Open letter on repression in Northern Ireland¶
Core Argument¶
This chapter is an open letter from E. Grant, Secretary of the Workers’ International League (Fourth International), denouncing a coordinated campaign of repression by the Northern Irish state against the Ulster section of the Trotskyist movement. The letter’s core argument is that the Northern Irish regime, described as the most reactionary in the English-speaking world, is acting in collusion with the Stalinists—who are accused of functioning as informers and police agents—to crush revolutionary Marxist organisation through victimisation, blacklisting, arrest, and deportation.
The letter provides specific evidence. A comrade was driven out of the shipyards in early November and blacklisted by the Employers’ Federation, rendered unable to find work despite an alleged shortage of skilled labour. On 29 November, Pat McKevitt, a Dublin-born plumber employed by Harland and Wolff with a strong record of trade union militancy, was arrested under the Civil Authorities (Special Powers) Act, held for a week without charge or trial, and deported to Southern Ireland. On 3 January, Bob Armstrong, the leading member of the Irish section, was arrested under the same act. The letter details Armstrong’s ten-year trajectory through the British working-class movement: the ILP Guild of Youth, six years in the Communist Party, service in the International Brigade in Spain (where he was twice wounded and placed in charge of Brigade records), and his eventual break from Stalinism after being denied internal discussion. He joined the Trotskyists, and the CP responded with a whispering campaign of slander.
The historical and theoretical context is crucial. The Special Powers Act, ostensibly introduced to deal with the IRA, had long been warned against by the labour movement as a weapon that would eventually be turned against militant workers and revolutionaries. The letter explicitly distances the Trotskyists from the IRA, characterising its methods as petty-bourgeois terrorism. The Marxists, by contrast, wield the traditional weapons of Marx, Engels, Lenin, and Trotsky, seeking to win Irish youth to the Marxist banner. The polemic is thus double-edged: against the reactionary state apparatus and its emergency powers, and against the Stalinists, who are portrayed as collaborating with that apparatus through informing and slander. The letter concludes with an urgent call for solidarity—demands for Armstrong’s release, and a financial appeal for the “Belfast Fund” to sustain the victimised comrades and their families facing starvation.