This paper was built around a review in Atlantis 4, September 1972, of Vol III of the Whitehall Diaries of Tom Jones, Lloyd George's secretary, done at the request of the Editor Seamus Deane. The original footnotes are numbered; I have used letters to insert some additional notes added when re-editing retrospectively. In this re-editing I have I hope taken care of most of the careless editing of the original, for which I was not responsible. RJ April 2000.

"Ireland is not an exceptional country but England is. Irish circumstances and Irish ideas as to social and agricultural economy are the general ideas of the human race, it is English circumstances and English ideas that are peculiar. Ireland is in the mainstream of human existence and human feeling and experience, it is England that is on one of the lateral channels."
(J. S. Mill, 1866, quoted by Richard Rose)

It is rare to encounter so valuable a means of gaining insight into the minds of the British ruling-class as has been provided by Tom Jones Whitehall Diary, Volume III.

It is a pity that the Editor, Keith Middlemas, Lecturer in Modern History in Sussex, has taken care to present the Irish part of the Diary so exclusively on its own; a reader new to the history of the period would tend to overlook the way in which the Irish struggle was part of an Empire-wide phenomenon, having foci simultaneously in India and Egypt as well.

Because of its nature it is necessary to read it against the background of the history of the period. Interpolatory notes provided by the editor are of some help, but quite inadequate to give a serious reader and real background. It is fortunate that the history of the 'hidden Ireland' of the period has been provided, in meticulous detail(1), by C Desmond Greaves, in his monumental Liam Mellows and the Irish Revolution, and that the history of the 'Treaty' negotiations has been written with scholarship by Frank Pakenham in his Peace by Ordeal

I found I had to read these three books in parallel in order to be able to review the Whitehall Diary, and that the effect was rewarding.

The above books relate to the genesis of the contemporary 'English question'; the analysis of its current nature awaits the historian. Richard Rose's Governing without Consensus does not count as a serious contribution, except in a limited sense. I will return to Rose. Initially I will note impressionistically some of the high spots of Tom Jones narrative. Then I will examine some of the crucial moments, with illumination from beneath from Greaves. Finally I will try to develop its contemporary significance, and link it to the facts of the north-east of Ireland as so painstakingly unearthed by Rose.

Right from the start appears the entity 'Ulster'. The early Home Rule discussions (April 1918) indicate the existence of an 'Ulster Committee' and talk of 'safeguards'. The Partition idea had indeed emerged earlier; Connolly denounced it in 1914. But at this stage the Home Rule idea seems to have been conceived as part of a package ultimately to involve Scotland and Wales: the 'Federal Solution'. (When are we going to hear of an honest English nationalist who is not at the same time British imperialist? All Federal proposals seem to have implied an English hegemony).

On May 9 1918 Sinn Fein drifts into view, as in a glass darkly, in the form of an 'Irish-German conspiracy' to be put down with a firm hand. The conscription question is passed over; there is a big gap between June and October 1918; by the latter date the 'six county' concept emerges, along with the 'fact of Irish nationality'.

This is a preview of the process whereby as Irish nationality becomes more sharply defined and expressed, the means of splitting it become refined.

In this period, when the key political issue was the imposition of conscription, there is no indication that the Cabinet was aware of the groundswell of support for the people arrested in the 'German plot'.

There is little space given to the year 1919, the crucial formative year of the First Dail. There is a short editorial reference to the suppression of the First Dail on 10th September and to some of the associated preliminary skirmishing, such as Solsheadbeg on Jan 21. This proclamation of the Dail was the signal for another round of manoeuvres by Lloyd George; a committee to draft a Partition Scheme was set up with F E Smith, now Lord Birkenhead, who could hardly be expected to do otherwise than plot the harvesting of the fruits of his 1914 Tory armed rebellion. The Bill which emerged from this conclave was introduced on December 22 1919, the consequences of this Bill, in the form of the 1920 Government of Ireland Act, are still with us.

Tom Jones only really begins to get going in the 1920-21 period. The language of the Cabinet meetings by May 1920 has become hard-core coercion: '. . . to deal with the Thugs, a number of whom are going about shooting . . . we are certain that they are handsomely paid... that the money comes from the USA, that it is passed through Bishop Fogarty ... the money is paid out to the murderers in public houses... the community is hostile, indifferent or terrorised...'.

The above is from a long cabinet debate on May 31st. In this debate emerges all the bloodthirsty vindictiveness of this group of ruthless men at the core of a shattering Empire. This was all happening at the time when Churchill was trying to intervene militarily to crush the Bolsheviks: '. . . the transport workers won't allow arms to go to the Poles to smash the Bolshevists, nor to save the police from the Irish Bolshevists. We ought to take the transport workers by the throat'.

Tom Jones at this stage started to put out feelers regarding Dominion status. This idea was already in the air, having been suggested by Beaverbrook in 1919 on the occasion of the Alcock-Brown flight (cf Greaves p180).

By July 1 the Irish committee was receiving objective accounts of the way in which the revolutionary Irish State was functioning. It became clear that coercion would have to be whole-hearted or else a settlement reached. A further blood-thirsty debate ensued on July 23 1920 in which Macready outlined the measures he needed. The idea that '90% of Sinn Fein are all right' emerges. Opinions differ as to the percentage, but the embryonic idea is there: split them and do a deal with the moderates. Churchill at this stage is seriously proposing to raise 30,000 men in Ulster and use them to put down the rest of the country. The 'Ulster people' were now supposed to be 'wedded to' their Government of Ireland institutions: partition was strengthening.

Nowhere in the discussions does it emerge by what logic it is moral to coerce a 35% minority with terror and pogrom while it is supposedly immoral to allow a 25% minority to be 'coerced' into a 32 county nation which was prepared to fall over backwards to accommodate them.

There does emerge, however, a feeling for the groupings who were to be dealt with: '...the decent Sinn Feiners, the Hierarchy and the Southern Unionists'. Here we have a foreshadowing of the alliance that has ruled 26 counties of Ireland continuously since the 1921 defeat.

On August 4 1920 Lloyd George, Law, Long and Greenwood met a deputation of Dublin and Cork businessmen. They warned against the Government of Ireland Act, predicting civil war as the outcome. They called for a 'bold and generous' offer of Dominion status for Ireland as a whole, and were confident that the six counties would come in if they started off with a clean financial slate and income tax at 2s in the £.

This scheme, if adopted, would have enabled an independent Irish bourgeois nation to develop without significant obstacles. It was not implemented because the Westminster Cabinet was appalled at the idea of Ireland not bearing its 'fair share' of the debts incurred in the 'war for civilisation'.

By December 1920, with the Tan war in full swing, the bloody-minded prejudice of the Cabinet. shows itself even more. They implicitly accepted the Roman Catholic Church as being part of their state machine, and discussed organising the surrender of arms to the parish priests in an amnesty. After all. did not Pitt found Maynooth for just this purpose? One is reminded of a more recent episode in Belfast when a crozier under British Army control helped to bring down a barricade. Churchill: '....I would pay up to £5,000 for a hanging case (laughter) and proportionally for the others'.

In the whole of the 1920 Cabinet debates there is no apparent knowledge of the manner in which Carson was organising the dragooning of the North. The 'illegal wing' of the British military-political machine of repression swung into action after July 12, when the shipyards were purged of Catholics (and incidentally socialists and trade unionists). The local government elections had demolished the myth of a homogeneous Protestant Ulster. It was necessary to attempt to create one by terror, coercion and pogrom. All this in Greaves. To read Tom Jones one gets the impression that the Cabinet was unaware of it.

One gains strong confirmation for the idea, long held by Marxists, that the imperialist state machine has a mind of its own, does its own long-term planning, and only lets the Cabinet in on it when it suits.

Once it became clear that working-class unity was not to be feared, the counter-revolution struck. The Irish revolutionary tide was turned irrevocably in Belfast in July 1920. Two weaknesses in the First Dail rendered this inevitable. The first was the failure to support the 1919 Belfast engineers strike. The second was the explicit abandonment of social-revolutionary aims by Brugha at the secret June 29 meeting of the First Dail, when he declared acceptance of the whole of British law up to January 1919. These weaknesses were rendered inevitable by the lack of Labour representation, a result of the failure to agree on the status of the abstentionist tactic in 1918.

If in July 1920 the trade-union unity in the Yards had stood firm, Carson and Wilson could not have launched the counter-attack that led to the arming of the B specials.

This crucial turning-point is outside the field of view of the Westminster Cabinet microscope as focused by Tom Jones. One has to go to Greaves to find it.

By the end of 1920, the Cabinet were beginning to talk peace. The Archbishop Clune communications were initiated. The Cabinet regarded Sinn Fein as a spent force and worthy of being treated with generosity. The North had been taken care of and the working-class split. There was clearly no threat to property. The problem was: whom should they treat with? who would 'deliver the goods'?

On March 8, 1921, the Cabinet met Lord Midleton, who advised against trying to implement the 'Southern Parliament'. He advised dealing with (a) the commercial men (b) the Catholic Church, the same 'Holy alliance' mentioned in the July 23 1920 Cabinet debate.

The April 27 1921 debate centred round whether or not to declare a truce and hold the 'southern Ireland' elections. They decided against; in the course of the debate emerges on various occasions from different quarters (Greenwood, Denis Henry) the option of dissolving, putting in Crown Colony status, '...and then you can postpone as long as you like'.

Misguided supporters of the concept of 'direct rule' by Commission should ponder the above.

Further discussion on a truce took place on May 12. There is a reference again to a debt write-off, this time through Lord Justice O'Connor to Lloyd George. The idea of a low-tax utopia, with opting out of war debts, had the Irish bourgeoisie obsessed. They appeared to think they could have it by asking a Government which had refused them war-contracts.

By May 24 it was becoming apparent that their military efforts were over-extended. They had troops active on the home industrial front, in Silesia, Egypt, Turkey, Palestine and Mesopotamia. The war dragged on. They were searching for a formula to pull out and complete the splitting of the Irish. The problem was to find a moderate to 'deliver'. They swung from one expedient to another. Macready set out in a paper of 'ensanguined hue' the implications of Crown Colony plus martial law '...will they begin to howl when they hear of our shooting 100 men in a week?'

The Partition machinery ground onwards. The King's speech at the inauguration of Stormont was used as an occasion to sugar the pill and make conciliatory noises, but firmly on a British-constructed partitionist basis. Craig and de Valera were to be asked to meet Lloyd George. This definition of de Valera's status was not accepted, but it drew a characteristic compromising response. De Valera asked Craig to meet him with the Southern unionists. Craig didn't come; securely ensconced behind Orange guns he did not need to. The Protestant bourgeoisie who had smashed their working-class and established a secure power-base had no need to confer with their weaker Southern counterparts and their upstart associates.

Greaves points out the remarkable fact that at this juncture, when Lloyd George was visibly priming him for a role as Craig's counterpart in a Southern partition structure, de Valera consulted neither with the Dail, the Army Council nor the Labour Movement. He turned to Jameson, Dockrell and Midleton.

The Cabinet got the measure of the men they were to negotiate with through Smuts, who went over to persuade them to start to talk. Smuts: '...I said that the Ulster Parliament was not a partition of Ireland and that they ought to be thankful for it as conciliating Ulster'. Churchill: 'I would go a long way to humour them'. Smuts: 'my impression is you can satisfy them with phrases ... let them talk themselves to death'.

Clearly the Cabinet had an accurate measure in advance.

The crux of the matter subsequently was how to dress up the partition settlement in such a way as to persuade the Irish that they had got something. The outcome was already decided, in Belfast, in 1920.

The major part of the Tom Jones Diaries are related to the actual Treaty negotiations in 1921. Fans of the Pakenham epic will enjoy fitting together the pieces of the jigsaw; the details of the 'concessions' obtained to dress the defeat up as a victory are of slight interest. The dominant, overriding force was that the Partition fait-accompli had been thrust upon them; they could only wriggle in the strait-jacket.

The obedient Tom Jones digs out quotations from Davis to support acceptance of the monarchy.

The long correspondence leading up to the Treaty talks consumed valuable imperial time. Nine drafts were made, at the Inverness cabinet meeting on September 7 1921, of a letter to de Valera. When they got the ninth agreed, Lloyd George gave them plenty of rope on the Armenian Refugees so that there would be no time to discuss it again. It was worth going to some lengths to ensnare the group who were to rule Southern Ireland for them, under Republican illusions.

When the Treaty talks proper start, initially there takes place the 'table between and no handshakes' act. As the negotiations proceed, with interminable arguments on the Northern Protestants, theology about the Crown etc, mutual respect grows. According to Lloyd George de Valera is '...a sincere man, a white man, an agreeable personality...' . Churchill: 'It was Cromwell who taught them republicanism'. In other words, they had the right attitude to property and could be relied on not to rock the boat of the social system. Reports must have trickled back to the Cabinet about how the Republican courts were putting down 'agrarian crime' (land seizures) and arranging for purchase of land through mortgages (the Land Bank). This underlying aspect is in Greaves; it must have affected substantially the Cabinet's will to negotiate a settlement which would enable Sinn Fein to govern.

There is an obvious element of phoniness about the off-stage 'negotiations' with Craig, culminating in the playacting in the finale: the 'special train at Euston' and the 'destroyer with steam up' waiting to take the message across.

At the cabinet meeting on Nov 10, the first after the start of the Treaty talks, Lloyd George is able to say '...they are simple; they have none of the skill of the old nationalists... they mean to come in and work with the Empire...'.

The way in which Lloyd George was visibly warming to Griffith and co disconcerted Craig, who showed evidence of wanting to stand aside still further by asking for Dominion status. The 2s in the pound tax idea, with repudiation of war debts, which had previously attracted the Dublin and Cork bourgeoisie, had obviously some support in Belfast. The idea was greeted with the same horror at cabinet level. In addition, the 'orange loyalty' image was becoming tarnished.

However, this crack in the Ulster myth was soon cemented over. The imperial military machine, staffed as it was by Anglo-Irish ascendancy blimps, the English Prussians, resorted to a bit more skullduggery. The 'Wickham circular' was instigated by Wilson, without the cabinets knowledge, the effect of which was to arm the Orangemen, at His Majesty's expense, and unleash again the pogroms.

The stage was set for the final round: sign or else.

The sequel to the Treaty in Tom Jones is slender, but revealing. The matter being settled, Tom Jones can sometimes play a primary role. We find him on March 22 1922, discussing with O'Higgins and Kennedy the Northern situation.

He says that in his opinion the British Government ought to 'put enough troops in to keep the peace on the border'. O'Higgins: '...and draw a ring fence round our people and leave them to be murdered in Belfast'. Tom Jones: '...hooligans were largely responsible and in any case it was very hard to apportion blame...'.

This passage ought to explode the myth of Tom Jones as 'friend of Ireland'. It also exposes the limits of vision of the small boys now governing: this famous cliché 'our people'(2) makes its way into political vocabulary. Nevertheless, it is obvious that O'Higgins is embittered and realises that they have been sold a pup.

On April 28 there is more evidence of skullduggery by the 'Prussians': Wilson tries to get bombs and aircraft for his Orange fascist friends. Tom Jones, some weeks previously (March 17) had written a memorandum to Churchill suggesting that by their arming and paying for the B-specials they were 'departing from the spirit of the bargain with the South'. Despite this, the machine grinds on. On May 12 Churchill stresses the desirability of letting Collins have more arms until his hands are well bloodied and he is a committed supporter of British rule. Despite the evidence of the trap closing, Collins upsets the Cabinet with his 'republican' constitution. They send back a list of clear questions, rubbing in the Empire, the King, the Oath, the Declaration, the lot (June 1 1923). They dine '...the PM was in a thoroughly happy mood and dismissed at great length the characters of Whitaker Wright, Jabez Balfour and Bottomly. He regretted the fewness and weakness of the Irish leaders ...there was only Griffith. Collins was just a wild animal - a mustang'.

On June 2 Craig complains to the Cabinet about his defences; he fears an attack by Collins' forces. The Belfast pogrom picture is presented to the Cabinet thus: '...there is a tremendous conspiracy in being, working with extraordinary skill on the feelings of Catholics ...they had an organised plan by which at a given signal shots were fired into the air and women shrieked for mercy'.

The Belleek incident, when Churchill and his army successfully defended the frontier of the Empire against the IRA. was celebrated on June 8 at Chequers with champagne and song. Churchill then organises the reduction of the Four Courts, thereby ensuring that Dublin remains safe for property and does not 'fall into the hands of the Industrial Workers of the World'. Griffith dies. According to Greaves he was torn apart by the contradictions of his position. The passage in Greaves where he describes the April 26 Dail debate is memorable for its exposure of the forces which tore Griffith apart: like Faust when Mephistopheles reduced to ashes the humble peasant's cottage he had coveted for his grandiose plan, he had come face to face with the real meaning of his actions ...thus imperialism makes swines of all who embrace it. Griffith knew in his heart that he had been cheated. He turned the venom of his remorse against the 'damned Englishman' (Childers). England had oppressed his country ...destroyed his own integrity ...and now an Englishman ...dared to stand before him as the custodian of what he had been robbed of (p312).

Tom Jones goes to his funeral, lunches at Jammets, visits the Horse Show and then spends the evening drinking with the R.I.C. officers.

Friend of Ireland?

About the death of Collins, Tom Jones is reticent.

On the foregoing evidence, given that the death of Griffith was in the offing, the British would have had a strong incentive to get rid of Collins. He had already been squeezed out of the Dublin Cabinet. He had a penchant for Republican constitutions and a concern for the North.

I know of the existence and location of papers which constitute evidence that he was shot in the back of the head by a revolver at 4 ft. range. I know of evidence that the flying column under the leadership of Thomas Hayles, referred to by Tom Jones, was elsewhere at the time. This evidence has not seen the light of day because the person who fired the shot is still alive(3).

Tom Jones' reticence, in the circumstances, is understandable.

The final section on the boundary commission illustrates the techniques of postponement by committee, sub-committee etc. to perfection.

The final section on the boundary commission is extraordinary. In the general atmosphere of burial, Craig makes expansive gestures, in an atmosphere of Protestant doctors opening Catholic bazaars and Lady Graig being asked to Catholic Whist Drives. Could not there be joint cabinet meetings in Dublin and Belfast? There is talk of a £10,000 job for Joe Devlin as Liaison officer for Catholics. Poor O'Higgins, with a tiny reference to the restoration of the 1920 PR system, is quite overwhelmed with the gush. O'Higgins and Cosgrave clearly fell for it: '. . . Cosgrave hoped the report would be burned or buried as a bigger settlement had been reached beyond any that the Award could achieve'.

The main worry, it seems, was the fear of wounding the Commissioners, whose names would not appear in print after all their hard work.

I now return to Greaves and note some points.

On the matter of the drafting of the King's speech for the opening of Stormont, Greaves asks 'who was the author of this monumental humbug?' He plumps for an original menacing draft sweetened subsequently by the King. He did not, of course, have access to Tom Jones when he wrote this. He discounts Churchill's claim for cabinet collectivity.

According to Tom Jones there was a first pair of drafts by Craig and Smuts. Behind Craig's lurked 'the innuendo of oppression'. The final draft involved the work of the King, Smuts and Balfour, the actual writing being done by Grigg.

The negative value of isolating the Irish part of the Whitehall Diaries is underlined by a passage in Greaves (p259) where it emerges during the Treaty negotiations, that Lloyd George had intended to be present at the Washington Naval Conference on Nov 11 1921. He had booked his passage. There was a deal in the making: Britain was willing to 'seek a solution to the China question' with America rather than Japan. American discrimination against British shipping (in Panama Canal dues) was to cease, the US was to disinterest herself in the Irish question. This type of background, as unearthed by Greaves, is quite absent from Tom Jones and we are the poorer for it. Would it have been too much to ask for some cross-referencing, or even some overlapping, between the volumes?

There is a gap in the Tom Jones record between 30 Dec 1921 and 23 February 1922. In this gap, the Provisional Government machinery takes over. Greaves (p287) points out a glaring illegality in the procedure: on January 14 the Southern Parliament, without the Fermanagh Dail Deputy, met, at the invitation of Arthur Griffith. To act thus as convener he claimed the status of Chairman of the Irish delegation in London: '...As such his rights derived from the Irish Republic. But this the British Government had refused to recognise. The 'Treaty' had not yet been given the force of British law...'. Churchill was aware of this anomaly and urged the Commons to press on and regularise matters.

The Southern Parliament went on to elect the Provisional Government. Who were these answerable to? The Southern Parliament met no more. The Provisional Government then went on to draft a Constitution for a 32 county Free State (remember the exclusion of the six counties was supposed to be temporary) without any consultation with the North, even from those areas the Boundary Commission was expected to transfer.

It seems inescapable that the British never seriously questioned the permanence of Partition.

Also into this gap fits the lightning visit of Griffith and Duggan to London, whither they were summoned to explain the election pact which arose out of the February 21 Ard Fheis. They were apparently successful in convincing Churchill that they had won three months control of Dail Eireann, during which they also controlled the Provisional Government. Westminster understood a temporising policy and no doubt approved.

In conclusion, one can derive some lessons.

The strategy of the enemy is to try to isolate the 'decent Sinn Feiners' from the 'murderers'.

This was rendered easy by the division of the Irish revolutionary movement into distinct military and political wings.

It is possible for someone who has extreme objectives (e.g. the establishment of a Republic) to avoid isolation if he sticks close to the mass of the people and does not allow himself to be put by the enemy into convenient categories. District military and political 'wings' are just precisely these convenient categories. This tradition is a major weakness in the Irish movement.

It is also possible for someone who has extreme objectives to place himself in a stronger position to attain them than he was before, and to be content temporarily with a step forward which is short of his objective. He achieves more by doing this than by adopting a 'die-hard' position and holding out for his extreme objective when the situation is going against him.

On this argument, the Civil War ought never to have been fought. A defeat, if recognised in time, can be survived and reversed. provided the opportunity exists for gathering the forces. If unrecognised in time, the consequence is a rout. The aftermath of 1921, for the forces of the Republican and Labour movements (the basis of the 1916 Rising but not of the First Dail: Labour was excluded), has been an unmitigated rout.

The revival of the 'English Question' in a new form in the sixties therefore implies a turning point; the analysis of this new awakening is attempted by Richard Rose. He barely scratches the surface. It is easy to see why. His original project started in 1965 with a survey of attitudes to authority in Northern Ireland. He produced an interim report which had some news value in or about 1968. Then all hell broke loose, and Professor Rose was forced to tack on to his survey and his theorising some instant contemporary history.

The background analysis of Irish history is perhaps the weakest area. In the half-page devoted to the great formative period of the Irish Nation (1783-1800) he mentions only the 1798 rising and omits completely the great movement for constitutional reform which preceded it, from which the British ultimately drew out a rising by coercion.

One would imagine that if he were searching for historical parallels, here was the place to look: a movement demanding the enfranchisement of Catholics, making its appeal over the head of the local Protestant-ascendancy gerrymandered regime to the King and to Westminster.

The response of the British, and the local Protestant ascendancy, to these moderate demands was to recognise the implied menace of democracy and to react with coercion.

Professor Rose's theory of nationalism is dubious. He appears to accept as a 'nation' the Victorian concept of 'Britain' as over-riding the historic English, Scottish and Welsh nations. Few of the common people of these islands would agree with him. There is a British ruling-elite which is derived by the English upper-class absorbing the Irish, Scottish and Welsh upper classes into itself via the public-school system. But there is no British nation. despite the best efforts of hack newspaper editors to gain acceptance for the term 'Briton'.

The potted instant history section shows evidence of having been done in a hurry, and from secondary sources. His one reference to me is apocryphal: some quotation of a quotation of what some English journalist alleged I said in an interview. I am in the phone book. He could have checked out what I am, what standing I had in relation to the events at the time etc. He made no such effort. He relied for his history of the origins of the NICRA on the Scarman report. The people concerned are around, he could have asked them.

The tacking on of an 'instant history' chronicle of contemporary events to the survey work is therefore of questionable value. The undeniable status of the survey adds an undue aura of reliability to the rest.

The survey itself is of considerable value, as it exposes the fallacy of the religious theory of nationality on which the identity of 'Ulster', in the British mythological sense, is based.

Most people have spent most of their lives in their community of origin and like it. Most people when they travel tend to travel in Ireland. The difference between Protestant and Catholic in these attributes is hardly detectable. Protestants are slightly more mobile.

Regarding constitutional change: 10% of Protestants would like it, and 33% thought big changes were coming in the next ten years. 33% of Catholics support the existing Constitution. 77% of Protestants and 89% of Catholics want to try to forget, and to look to the future.

82% of Protestants believed it was right to take up arms 50 years ago to defend 'Ulster' but 67% think it is wrong for Protestant groups to be drilling now.

On the other hand, only 23% would approve if the Government passed a law making it illegal to refuse a job or to rent a house to a Catholic. There is clearly a hard-core unionist-ascendancy there, despite a surface liberalism.

One can go on like this for pages. Professor Rose has a lot of text devoted to a description of the phenomenon. He develops measures for 'compliance' and 'support'. He has a two-dimensional chart for describing regimes. The axes are the above measures. He labels the four corners and the middle: a 'legitimate' regime has high support and high compliance. A regime could get high compliance with low support by being 'coercive'. It could be 'Isolated' by having high support and low compliance. Or it could be 'repudiated', having neither support nor compliance. A divided regime has medium support and medium compliance.

Professor Rose defines the 'ultra' as a non-compliant supporter of a regime: one who is prepared to break the law in order to further what he holds the regime stands for.

I am not convinced that this type of subjective classification is of prime importance. The advantage of the classical Marxist approach (objective classification in relation to the ownership of the means of production) is that it gives a dynamic whereby trends can be predicted(4). Tensions will always exist between subjective attitudes and objective class interests. These are obviously high in contemporary 'Northern Ireland'. Professor Rose's analysis can help to measure them. But I put my money on the objective factors in the long term, provided, of course, we give them a hand by helping to break the subjective barriers. This was, and is, the crucial significance of the Civil Rights demands. Allow the working population to mix as neighbours and as fellow-trade-unionists and a class consciousness will develop. Tories who fight hard to prevent this from happening have a better knowledge of the craft of class warfare than the novices of 'Peoples Democracy' who thought that the word 'socialism' would by some miracle bring down the subjective barriers!

In conclusion, I wish to refer to the appalling catastrophe of Pakistan. This is the fruit of the British 'religious theory of nationality' in its most extreme form.

The English, in their mentality, are steeped in the tradition of their own nation and its emergence. Because of the lack of development of political theory in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, their national culture emerged in the form of the Bible and the Reformation. The 18th century Enlightenment saw the emergence of modern political theory and the nineteenth century developed it. Most of the modern European nations have emerged in the form of secular, democratic republics. The English nation is peculiar. It retains all those primitive forms, which have stamped themselves on their Empire, and caused untold confusion and suffering.

'Ulster', 'Pakistan' and 'Israel' are the monuments left by the English to their own primitive political thinking. May they soon be replaced by the more civilised democratic republics of Ireland, India and Palestine, so that the final battle, in which the working people will take social control of the property, may be fought on an objective basis, unclouded by relics of medieval mythology.

Notes:

1. I have since heard historians being critical of Greaves on Mellows, on grounds of lack of notes and references. He put them at the foot of the pages, as asides, to facilitate a lay readership.

2. The term 'our people in the North' usually indicates a 'catholic nationalist' standpoint. I have however heard it used by Micheal O Riordain, the Communist Party leader, in a brave but futile attempt to endow it with the meaning 'working people of whatever religion'.

3. To my regret I have not been able to follow this up. My informant was Maire Comerford, who at the time of the assassination was with the Hayles column. She showed me a set of papers, and she had a source in London for additional material. I have never found any of the versions which have been circulated satisfactory.

4. This of course can be highly refined. Mao Tse Tung identifies no less than six objectively-defined classes in the China of the 1920s. (Selected Works, Vol. 1, Lawrence & Wishart 1954, p13). No practical revolutionary takes seriously Marx's basic two-class system except for didactic purposes.

Some navigational notes:

Copyright Dr Roy Johnston 1999