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John Sullivan on British Trotskyism
As Soon As This Pub Closes
FEW groups have been as successful in marketing an original product as the oddly-named BICO. It all started in the late 1960s when Brendan Clifford, an unemployed Jesuit-trained gravedigger was whiling away the time in the library of Trinity College Dublin. Tiring of waiting in the long queue of clerics desirous of studying Gaelic erotic poetry, Clifford asked to see some of the works of the revered fathers of Irish republicanism, which were in no great demand. Having blown off the dust, he was flabbergasted to discover that these saintly heroes, who he had been told were the Irish equivalents of Garibaldi and Mazzini, were a shower of bigoted, racist shitbags, who hated England because it had prevented Ireland from establishing its own empire with its own blacks to chain up and flog. The odd man out among this unsavoury crew was Wolfe Tone, a Protestant whose view of the Vatican tallies closely with that of Ian Paisley.
There was consternation on the British left when Clifford’s findings were published. (The Irish were less bothered as he had not uncovered any closet atheists.) The British groups hastily summoned the managers of their Irish branches to London, and asked if Clifford’s findings were genuine, or were merely paranoid fantasies. The unfortunate Paddies had to confess that they did not know. Never having had the occasion to read any of the heroes’ writings, they had unwisely accepted what the priests had taught them in school. The British groups which had been keeping charming but feckless Irish intellectuals in Guinness, reacted by cutting off the subsidies, so that the poor buggers were driven to take up school-teaching in order to keep body and soul together.
In the ensuing despair desperate action was contemplated, but it was already too late. Clifford’s Jesuit training ensured that he took photocopies and warned the librarians to look out for British arsonists. The reputation of most Irish ‘Marxists’ has never recovered from Clifford’s revelations, and they are reduced to arguing that it is wrong to consider the opinions of Irish revolutionaries outside their historical context. That is presumably true of Hitler and Attila the Hun.
Clifford’s victory, once quotations were verified, was almost too complete. Other groups had little choice but to adopt neo-Cliffordian positions, but unwilling to serve as a pilot to the left through the suddenly bewildering currents of Irish politics, he spurned all ecumenical offers and pressed home his attack, calculating that if left views on Ireland were a fantasy, the same might apply to the rest of their politics. Clifford adopted the working assumption that whatever the left said on a given issue was wrong, and he applied his training by finding examples which would demonstrate truths already established by faith and doctrine. For example: if the left favours Irish unification, opposes the Common Market, and deplores racism, we should adopt the opposite view in each case. Anyone can do that: it is more difficult to argue a case based on Marx and Lenin supporting the Common Market, the Orange Order or Thatcher’s immigration policies. The Jesuits have lost the knack of such apologetics since they adopted liberation theology.
Because the conclusion to any of BICO’s arguments can always be predicted by reversing the sign on current left orthodoxy, their writings provide little sense of intellectual discovery, but even friends who do not share Clifford’s intellectual background assure us that the argument is always a pleasure to read. Clifford’s main journal is The Communist, but there are a number of offshoots and fronts, the most unlikely of which is the Ernest Bevin Society. The logic of this is impeccable: if Bevin hammered the left for a generation, he must be a misunderstood genius whose thoughts should be revived. In fact, if Bevin ever had any deep political thoughts, it would take Jacques Cousteau to locate them. Some thought that Clifford would become a guru of the Labour right, but that tendency is so dominated by non-conformity, Fabianism and pragmatism that they have found him a bit of a puzzle. The discomfort is reciprocated, as Clifford does not like the remnants of sentimental humanitarianism they still display. The gravedigger has still not found his final political resting place.
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Last updated on 28.7.2007