It was decided, on the basis of a hefty document from Kieran Allen (The Nature of the Southern State), that the Free State was not in fact a semi-colonial, “imperialised” state but rather an advanced European capitalism much like any other.

The debate was unusual in that, if memory serves, the initiative did not come from Britain. One irritating thing about the SWM was that our conference could decide what it liked, but big shifts in policy would normally arrive with the Pooka, as Cliff would have a brainstorm in the run-up to the British SWP conference in November and this would then be translated into Irish terms. Now, Kieran was always basically a Cliff man – Cliff had elevated him to the leadership, after all – so it can be safely assumed that the Poms were consulted before the change was taken to the Irish membership. I wasn’t in the inner circle, so I can’t be certain of this, but I would lay money on it. Nonetheless, the drive for the change came from Ireland, though Cliff’s methodology was much in evidence.

Cliff used to have a rationale for arriving at new theoretical positions, which was based on working back from a bad position to its supposed theoretical roots, and then formulating a new theory which would safeguard his organisation against the bad position. A lot of the supporting argumentation for the state capitalist theory of Russia took the form of arguing that the Healy movement’s pro-Stalinist position during the Korean War derived from their holding a degenerated workers state position, and the adoption of state capitalism would allegedly protect us from this terrible deviation. (See also the Harman-Mandel debate in the 1980s, when Chris Harman, a very intelligent man, was forced to systematically falsify the history of the Fourth International.) Kieran’s document on the Southern state was really an application of the same method.

What exercised Kieran was the Provos’ embrace of electoral politics and a (largely rhetorical) leftism, and the magnetic pull that was having on the far left. Already we had seen Peoples Democracy, a much stronger organisation, go into a state of virtual collapse as the majority of its militants went over to Sinn Féin. We were also leaking members, albeit on a smaller scale – partly because we had fewer people to lose, mainly because PD’s concentration in the North and much more intimate links to the Provo base rendered them more vulnerable. The dominant view in the SWM was that we had to guard ourselves against the danger of defections to the Shinners, and it was that pragmatic view that informed the ideological shift.

Kieran’s basic argument was that PD had got what was coming to them because they had “tailed” republicanism – a pretty tendentious view given their and our comparative records over H-Block. But then, for reasons best known to himself, he chose to aim his fire at our theory of the Southern state, which had been pretty well established since the SWM’s formation in 1971. Of course, the preceding SWM position was not dealt with directly, as Kieran’s polemics were mostly aimed towards the extravagances of republican politics, such as the Provos’ argument that the Southern ruling class were direct puppets of Britain, or some of the absurdities developed by the Sticks under the baleful influence of Eoghan Harris. The positive argument for the new position was simply a few tables showing that various characteristics of capitalism applied to Ireland, while failing to hide the fact that this was a very peculiar sort of capitalism.

But, as you might expect, the debate centred not on the empirical evidence or lack thereof, but on the supposed consequences of neo-colonial theory. It was argued that, if we accepted the South as a neo-colonial state, we would inevitably be driven towards Stalinist-style popular front politics, towards unity with Irish capital and specifically with Fianna Fáil. This ignored the fact that in the previous eleven years we had never felt the urge to unite with Irish capital – nor for that matter had Peoples Democracy, the IWG or the LWR, all of which had substantially similar positions.

At the time I didn’t challenge this, nor did I seriously question the new position until after the SWM had dispensed with my services some years later. I was much more concerned with our line on the North, and the general view was that not only would this not weaken our position on the North, it would actually strengthen it, as we would have no illusions in the possibility of there being a “patriotic bourgeoisie”. Actually, as it happens, there were consequences flowing from the new line that we weren’t really aware of at the time, and that did serve to weaken our politics in the longer term.

The basic consequence was that the national question was confined to the North. Without really noticing it, we moved away from a perspective of a nationwide struggle for national liberation and socialism, and towards a view that in the South there was a class struggle pure and simple, with only a platonic connection to the North. That became the consistent line. It also strengthened economistic tendencies in the Northern SWM, although less consistently as reality had a tendency to impose itself. Opposition to imperialism, which was the outcome of an all-Ireland perspective, came to be reframed simply as opposition to sectarianism, which I think is the logical outcome of a perspective confined to the North. Not that we ever went over to the West British Marxism of Militant – even the most strident economists balked at Militant’s conclusions – but we gradually developed premises that weren’t a million miles from theirs.

And the moral of this story? I suppose that you have to try and base your politics on empirical reality, and think through your conclusions before you jump. And if you believe that adopting a particular dogma can ward off political sin like a cross repels a vampire, you’re likely to find the unintended consequences of that hastily adopted dogma turning round and biting you in the ass.

Today we return to our discussion of what a revolutionary programme for Ireland might entail, and we are going to deal with the place of economism in Irish Marxism. Don’t run off shrieking just yet – it isn’t as hard as it sounds, and I promise to keep the jargon down to a minimum.

The outstanding practitioners of economism today are the two major far-left groupings, the SWP and the Socialist Party. We’ll concentrate here on the SP, not to wind up my regular readers from that group – though that’s a bonus – but because the SWP’s politics constitute a moving target and so don’t lend themselves to this kind of discussion. The SP, on the other hand, are the dogmatists of economism and, to their credit, once they arrive at a position they tend to stick to it like glue. They have the merit of being consistent, even if they’re consistently wrong.

I’m not going to go into a lot of detail about the theoretical premises and historical development of the SP’s position on the national question. Marc Mulholland has done that quite ably, and, while I have my differences with Marc, his account will do to be going on with. Nor will I go into a big long ramble about what economism means outside Ireland.

What economism means, in the Irish context, is the studied refusal to consider the relevance of the “I” word; a writing out of Britain’s role; the proposition that the Banana Republic is a normal European country, comparable to say Norway or Holland; in the North, the denial of any material basis to sectarianism; the belief that spontaneous economic struggles will lead to the defeat of sectarianism; the advancement of “workers’ unity” as the all-purpose slogan for any situation; and the often unconscious tendency to privilege loyalist workers.

The best example of this approach is the SP’s last major publication on the North, Peter Hadden’s Towards Division Not Peace. Amongst other criticisms I could make, the pamphlet is characterised by magical thinking, which postulates that whatever we say is so becomes so. Therefore, since the British conceded the original NICRA demands, plus the Fair Employment Act and some other bells and whistles, it follows that discrimination no longer exists in any serious form. Many nationalist grievances are imaginary, and furthermore nationalists should keep quiet about them, because harping on these minor grievances only militates against the workers’ unity that is held to be constantly imminent – in fact, to even raise a grievance about sectarianism is, well, sectarian. This also explains, by a complicated logical process, the Millies’ enduring belief in the talismanic power of bread and butter.

Let me explain. If sectarianism doesn’t have a material basis, it can only then be described as a form of false consciousness. And this is in fact what the SP do – in their Weltanschauung, the workers are continually and spontaneously uniting around bread-and-butter demands, only for Machiavellian “sectarian politicians” to drive them apart again. So we move from the realm of materialism to psychological categories, in a way reminiscent of that old GLC anti-racist poster. (“Are you a racist? You’d be a nicer person if you weren’t.”) When workers unite in spontaneous economic struggles, so the theory goes, they see the potential power of a united class and the stupidity of sectarian divisions. This is what the SP call “the potential of class issues to transcend sectarianism”. The process is seen as virtually automatic – to the extent that it isn’t, all that is needed is the presence of the SP to point out to workers their objective interests.

There is a grain of truth in this, but only a grain. The reality of the North is that sectarianism finds it quite easy to intrude into the bread-and-butter sphere. I wouldn’t normally quote Gerry Adams as an authority, but he is fond of telling a story about his youthful activism in 1960s Ballymurphy, when local Catholics united with Protestants from New Barnsley to fight for a pedestrian crossing on a bit of road where a child had been killed. Eventually the crossing was won, but not before a Paisleyite rabble-rouser had broken up the united campaign. Gerry draws the obvious conclusion – if the working class found it so hard to unite for a pedestrian crossing, wouldn’t they find it much harder to unite for anything substantial?

Not to say that economic campaigns can’t possibly lead anywhere beyond their immediate demands, but one has to start out by recognising the difficulty of it and being prepared to confront the tough issues head-on. Allies who are easily swayed by taig-baiting will not be reliable allies. The SP, on the other hand, draw the opposite conclusion. Because economic struggle by itself undermines sectarianism, the need is for maximum class unity at all times, and one must at all costs avoid saying anything that might annoy the Prods. This explains why, any time loyalist bigotry rears its ugly head, the SP rush out statements condemning ALL sectarianism and none in particular.

What we end up with, therefore, and ironically from people who set out to avoid the Stalinist stages theory, is a stages theory turned on its head. Instead of uniting Ireland first and then fighting for socialism, the idea is that we achieve socialism – separately, North and South – then we talk about the national question. This is how the SP reconcile their formal position of a “united socialist Ireland” in the sweet by and by with their fervent unionism in the here and now. There’ll be pie in the sky when you die.

Or to put it another way, we have a reverse Leninism, where, instead of the advanced workers taking the lead, the most politically backward workers have a veto. Where Dev was supposed to have said “Labour Must Wait”, the SP say “Wait For Labour”. Anything that isn’t a simon-pure united workers’ movement is dismissed as reactionary, and we are condemned to sitting on our arse waiting for a radical movement that lives up to the SP’s impossible standards. Which is pretty much what Militant did throughout the Troubles, when they ignored very real struggles and instead exaggerated the political significance of every little sectional strike.

Next in this thread, we’ll look at the stages theory versus permanent revolution as a strategy for Marxists.

I notice that my rather facetious comments on the far left’s intervention in the upcoming Stormont election have provoked an irate response from a partisan of the Socialist Party. If you look in the comments below, you will find that I have responded politely to his substantive points. I am of course gratified that at least one Irish leftist is reading this blog, but I sense a dark cloud on the horizon. That dark cloud is the SP’s fulltimer for the internet, the famously humourless Brian Cahill, bombarding me with splenetic comments any time I say anything slightly uncomplimentary about his sect. Therefore I feel it is incumbent on me to spell out from which vantage point I will be dealing with the Irish left. Please allow me to introduce myself…

I was born a long time ago. I write about the left from bitter experience and close observation over many years. I knew the Socialist Party when it was still the RSL, and a brief glance at the timeless contents of The Socialist assures me that my criticisms of it only need updating to the extent that that organisation’s idiosyncrasies have deepened over the years. I have studied the Socialist Workers Movement from the inside, and am better placed than most to examine its Melrose Place cum Darkness At Noon internal life, as well as its public positions. I have seen things that Brian Cahill can’t possibly imagine.

This blog does not represent the viewpoint of any organisation. It represents only the thoughts of a fairly experienced socialist militant. Bearing in mind my extensive familiarity with the existing (and some no longer existing) left groups, it is unlikely that I will go out of my way to be kind to any of them. If members of the Socialist Party or the SWP take umbrage at some of my remarks, tough. If they think I’m being unfair to them, boo hoo. Vu shteyt’s geshribn that I should be fair? My approach will be, credit where credit is due and a smack in the gub where a smack in the gub is due.

If anyone is expecting this to be a flame-fest pure and simple, though, they will be disappointed. I write about the left because I am of the left. I have every intention of writing about the bigger issues of the day, and have indeed begun to do so. And my writing on the left won’t be restricted to exposés of gormlessness – although examples aren’t hard to come by – but will include more sober reflections on the far left experience, as well as some constructive ideas as to how things can be taken forward.

Nobody of course is under any obligation to pay attention to anything I say, still less agree with me. My modest hope is that some readers might find some of my posts thought-provoking, reflect on them, and use them to inform their own ideas. In this spirit I will endeavour to have a civil argument with anyone who wants to argue in a serious way, although I am under no obligation to tolerate the purely abusive and will not do so. I would like an active and interested readership, and hope that this blog can provide a forum for developing debate.

Sectarian polarisation in the Six Counties may be as bad as ever, but we can at least offer would-be optimists a small example of détente among the North’s tiny far left.

The upcoming Stormont election has galvanised Eamonn McCann, the Irish SWP’s best-known public figure. Over the past few years Eamonn, via his vehicle the Socialist Environmental Alliance, has stood in several elections and pulled in a respectable if hardly earth-shattering personal vote in his home city of Derry. But Eamonn is not content with Derry, he has been mooting a left slate across all 18 constituencies. The limited resources of the SWP – a mini-branch in Belfast and frig all anywhere else – will clearly not do, and allies are needed. Therefore Eamonn has issued an appeal to the SWP’s deadliest enemies, the Socialist Party of Northern Ireland (P. Hadden prop.).

Up until now, the SPNI has reacted to such calls with lofty disdain. Partly this is due to historically different stances on the North – although both groups support the peace process, the SWP has a history of sucking up to the Provos, while the Millies have established themselves as the Marxist wing of Ulster unionism. So the last time Eamonn made a pitch for an alliance, SPNI spokesman Ciarán Mulholland responded with a long-winded article denouncing the SWP/SEA’s “left republican” programme. This immediately called to mind Jack Dee’s Happy Hour (“it isn’t happy and it doesn’t last an hour”). Likewise, Eamonn’s programme was neither left nor republican. The SPNI then added insult to injury by publishing election “analyses” that boosted their own tiny vote, pretended the apolitical Dr Kieran Deeney of Omagh was some kind of radical, and ignored Eamonn.

The excuse for a new lash-up is the imminent introduction of water charges in the North. The SWP and the SPNI have both been banging the drum for non-payment, although, despite total agreement, they still can’t bear to be part of the same campaign. But, in the light of the water charge issue, and bearing in mind the precedents of Tommy Sheridan and Joe Higgins, the SPNI have hatched a Cunning Plan. It goes something like this:

1. Peter Hadden won’t pay his water bill.
2. Peter will be sent to jail.
3. The broad masses will rally around Peter and elect him to Stormont.

The SWP also have a Cunning Plan. Can you tell what it is yet?

Like one of Baldrick’s Cunning Plans, the far left perspective is so shot through with holes it’s hard to know where to start. In the first place, if the election takes place on schedule, it will happen before the water bills start arriving. Secondly, a government resort to the Small Claims Court or the Enforcement of Judgements Office makes it unlikely anybody will be going to jail. Thirdly, proconsul Hain has been cute enough to introduce the charge in stages. In the first year, only a third will be payable, making £30 for the poorest households. Who, except for an ideologically motivated far-left activist, would risk jail for the sake of £30?

Most importantly, this election, like all elections in the Six, will be a referendum on the peace process. Both left groups, who are planning a single-issue campaign, reckon they can ignore this and turn it into a referendum on water charges simply by declaring it to be so. As if!

And will the unity call succeed? The most likely scenario is that the SPNI(PHP) will tell the SWP to feck off, as they usually do. There is however a faint possibility that they might agree to a paper alliance, as long as the SWP stay 70 miles away in Derry and the Haddenites don’t actually have to talk to them or work with them.

And where do I stand on this? Idly by is where I stand. I don’t take either of these sects remotely seriously, nor do virtually the entire population. I’m much more interested in the possibility of a dissident republican slate than a far left slate. In fact, I would go so far as to say that 500 votes in Derry for Gary Donnelly is worth 2000 for Eamonn McCann. I say that not to boost Gary or do down Eamonn – in terms of formal politics, I’m much closer to Eamonn – but simply to state that a dissident run would challenge the Provos. A single-issue run by the far left, either united or separately, won’t represent a challenge to anyone.

I’ve been reading I Think the Nurses Are Stealing My Clothes, a compilation of the best comedy work of the late and sorely missed Linda Smith. Edited by Linda’s long-term partner Warren Lakin and old friend Ian Parsons, it collects highlights of her stand-up routines going back to the mid-80s, together with her most memorable radio and TV appearances, interspersed with tributes from her friends. It really is a wonderful book to dip into.

I never met Linda Smith, but I suspect like a lot of people, after hearing her on the radio a few times you felt you knew her. She had a terrific likeability and accessibility that caused audiences to warm to her immediately, as well as a great comic voice that fairly leaps off the page here. And, although she came up with the generation of 1980s political comedy, she had her own distinctive style that actually reminds me a lot of another comic genius, Dave Allen. This is probably best explained by contrast – today an awful lot of comedy, even in the mainstream media, seems to be based on the idea that effing and blinding is funny in itself, or that you can get an infinite amount of laughs out of knob jokes. Like Dave Allen, Linda wasn’t averse to the odd bit of swearing or smut, but those become minor parts of your act when you actually have something to say.

And this was the thing about Linda – she did have something to say, and she said it in a way that was uniquely Linda. Although she was definitely a woman of the far left, and her political edge is much to the fore in this book (her wonderfully vicious bitch-slapping of Neil Kinnock is here, and if there’s any justice David Blunkett will never live down her “He’s Satan’s bearded folk singer. How can someone who looks so much like a jolly fisherman be such a miserable bastard?”) but she wasn’t a ranter. Her observational humour was as likely to take in English literature or Test Match Special as politics. And even when she stuck the boot in, she would do it in such a nice, disarming way that you couldn’t really take offence. This is probably why the Radio 4 audience took her to their hearts as they did.

I think there are a couple of reasons why Linda stood out as a political comedian. In the first place, she was a genuine working-class intellectual, coming from Erith (which the maps say is in Kent but at ground level looks like Magnitogorsk) and living for years in unglamorous Sheffield. This background gave her observations an edge that was denied to those comedians who were middle-class kids slumming it; it also meant she didn’t romanticise the English working class. She struck a fine balance between idealism and cynicism.

She also, like most leftwing comedians, was sensible enough not to join a leftwing group. She was therefore free of those left vices – dogmatism, a concern with orthodoxy, political correctness, internecine feuds with other left groups and backstabbing within the group – that, apart from being just plain unpleasant, would be deadly to any comic sense. Imagine if you will a comedian who was a fervent member of the Militant Tendency. Hard, isn’t it? Mark Steel I suppose is the exception who proves the rule, managing to combine membership of the SWP with being a very funny man. But even Mark tends to shy away from mining the rich seam of comedy in his own organisation.

But I think the key point in Linda’s success, and why she is so fondly remembered, is the personality that shone through her work. The tributes in this book invariably focus on her tremendous warmth and kindness – unlike an awful lot of socialists, she not only hadn’t forgot why she was a socialist, but she practised what she preached and embodied those characteristics that I think a better society would encourage in the population at large. Combine those human qualities with a fantastic ability to communicate, and it’s easy to see why Linda was a beacon for any of us who have ever had to say, “I’m a socialist, but I’m not weird, honest.”

Latest in the "you couldn't make it up" category:

Back on 24th November, the state opening of our wee toy parliament at Stormont was disrupted by mad loyalist killer Michael Stone, who managed to get into the actual building, toting a bag full of crude weaponry, without a cop in sight.

Now Stoner is arguing, in a five-page letter to the press, that his stunt was actually done in the name of performance art. Our man says, "As an artist I viewed the political event at Stormont as an opportunity to exhibit a work in performance art." This might be aimed at the trendy saps in Dublin who were keen to acclaim Stoner's painting as evidence of loyalism's deep aesthetic soul.

More interesting is the list of inspirations Stoner claims. This includes Big Ian (plausible enough), Pablo Picasso (huh?) and, best of all, Eamonn McCann. Eamonn's stunt at the Raytheon plant in Derry apparently fired Stoner's imagination.

One would hope that Captain Eamo would have the decency to show some embarrassment about this episode. And that goes for the SWP heads who claimed the Raytheon action wasn't a stunt but a mass action, too.