These are some of the better
books I have read in the past year, and ones to look for if you want to find
out about …
The British Labour Movement and Ireland
Geoffrey Bell, Hesitant
Comrades: The Irish Revolution and the British Labour Movement, Pluto
Press, 2016
This book is an interesting
study that undermines the notion that the British labour movement was ever
progressive when faced with a challenge to British imperialism. Its focus is on
Britain and Ireland in the early 20th century, and it shows there was only some
limited support for Irish freedom from British rule in British cities where
there were many Irish workers. Neither the mainstream workers’ organisations,
nor the more radical ones, took up the issue in any substantial way. This leads
Bell to his book’s title of ‘hesitant comrades’. The Catholic Herald
summed it all up in March 1920: ‘Ireland is in the throes of a national agony,
a victim of merciless militarism, and British Labour remains quiescent and
inactive’ (p. 218).
William O’Brien of the Irish TUC and Labour Party had made a similar
point a year after the 1916 Easter Rising. Addressing delegates at the Leeds
Convention in 1917, he said: ‘In Ireland you have a small nationality at your
door which is demanding the right of its own life, … I gather from reading some
of the capitalist papers that revolution is popular nowadays. Twelve months ago
you had a revolution in Ireland. The papers and politicians that acclaimed the
revolution in Russia did not acclaim the revolution in Ireland whose leaders
were taken out and shot like dogs’ (pp. 217-218).
Even Sylvia Pankhurst’s Workers’ Dreadnought sidelined the issue
of Irish freedom from political oppression by belittling the Sinn
Fein-supporting nationalists. It promoted hopes for the class struggle instead.
It is tricky to follow the development of inconsistent comments by labour
movement radicals. But while some, like the Communist Party of Great Britain
(CPGB), ended up being more ‘theoretically’ correct, they still did next to
nothing about the issue, or even wrote much about it.
All the workers’ organisations wanted to avoid the question of
sectarianism in Ulster, which was replicated in the working class in Liverpool,
Glasgow and elsewhere. Confronting sectarianism would also have caused problems
for the trade unions. So they blamed sectarianism on Unionist politicians, like
Carson, and on the British Government, and downplayed the material basis for
the support of anti-Catholic policies among the Protestant-Loyalist working
class.
In the second half of 1921, after anti-Catholic pogroms by the Ulster
Loyalists, CPGB member William Paul, in his pamphlet Irish Crisis, said:
‘The peculiar psychology of Orangeism … with its fierce and violent hatred
against its enemies will be easily diverted against a capitalist class during a
revolutionary crisis. It was Carson who taught them how to arm against the status
quo … When the workers move against Capitalism, the revolutionary movement
of Ulster will have good reason for thanking Carson for his magnificent work’
(p. 191). This view rested on the delusion that somehow the loyalist workers’
‘fierce and violent hatred’ towards Catholics would be overcome in a ‘move
against Capitalism’. It dishonestly used the mirage of future workers’ unity to
avoid dealing with the ugly reality of the day.
The left sometimes recognised how Ireland’s struggle was a political
embarrassment. For example, in June 1920 the British Communist paper, The
Call, said: “The suppression of Ireland is one of the world’s great crimes;
the silence of Englishmen is one of the tragedies” (p. 111). But despite this,
and other, similar statements by the CPGB in 1920-21, they did little about it.
To say the least, they would have scored few points when measured on the
Bolshevik reckoning of how many Communist supporters had been imprisoned for
their agitation on Ireland.
The British and India
Shashi Tharoor, Inglorious
Empire: What the British Did to India, Hurst & Co, 2017
Tharoor is an Indian politician,
and a good polemicist. Two points stood out for me in this well-written book.
Firstly, he does a good job of confronting Niall Ferguson, the historian and
apologist for British (and American) imperialism, on the subject of India. This
illustrates how a polemic can provide a useful theme for guiding the exposition of
an argument.
Secondly, and for me the most
interesting parts of the book, were not where he detailed how the British
destroyed the Indian textile industry to promote India’s imports of British
textile products – often woollen clothes that were completely unsuited to
India’s climate. This has been covered many times by others. The new point for
me was where he showed how British domination undermined India’s commercial
shipping sector and its shipbuilding industry, an industry that, at the time,
was at least as advanced as the British one. This resulted from British
commercial power, setting the rules on what ships could be used between British
controlled ports and also who could run that business. Commercial power is
often greatly underestimated by those who focus only on industry, and these
examples help explain more fully Britain’s exploitation of India.
Machinations in the Middle East
Christopher Davidson, Shadow
Wars: The Secret Struggle for the Middle East, One World, 2016
This book is a good, easy to
read, although lengthy review of events in the Middle East and Northern Africa.
It will help a lot in understanding the background to present day news stories,
since it details the actions both of the major powers – the US, Britain and
France in particular – and of the different political groupings in the region.
There is a welcome coverage of countries from Nigeria, to Libya, to Saudi
Arabia, Syria and Turkey, with comprehensive information on the supporters of
ISIS, Al-Qaeda, Al-Nusra, Boko Haram, etc.
Davidson has incorporated a mass
of material into the book, providing some important details that even close
observers of these events are likely to have missed. His 2,500 footnotes are
encyclopedic, even to excess, covering 121 of the near-700 pages, but they do
give useful documentation for anyone doing research on these
issues. However, although in many places the book gives a useful summary of the
relevant historical background, its disadvantage is that it reads more like an
extended news review. This is at the cost of giving a more theoretical
assessment of what is going on and explaining how this results from the latest
phase of imperial disintegration.
The Balfour Declaration, British Support for Zionism
David Cronin, Balfour’s
Shadow: A Century of British Support for Zionism and Israel, Pluto Press,
2017
This book does what it says in
the title, and reviews British government policy towards Palestine and Zionism
from the time of the Balfour Declaration in 1917 up to the present day. There
are more twists and turns in this story than it is easy to summarise here, but I
would recommend Cronin’s work as well-written, well-documented and mercifully concise!
Although it covers some similar
ground, I would also recommend reading John Newsinger’s telling critique of the
British Labour Party and Zionism, available here.