People often say to me “Liam, is there an easy way to find out if someone on the British left or in one of its anglophone satellites is a bit vague on how significant British imperialism’s domination of Ireland is?”
Invariably my reply is “what do they call the bit in the north with more British soldiers than Iraq?”
If they call it “Northern Ireland” it can mean many things. They may be new to socialist organisations and still on a learning curve. If they are a bit longer in the tooth it can mean that they are linguistically sloppy. More usually it means that they are tranquillo with British imperialism and, inasmuch as they think about the place at all, just wish that the Irish could get on with normal working class politics. So I usually sum it up as the clueless, the pro-imperialist and the liberal. Does that sound harsh? It’s not meant to.
The accompanying photo was taken in central Belfast last weekend. It shows an armed paramilitary police force protecting a squadron of the British state’s mercenary killers as they strut though the town. Fifty thousand people turned out to welcome them. Most of them would refer to the area as “Northern Ireland” which they’d probably pronounce “Norn Iron”.
There were some small counter protests. Sinn Fein has long abandoned any pretence of being an anti-imperialist organisation and has even sunk so low as to be part of the “conflict resolution” industry in Iraq. But you can guarantee that no one in Belfast who is actively or passively opposed to the imperialist domination of Ireland would use the phrase “Norn Iron”. That’s what you call it when you accept that it has some right to exist. If your starting point is that it has to be destroyed you call it “the north”, “the north of Ireland”, “the six counties” or some permutation of these.
Not so very long go the British left was pretty good at getting the nomenclature right. That is no longer true. The mass struggle against imperialism has been defeated and an acceptance of the the imperial settlement is commonplace among a British left which generally failed to register that a big defeat had happened. The recent proposed changes in the abortion legislation were a good example of this drift. All sorts of model resolutions have been flying around and they all stay inside the pro-imperial consensus.
Is it important? I think it is. Even the use of language is an act of rejection of the unacceptable. Leanne Wood managed to get herself chucked out of the Welsh Assembly for referring to the biggest scrounging parasite in Europe as “Mrs Windsor”. Leanne was making her views on toadying to unelected heads of state very clear. Hers is an example more should follow.
Liam redux 
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