The British Labour Party and the Establishment of the Irish Free State 1918-1924 by Ivan Gibbons (review)

Abstract

Review Article The British Labour Party and the Establishment of the Irish Free State 1918– 1924, Ivan Gibbons (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), ix+263 pages. ‘The task of the present government is greatly facilitated by the fact that it has merely to give effect to the policy outlined by our predecessors with whom we are in perfect agreement. To us, as to them, the Treaty embodies a final settlement of Anglo-Irish relations and once and for all, with no ulterior motives’ (Ramsay MacDonald, first Labour Prime Minister, June, 1924). For an Irish reader, a particular merit of Gibbons’s work is that much of the Irish revolutionary period is reviewed not from an Irish perspective but as seen by the British political parties in Westminster. While the focus is on the Labour Party, there is good coverage also of the Liberals (bothAsquithian and Lloyd Georgian) and the Conservatives (‘Die-hard’ and more moderate). This angle of approach is salutary. Some instinctive British attitudes to Ireland, as manifested by their political parties, the media (and not only the tabloids) and by academia have not altered much in the past century; in certain respects, the British landscape of the 1920s is depressingly familiar. An occasional reference, then and now, to the ‘British-Irish border’, or even to the ‘British border’, would not come amiss. Professor Gibbons is a former Programme Director of Irish Studies, St Mary’s University, Twickenham, London. He is also the author of a ninetypage extended pamphlet, Drawing the Line – the Irish Border in British Politics, which was published by Haus Curiosities in October 2018 in the context of the current Brexit debate; he clearly believes that a primer of this sort is sorely needed for the basic education of especially the English public. It repeats much of the historical material in the earlier study but it does not cover the details of the current EU–UK negotiations. Its provocative and highly readable final chapter is entitled ‘Don’t Mention the Irish Border’. The study under review contains interesting perspectives on the Irish centenary period now being celebrated and a wealth of apt quotation and fascinating factual nuggets. Its bibliography is extensive (close to 150 secondary sources), and it has a dependable index and footnotes. It is more detailed and more insightful on the British-party context than on the Irish Summer 2019: Review Article Studies • volume 108 • number 430 212 background. The kernel of the volume is contained in the second, third, fourth and fifth chapters; these cover in turn Labour policy on Ireland between 1918 and 1921, Labour and the Government of Ireland Act of 1920, the establishment of the Free State while Labour was the principal opposition party at Westminster, 1921–23, and Labour as a minority government, June to October, 1924. To the extent that the present-day British Labour Party has the capacity to offer potential alternative strategies to existing UK dilemmas in respect of both of our islands, its earlier history now possesses a special interest. But the book is not particularly well-organised. For example, I found the introduction and the first chapter somewhat over-lengthy and repetitive; the final chapter and conclusion add little. The principal theme is straightforward and convincing. It is that the closer the Labour Party got to taking power as the governing party in London, the more inclined it was to hedge its bets on its traditional interest in and commitment to Ireland and its interests. In its earliest years, up to late 1918, the Labour Party functioned mainly as the progressive wing of the Liberals; as such, it possessed an instinctive and general sympathy with Irish nationalism as articulated by John Redmond. But under the influence especially of the Representation of the People Act, which greatly expanded the franchise, and due to the breakup of the Liberal Party, Labour moved towards becoming the principal opposition party in Westminster; by 1922, it had more seats in the House of Commons than the Liberals. As the party in particular of unionised male industrial workers, the core interest of which was to improve working conditions and increase wages, and faced with serious economic decline, red revolution in Russia...