[¡ Merseyside police force A no wonder Liverpool…]

Scan page 7

¡ Merseyside police force A no wonder Liverpool are not assimIritish society. as an unemjate of over ir than Strahe North of le fact that the idge is still ¡ Liverpool 8 tagonism bewhites and lessened in is with the innemployment.

was about and white, idity of the Six late, with its louring parti, been a key selling' British it policy in reland over the ide. Once. it shift, the whole i edifice will and begin to llaghan's call dependent Six is part of the ind an importfom. It may e thinking of of the state tis a nonsense. such a state, d decisions be the 'majority' inge supremaci beating down ics?

1975 Constisembly, which d the communal and the antashows what ppen. In 1975 re undisguised ears of an att'coup' by the majority in embly which lave triggered e civil war. Not ut certainties i provoked by a an independent les. / Callaghan is a recipe for and both rioters ice saw it as a against authority.

In the subsequent looting, the majority of the looters were white -many from outside Liverpool 8.

Even in times of prosperity, black unemployment in this area was high - despite its proximity to the city centre, few blacks could find jobs in the shops. And police harassment of blacks has been going on for years. civil war, massive population movements (and/or massacres in Belfast) and probably repartition (which is also being discussed in the bourgeois press for the first time since the mid1920s).

Callaghan was home secretary in 1969 and directly responsible for Northern Ireland when that state began to disintegrate into sectarian civil war. He put the troops in and began feeble reforms, instead of recognising that the Six Counties were unreformable, that sectarianism was programmed in SO radically that a solution could only be sought on an all-Ireland (and probably federal) basis.

Twelve years later -after the Tories in 1972 were forced by events to take a much more radical approach, that of dumping Six County majority rule and imposing direct rule; after the failure of the power-sharing executive in 1974 and of the Constituent Assembly in 1975; and after that has been followed for over five years by a basic British policy of holding the ring and beating down the Catholic resistance — Callaghan can think of nothing more responsible than to cut the ungovernable Six County structure loose and leave it to its own devices! A war mentality has built up in the minds of the police.

Two years ago, when the BBC did a series on the Merseyside police, exper quoted a police Liverpool-born blacks 'were the products of liaisons "between black seamen and Liverpool prostitutes" • Decades and centuries of remarks like that, and actions to suit, lay behind the weekend's riots.

Up The ferment of discussion is at an early stage yet. But already it has shown that the men who died on hunger strike and those who are following them have achieved a great deal. The Left in the labour movement must seize the chances that the opening of real discussion on Ireland in the movement give us, and explain why there can be no Six County solution.

If Foot & Co. are beginning to say that the only solution is a united Ireland, then they cannot also continue to say that Six County Republican militants who have fought to break out of the Six County prison-house in which Britain has for six decades penned the Northern Ireland Catholics are not political prisoners.

Their methods will be deplored by large sections of the movement. That is not at issue. Whether they are political prisoners and prisoners of war is. Plainly they are, if part of the problem is the partition of Ireland.

We must explain this to the labour movement, and urge it to try to save the life of foe McDonnell and those following closely behind him. A young Asian woman and her three sons were burnt to death after petrol was squirted through the letter-box and their home in Walthamstow [East London] was set on fire last Thursday, 2nd. The woman's husband was severely burned. And local community leaders are convinced that it was a racist attack.