Hesitant Comrades: The Irish Revolution and the British Labour Movement by Geoffrey Bell (review)

Mainly focusing on the period between the 1916 Easter Rising and the Anglo-Irish Treaty of 1921, this is one of a spate of books concerned with the Irish revolution one hundred years on. The book is unique in that it cogently analyses the response of the British left to the revolution, rather than the participants in Ireland or the British government. It partly follows on from the author's earlier works (also published by Pluto) including The Protestants of Ulster (1976) and Troublesome Business: The Labour Party and the Irish Question (1982). These works along with The British in Ireland: A Suitable Case for a Withdrawal (1984) were probably shaped by Bell's socialist activism during the recent "Troubles" in Northern Ireland. Hesitant Comrades, based on a PhD, is less polemical.

Bell's prologue begins with an account of Trafalgar Square's "Bloody Sunday" of November 1887, a demonstration against British coercion in Ireland ending with violence on London streets, to introduce "the history of British radicalism identifying with the cause of Ireland." (x) The opening chapter discusses the Rising's gestation and the unsympathetic response of the British left, exemplified by the Socialist Labour Party's failure to provide an obituary for James Connolly, a former prominent member, following his execution. A further contextual chapter outlines Sinn Féin's electoral eclipsing of the Home Rule Party on a republican platform, and it places the increasingly deadly "Irish Question" in the context of the Russian Revolution, growing working-class consciousness, and industrial militancy in Britain.

Subsequent thematic chapters provide a detailed account of the British left's hesitant response to the tumultuous events in Ireland. Bell devotes two chapters to the Labour Party and the Trades Union Congress (tuc), while "Alternatives" deals with Communists, Fabians, and the Independent Labour Party. Other chapters incorporate "voices from below" or workers' perspectives; address contemporary debates about how socialists should respond to Irish nationalism, the Ulster question, and the Anglo-Irish Treaty that ultimately recognized the partition of Ireland.

Hesitant Comrades emphasizes that the labour movement was critical of government policy and Bell disassociates it "from Britain's side in the Irish War of Independence. This was not their war." (216) Nevertheless, Bell's main argument is that whilst large sections of the British working class were disturbed by their government's treatment of Ireland, the labour movement, with a few exceptions, failed even to attempt to provide leadership that could give voice to this sentiment. Rather, equivocation, confusion, and ultimately a disinclination actively to support Irish independence typified attitudes and approaches. Why? Bell convincingly points to ambivalence about the utility of Irish nationalism, limited comprehension of Irish complexities, and a strong desire that the issue would simply disappear. The Labour Party did actually move from support for Home Rule to advocating unconditional Irish self-determination. However, in 1920, the party's Executive backed away from the idea, since independence would make Ireland a military or naval menace to Great Britain. As Bell points out the "implication was that if the potential Irish 'menace' was not sorted out Labour would oppose any settlement." (72) This imperialist thinking had a left-wing corollary in the idea that since the Irish revolution was not "socialist," it deserved only qualified support. One communist organ observed that the "nationalist aspirations of the Irish workers … are dangerous illusions" (112) and Bell notes that leading Bolsheviks felt obliged to rebuke their British comrades for such sentiments.

Bell outlines how discontinuity carried over into thinking on the "Ulster Question." Arguments for the region's exclusion from a Home Rule settlement, most forcibly made by the "reactionary" figure of Sir Edward Carson, were deemed as economic in basis by the British left and supportive Ulster protestant workers were the dupes of Belfast's capitalists. There was in fact little understanding of Ulster worker mentalities, and when anti-Catholic violence was brought to the attention of the tuc, their response was feeble. In 1920...