/leftypol/ - Leftist Politically Incorrect

Kill anglo, simple as

>>1808318
There are Black and brown British people you know.

>>1808321
Irish unionists aren't British, contrary to their dellussional beliefs that somehow, Ireland is part of Great-britain

>>1808324
>contrary to their dellussional beliefs that somehow, Ireland is part of Great-britain
Ireland has been a part of Britain for centuries. What ukraine is to Russia, ireland is to Britain.

>>1808345
Ireland has never been part of Britain, it was occupied by England and then the United Kingdom, but never "Britain"…

>>1808357
real shit

on an individual level, absolutely, there have been plenty sympathetic to republicanism and irish unity, theres even been some in the provos. on the broader level, no, because unionism as an identity and an ideology presupposes the legitemacy of british rule in ireland.

>>1808324
>Irish unionists aren't British

the vast majority of unionists consider themselves primarily british in a way not even the rest of the UK does, one of those effects of being a population that places being a settler over previous ethnic divisions like with whites in the US and Australia.

>>1808345
Critical support for anti-imperialist colonialism.

>>1808314
As a Brit, we don't want them. You Irish have to deal with them yourselves

>>1808379
But who will be able to throw Urine on your school children then ????

>>1808314
>when the 32 county Irish socialist republic is established
It won't be, not in the foreseeable future, and that is preferable. It does no good to anyone to force a people (in the north of Ireland), who as a majority don't want to be part of a country, to be a part of that country. The status quo, with a power-sharing Stormont, international cooperation between Britain and Rep. Ireland, and disarmed paramilitaries, would be overthrown by forced reunification, which would have the streets burning.

'Possible' is probably the wrong word. It's been shown possible to rehabilitate KKK members, and children of cult members and neo-Nazi compound owners (Kelvin Pierce).
But whether it is a difficult struggle or whether it can be achieved as scale, that might be another problem.

In an understandably limited respect, loyalist workers are intensely class conscious–historically even more so than today, of course. Industries like linenmaking and shipbuilding were concentrated in the north, and northern Irish workers have watched the south transformed from an agrarian reactionary Catholic nightmare into a plastic neoliberal shithole with nary an industrial revolution in between. On this basis, a more appropriate question would be: What possible class consciousness has ever existed in Ireland, outside of the northern workers? The UWC strike could not have succeeded without a high degree of class consciousness. Likewise, there's a reason the most substantial document to emerge from the far left in Ireland was the Workers Party's "The Irish Industrial Revolution"–which, rather than a retrospective look at the industrial revolution on the island, was a carefully considered program for its eventual implementation.

Deindustrialisation has devastated loyalist communities just the same as their counterparts in the north of England. Protestant workers traditionally left school early, got apprenticeships, and learnt on the job. Barred from the same kind of jobs, Catholic families put emphasis on education–intellectual habits that have seen Catholic kids excel, whereas the death of the mills, shipyards, tobacco factories, breweries that were the lifeblood of communities like Sandy Row have left nothing in their wake. Yet I return to estates like that when I go home and I still see greater levels of class consciousness, discipline and autonomous cultural activity than I see in the grim wastelands of the English midlands. Kids learn to march, learn to play the flute or the drum or the bagpipes, build architectural marvels and burn effigies of their ancient enemies every summer. Reactionary, certainly, but there's a life to working class estates back home that's entirely absent across the Irish sea. And they take no little pleasure in watching their bonfires smoke out the luxury apartments that encroach on the outskirts.

Prior to the Good Friday Agreement, expressions of class consciousness in the loyalist community took interesting political forms. (Morbid forms, for sure–like the UWC strike, class consciousness expressed by a 'planted' working class naturally expresses itself morbidly. I am sure the same exists among Israeli workers.) You had, though, the publication of "Beyond the Religious Divide" by the UPRG in 1979, and the development of the NILP into the PUP. It is worthwhile reading interviews with David Ervine and also Hugh Smyth, if you are seriously interested in answering your question, OP–they describes much more clearly than I the class divide between Protestant workers and their establishment "big house" unionist representatives. Billy Hutchison's memoir "My Life in Loyalism" is also worth reading:

>When the Empire declined in the 1960s, our sense of ‘Empire Britishness’ all but died out with it. People on the Shankill could no longer comfort themselves with the perception that they were at the centre of a much bigger project. Looking back, the 1960s should have been a turning point for working-class Protestants in Northern Ireland. With the collapse of the British Empire and demands for civil rights emerging from the Catholic community, it was obvious that changes were afoot. Instead of being resistant to this zeitgeist, people in the Shankill and other Protestant areas should have demanded better from those unionists who took their seats in Stormont. We were portrayed as the Protestant ascendancy, but that was a falsehood. It was the landowners and factory owners who were the ascendancy. We were merely the people who made them rich and kept them in furs and diamonds.

>Although the electorate in the Greater Shankill did vote for independents and Northern Ireland Labour Party (NILP) candidates, they were broadly nervous about protesting against the government too much. To do this would have played into the hands of republicans, or at least that is what people were told. We were kept in our place, but we were no better off than people on the Falls Road. Billy Mitchell, a future Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF) comrade and Progressive Unionist Party (PUP) colleague of mine, was always quoting my dad on this issue: ‘Hutchie’s da was right. We may have got a slum quicker than a Catholic, but it was still a slum.’

>Although the Empire was in decline, the people of the Shankill still retained a Britishness that was rooted in a sense of belonging to the wider British working class and its struggles. This common working-class identity was forged in the struggles of Belfast’s industrial working class, which linked them to workers on the Clyde and in Liverpool’s docks as well as the other great industrial centres of Britain, rather than to the mainly agricultural south of Ireland. Like many other men of his generation, my uncle Billy Grant had to travel to England for work when there was none available in Belfast. The working-class political consciousness that existed on the Shankill had a stronger East–West dimension than a North–South one.

Your question should rather be, is it possible to create a "national" consciousness in Unionists? By definition, of course, they would then cease to be Unionists. Historically we have great, heroic examples of Presbyterians like Henry Joy McCracken; we all know very well the decline of the Ulster Presbyterian congregation in this regard. During the Troubles, there were certain people, certain organisations, and certain historical circumstances that brought not just workers but combatants from both sides of the divide closer together. Gusty Spence and the official IRA spoke in Long Kesh, an encounter that, in part, led to the development of the PUP. Republican socialist organisations did draw some Protestants into their ranks, like Billy Bunting. The 1972 collapse of Stormont took the establishment UUP foot off the neck of the loyalist workers.

Finally, it is worth noting that Northern Ireland has–even up til now, in some ways–enjoyed a level of social democracy (for example with regards to water, a sprawling public sector, cheap high-quality education) greater than the rest of the UK, and greater than the south. So even an otherwise highly "reactionary" unionist - Sammy Wilson, for example - will have, baked-in, a sense of entitlement to those things.

All of this is fast becoming ancient history, of course. The industries are gone, demographics in the north are changing, the PUP are a footnote, the DUP are the "big house", water charges are always a threat. And yet as Irish unity seems to draw nearer, Irish neutrality is also under threat–what purpose a united Ireland if it comes at the price of Nato membership?

Whilst forms of consciousness come into and move out of being, the underlying principles remain: Working class consciousness is predicated upon industrialisation–collective work, collective economic struggle, then the politics on top of that. If the prospect of that does not exist on the island, then it remains to be seen whether a rising tide in Britain can lift ships in Ireland too.

>>1808314
I agree with the first part anon, but I don't believe necessarily the comparison is the same- from my understanding Russia believes Ukraine has always been historically Russian and is simply a breakaway state, where as "Angoland" never believed that this nation of Celtics was somehow their ancestral home, but instead a colony for the Crown. Even Northern Ireland has origins as a settler colony.