The following article by John Molloy was first published in Unity, the weekly paper of the Irish Communist Party.
A COMMON feature of British political commentary in the 1970s and 1980s was to mock the volatility of other jurisdictions – most commonly Italy – where government instability and the scrabble to form coalitions was presented as an uncouth contrast to the serenity of the "Mother of Parliaments" at Westminster. At a global level, this smugness had even greater scope and a racial hue where in the formal colonies, the very instability that imperialism's invade, plunder, break and leave economically hamstrung strategy created, could be attributed to the childish natives inability to efficiently run their own affairs without the presence of their former "masters."
The resignation this week of the Zionist hologram Keir Starmer, who swiftly squandered the political capital of a landslide Labour majority, will see the UK getting another Prime Minister, its seventh in ten years.
A superiority complex is hard to shake, however. This means there is no profound analysis of how it is the elitist, undemocratic, secret society shaped nature of British capitalism – from the tip of its crown, through its Privy Councillors that perpetuates certain aspects of its limitations. These are compounded by its political classes' capture by "market-led" economics (built to profit-seek at the expense of the material needs of the population) that eventually leads to the only consequence of popular discontent being the swapping of one empty suit behind a podium for another. This creates the space for the "back to the future" political opportunism of right-wing populism, itself an advocate of privatised solutions, to offer itself as real change, scapegoating new arrivals in our society, particularly those who are not white, as the "problem."
In this context as Stiofan O Nuallain of Trademark Belfast's recent article in the Morning Star, pointed out the "British state offers no serious challenge to any of this, no genuine attempt to restructure the economy, to redistribute wealth, just performative border noise, militarism and more austerity. Migrants remain vulnerable, housing stays unaffordable, and social cohesion frays further and not because of migrants, but because the system demands it and the far right fills the vacuum with the occasional pogrom acting as a safety valve for the failures of a dying economic system."
Because of imperialism hold on this part of Ireland, we are still chained to the chaos of this model. However, we had no need for Farage-ism to emerge to imagine how supremacism acts when it operates the levers of power. We have had over a century of a statelet built and underwritten by British imperialism where exclusion was/is the watchword, vigilantes and their fellow travellers can portray a 98% white population as too multicultural and why in the characteristically violent self-pity of a loyalism used to supremacy, any hint of equality is painted as oppression.
Political Unionism in all its shades represents this reaction and as post-Good Friday Agreement Party Politics has shown since 1998 – looking for progressive change to be led from such quarters is delusional with the supposedly temporary scaffolding of Assembly structures, designed to protect against a Unionist veto, now delivering it in the guise of a Petition of Concern and the only indestructible "Good Jobs" incredibly enough in this context are for rejectionist Unionists and their families on the Stormont gravy train.
The consideration of our future, therefore, to fully "think 32", has to illuminate what freedom from the "dependent 6 counties" with its hamstrung Assembly would materially look like. It is to explore where is the space for a liberation that moves beyond the segregated society of a perpetual Lundy-hunt and best subverts the coercive control of sociopathic capitalist market forces.