Fine Gael/Labour merger would only play into the hands of Sinn Féin

I WAS interested in Diarmaid Ferriter’s column arguing for a merger between the Labour Party and Fine Gael (Irish Examiner, December 28).

Interested, but in no way convinced. For some people on the left this would seem a logical progression from the decision of that section of the Workers Party that became the Democratic Left to enter the last Rainbow government — something I wrongly opposed at the time — and the subsequent merger of DL with Labour.

This has created in Ireland something that had emerged in Britain in the 1930s, namely, a significant Labour left. It is an appropriate and correct deployment of Gramsci’s method of the ‘war of position’ which shifts the public consensus in a leftward direction.

Likewise, an electoral pact with Fine Gael is quite justified under the present historical conditions as there is no way that a democratic centralist vanguard or Bolsheivik party can be built in a western democracy like Ireland.

Indeed it was for this reason that I left the Socialist Party and started supporting Labour.

That said, there is always the misuse of Gramsci’s method of the war of position, as identified with post-World War II Stalinism, that builds broad alliances to close down democratic socialism and any independent representation of the working class. This is the method of the popular front.

In Ireland, it might just break Fianna Fáil’s stranglehold, but just how left-wing would be the party that replaced it?

As usual, Britain’s recent history provides a cautionary tale. Long before the political defeat of the working class in the miners’ strike in 1985, the Stalinist propaganda organ Marxism Today was advocating the building of the broadest possible coalition to defeat Thatcher.

It also advocated closing down class struggle politics to achieve that end.

By the early 1990s — particularly with the collapse of the Soviet Union — these self-same Stalinists were proclaiming an end to history as class struggle and arguing that, in fact, Margaret Thatcher got quite a few things right.

They played a major role in the rise of the New Labour clique who in 1995 hijacked the British Labour Party in violation of its own constitution. The resultant government is Thatcherite and right-wing in everything but name.

I can’t help thinking that a Labour-Fine Gael fusion would lead to a New Labour-type government here rather than one that was an authentically democratic socialist, or even social democratic. Fine Gael, after all, is a party with no historic connection to the labour movement and its leadership is both anti-abortion and supportive of market forces in healthcare.

A commitment to public ownership, the redistribution of wealth through progressive taxation, a British-style national health service, secular education and free abortion on demand would have to be a bare minimum for the programme of a new party.

If Labour and Fine Gael fused, then the resulting party might be less a byword for corruption and the kind of speculative gangster capitalism that has been almost entirely fuelled by inflated property prices. The result has been failure to provide adequate infrastructure or social housing.

It is entirely Fianna Fáil’s fault that the Celtic Tiger boom has fuelled social exclusion and seen the country awash with drugs and gang crime.

The resultant new party would also be better on law and order. But how could it attack the causes of crime if it supported the free market? This, too, is a failure of New Labour in Britain.

A new party would be less likely to appease IRA terrorists and drive the unionist working class into the arms of political reactionaries like the DUP. But wouldn’t it be churlish to advocate the founding of a Labour Party in Northern Ireland while winding down such a party south of the border?

In 1998, a group of Fine Gael students at UCC invited the Nazi historian David Irving to challenge the fact that the Holocaust ever happened. There are plenty of Fine Gaelers who still defend the role of the Blueshirts and Franco in Spain. Would these people be welcome in the party of which Diarmaid Ferriter speaks?

In the UK, the BNP is now the fourth largest party commanding the support of 7% of the electorate. The fault for this lies with New Labour who have embraced the free market and closed down class struggle politics — enabling the fascists to present themselves as a radical alternative.

The real beneficiaries of a Labour-Fine Gael merger would not be the left so much as Sinn Féin/IRA — who would then fraudulently represent themselves as the socially radical alternative.

A bit like the BNP in Britain.

Roger Cottrell

Reenascreena

Rosscarbery

Co Cork